posted February 25, 2010 01:28 PM            

It's motive and desired effect? To tax EVERYTHING!

posted February 28, 2010 10:19 PM            

The news from sunny Bali that there is to be an international investigation into the conduct of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri would have made front-page headlines a few weeks back. But while Scotland and North America are still swept by blizzards, in their worst winter for decades, there has been something of a lull in the global warming storm – after three months when the IPCC and Dr Pachauri were themselves battered by almost daily blizzards of new scandals and revelations. And one reason for this lull is that the real message of all the scandals has been lost.

The chief defence offered by the warmists to all those revelations centred on the IPCC's last 2007 report is that they were only a few marginal mistakes scattered through a vast, 3,000-page document. OK, they say, it might have been wrong to predict that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035; that global warming was about to destroy 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest and cut African crop yields by 50 per cent; that sea levels were rising dangerously; that hurricanes, droughts and other "extreme weather events" were getting worse. These were a handful of isolated errors in a massive report; behind them the mighty edifice of global warming orthodoxy remains unscathed. The "science is settled", the "consensus" is intact.

The catastrophe behind climate change
The world has never seen such freezing heat. But this completely misses the point. Put the errors together and it can be seen that one after another they tick off all the central, iconic issues of the entire global warming saga. Apart from those non-vanishing polar bears, no fears of climate change have been played on more insistently than these: the destruction of Himalayan glaciers and Amazonian rainforest; famine in Africa; fast-rising sea levels; the threat of hurricanes, droughts, floods and heatwaves all becoming more frequent.

All these alarms were given special prominence in the IPCC's 2007 report and each of them has now been shown to be based, not on hard evidence, but on scare stories, derived not from proper scientists but from environmental activists. Those glaciers are not vanishing; the damage to the rainforest is not from climate change but logging and agriculture; African crop yields are more likely to increase than diminish; the modest rise in sea levels is slowing not accelerating; hurricane activity is lower than it was 60 years ago; droughts were more frequent in the past; there has been no increase in floods or heatwaves.

Furthermore, it has also emerged in almost every case that the decision to include these scare stories rather than hard scientific evidence was deliberate. As several IPCC scientists have pointed out about the scare over Himalayan glaciers, for instance, those responsible for including it were well aware that proper science said something quite different. But it was inserted nevertheless – because that was the story wanted by those in charge.

In addition, we can now read in shocking detail the truth of the outrageous efforts made to ensure that the same 2007 report was able to keep on board IPCC's most shameless stunt of all – the notorious "hockey stick" graph purporting to show that in the late 20th century, temperatures had been hurtling up to unprecedented levels. This was deemed necessary because, after the graph was made the centrepiece of the IPCC's 2001 report, it had been exposed as no more than a statistical illusion. (For a full account see Andrew Montford's The Hockey Stick Illusion, and also my own book The Real Global Warming Disaster.)

In other words, in crucial respects the IPCC's 2007 report was no more than reckless propaganda, designed to panic the world's politicians into agreeing at Copenhagen in 2009 that we should all pay by far the largest single bill ever presented to the human race, amounting to tens of trillions of dollars. And as we know, faced with the prospect of this financial and economic abyss, December's Copenhagen conference ended in shambles, with virtually nothing agreed.

What is staggering is the speed and the scale of the unravelling – assisted of course, just before Copenhagen, by "Climategate", the emails and computer codes leaked from East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. Their significance was the light they shone on the activities of a small group of British and US scientists at the heart of the IPCC, as they discussed ways of manipulating data to show the world warming faster than the evidence justified; fighting off legitimate requests for data from outside experts to hide their manipulations; and conspiring to silence their critics by excluding their work from scientific journals and the IPCC's 2007 report itself. (Again, a devastating analysis of this story has just been published by Stephen Mosher and Tom Fuller in Climategate: The CRUtape Letters).

Almost as revealing as the leaked documents themselves, however, was the recent interview given to the BBC by the CRU's suspended director, Dr Phil Jones, who has played a central role in the global warming scare for 20 years, not least as custodian of the most prestigious of the four global temperature records relied on by the IPCC. In his interview Jones seemed to be chucking overboard one key prop of warmest faith after another, as he admitted that the world might have been hotter during the Medieval Warm Period 1,000 years ago than it is today, that before any rise in CO2 levels temperatures rose faster between 1860 and 1880 than they have done in the past 30 years, and that in the past decade their trend has been falling rather than rising.

The implications of all this for the warming scare, as it has been presented to us over the past two decades, can scarcely be overestimated. The reputation of the IPCC is in shreds. And this is to say nothing of the personal reputation of the man who was the mastermind of its 2007 report, its chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri.

It was in this newspaper that we first revealed how Pachauri has earned millions of pounds for his Delhi-based research institute Teri, and further details are still emerging of how he has parlayed his position into a worldwide business empire, including 17 lucrative contracts from the EU alone. But we should not expect the truth to break in too suddenly on this mass of vested interests. Too many people have too much at stake to allow the faith in man-made global warming, which has sustained them so long and which is today making so many of them rich, to be abandoned. The so-called investigations into Climategate and Dr Michael "Hockey Stick" Mann seem like no more than empty establishment whitewashes. There is little reason to expect that the inquiry into the record of the IPCC and Dr Pachauri that is now being set up by the UN Environment Programme and the world's politicians will be very different.

Since 1988, when the greatest scare the world has seen got under way, hundreds of billions of pounds have been poured into academic research projects designed not to test the CO2 warming thesis but to take it as a given fact, and to use computer models to make its impacts seem as scary as possible. The new global "carbon trading" market, already worth $126 billion a year, could soon be worth trillions. Governments, including our own, are calling for hundreds of billions more to be chucked into absurd "carbon-saving" energy schemes, with the cost to be met by all of us in soaring taxes and energy bills.

posted February 28, 2010 10:36 PM            

Pleasssse cpn, no age jokes!

I was a mere lad in those days and no one knew where gravity came from. It sure grounded us. I was mostly growing my hair and waiting for someone to invent the wheel...along with outrunning the occasional dinosaur. Utterly stupid creatures but still smarter than the man made global warming cluckheads.

posted March 09, 2010 06:52 AM            

You and the rest of the crackpot man made global warming set lost the argument long ago...on the record and facts.

It only takes one argument to lay low the scam, hoax and utter lunacy of man made global warming theory.

You would know that...if you actually knew anything and could connect the dots.

The history of global warming and cooling cycles as they relate to CO2 are written in ice core samples.

650,000 years of ice core samples reveal the relationship between heating, cooling and CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and those facts utterly destroy the crackpot religious notion that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere drive global temperatures.

posted March 09, 2010 01:16 PM            

When I give talks about climate change, the question that comes up most frequently is this: “Doesn’t the relationship between CO2 and temperature in the ice core record show that temperature drives CO2, not the other way round?”

On the face of it, it sounds like a reasonable question. It is no surprise that it comes up because it is one of the most popular claims made by the global warming deniers. It got a particularly high profile airing a couple of weeks ago, when congressman Joe Barton brought it up to try to discredit Al Gore’s congressional testimony. Barton said:

In your movie, you display a timeline of temperature and compared to CO2 levels over a 600,000-year period as reconstructed from ice core samples. You indicate that this is conclusive proof of the link of increased CO2 emissions and global warming. A closer examination of these facts reveals something entirely different. I have an article from Science magazine which I will put into the record at the appropriate time that explains that historically, a rise in CO2 concentrations did not precede a rise in temperatures, but actually lagged temperature by 200 to 1,000 years. CO2 levels went up after the temperature rose. The temperature appears to drive CO2, not vice versa. On this point, Mr. Vice President, you’re not just off a little. You’re totally wrong.

Of course, those who’ve been paying attention will recognize that Gore is not wrong at all. This subject has been very well addressed in numerous places. Indeed, guest contributor Jeff Severinghaus addressed this in one of our very first RealClimate posts, way back in 2004. Still, the question does keep coming up, and Jeff recently received a letter asking about this. His exchange with the letter writer is reproduced in full at the end of this post. Below is my own take on the subject.

First of all, saying “historically” is misleading, because Barton is actually talking about CO2 changes on very long (glacial-interglacial) timescales. On historical timescales, CO2 has definitely led, not lagged, temperature. But in any case, it doesn’t really matter for the problem at hand (global warming). We know why CO2 is increasing now, and the direct radiative effects of CO2 on climate have been known for more than 100 years. In the absence of human intervention CO2 does rise and fall over time, due to exchanges of carbon among the biosphere, atmosphere, and ocean and, on the very longest timescales, the lithosphere (i.e. rocks, oil reservoirs, coal, carbonate rocks). The rates of those exchanges are now being completely overwhelmed by the rate at which we are extracting carbon from the latter set of reservoirs and converting it to atmospheric CO2. No discovery made with ice cores is going to change those basic facts.

Second, the idea that there might be a lag of CO2 concentrations behind temperature change (during glacial-interglacial climate changes) is hardly new to the climate science community. Indeed, Claude Lorius, Jim Hansen and others essentially predicted this finding fully 17 years ago, in a landmark paper that addressed the cause of temperature change observed in Antarctic ice core records, well before the data showed that CO2 might lag temperature. In that paper (Lorius et al., 1990), they say that:

changes in the CO2 and CH4 content have played a significant part in the glacial-interglacial climate changes by amplifying, together with the growth and decay of the Northern Hemisphere ice sheets, the relatively weak orbital forcing

Several recent papers have indeed established that there is lag of CO2 behind temperature. We don’t really know the magnitude of that lag as well as Barton implies we do, because it is very challenging to put CO2 records from ice cores on the same timescale as temperature records from those same ice cores, due to the time delay in trapping the atmosphere as the snow is compressed into ice (the ice at any time will always be younger older than the gas bubbles it encloses, and the age difference is inherently uncertain). Still, the best published calculations do show values similar to those quoted by Barton (presumably, taken from this paper by Monnin et al. (2001), or this one by Caillon et al. (2003)). But the calculations can only be done well when the temperature change is large, notably at glacial terminations (the gradual change from cold glacial climate to warm interglacial climate). Importantly, it takes more than 5000 years for this change to occur, of which the lag is only a small fraction (indeed, one recently submitted paper I’m aware of suggests that the lag is even less than 200 years). So it is not as if the temperature increase has already ended when CO2 starts to rise. Rather, they go very much hand in hand, with the temperature continuing to rise as the the CO2 goes up. In other words, CO2 acts as an amplifier, just as Lorius, Hansen and colleagues suggested.

Now, it there is a minor criticism one might level at Gore for his treatment of this subject in the film (as we previously pointed out in our review). As it turns out though, correcting this would actually further strengthen Gore’s case, rather than weakening it. Here’s why:

The record of temperature shown in the ice core is not a global record. It is a record of local Antarctic temperature change. The rest of the globe does indeed parallel the polar changes closely, but the global mean temperature changes are smaller. While we don’t know precisely why the CO2 changes occur on long timescales, (the mechanisms are well understood; the details are not), we do know that explaining the magnitude of global temperature change requires including CO2. This is a critical point. We cannot explain the temperature observations without CO2. But CO2 does not explain all of the change, and the relationship between temperature and CO2 is therefore by no means linear. That is, a given amount of CO2 increase as measured in the ice cores need not necessarily correspond with a certain amount of temperature increase. Gore shows the strong parallel relationship between the temperature and CO2 data from the ice cores, and then illustrates where the CO2 is now (384 ppm), leaving the viewer’s eye to extrapolate the temperature curve upwards in parallel with the rising CO2. Gore doesn’t actually make the mistake of drawing the temperature curve, but the implication is obvious: temperatures are going to go up a lot. But as illustrated in the figure below, simply extrapolating this correlation forward in time puts the Antarctic temperature in the near future somewhere upwards of 10 degrees Celsius warmer than present — rather at the extreme end of the vast majority of projections (as we have discussed here).

Global average temperature is lower during glacial periods for two primary reasons:
1) there was only about 190 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere, and other major greenhouse gases (CH4 and N2O) were also lower
2) the earth surface was more reflective, due to the presence of lots of ice and snow on land, and lots more sea ice than today (that is, the albedo was higher).
As very nicely discussed by Jim Hansen in his recent Scientific American article, the second of these two influences is the larger, accounting for about 2/3 of the total radiative forcing. CO2 and other greenhouse gases account for the other 1/3. Again, this was all pretty well known in 1990, at the time of the Lorius et al. paper cited above.

What Gore should have done is extrapolated the temperature curve according this the appropriate scaling — with CO2 accounting for about 1/3 of the total change — instead of letting the audience do it by eye. Had he done so, he would have drawn a line that went up only 1/3 of the distance implied by the simple correlation with CO2 shown by the ice core record. This would have left the impression that equilibrium warming of Antarctica due to doubled CO2 concentrations should be about 3 °C, in very good agreement with what is predicted by the state-of-the-art climate models. (It is to be noted that the same models predict a significant delay until equilibrium is reached, due to the large heat capacity of the Southern ocean. This is in very good agreement with the data, which show very modest warming over Antarctica in the last 100 years). Then, if you scale the Antarctic temperature change to a global temperature change, then the global climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 becomes 2-3 degrees C, perfectly in line with the climate sensitivity given by IPCC (and known from Arrhenius’s calculations more than 100 years ago).

In summary, the ice core data in no way contradict our understanding of the relationship between CO2 and temperature, and there is nothing fundamentally wrong with what Gore says in the film. Indeed, Gore could have used the ice core data to make an additional and stronger point, which is that these data provide a nice independent test of climate sensitivity, which gives a result in excellent agreement with results from models.

A final point. In Barton’s criticism of Gore he also points out that CO2 has sometimes been much higher than it is at present. That is true. CO2 may have reached levels of 1000 parts per million (ppm) — perhaps much higher — at times in the distant geological past (e.g. the Eocene, about 55 million years ago). What Barton doesn’t bother to mention is that the earth was much much warmer at such times. In any case, more relevant is that CO2 has not gone above about 290 ppm any time in the last 650,000 years (at least), until the most recent increase, which is unequivocally due to human activities.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Below is the letter written to Jeff Severinghaus, and his response:

Dear Jeff,

I read your article “What does the lag of CO2 behind temperature in ice cores tell us about global warming?” You mention that CO2 does not initiate warmings, but may amplify warmings that are already underway. The obvious question comes up as to whether or not CO2 levels also lag periods when cooling begins after a warming cycle…even one of 5,000 years?

If CO2 levels on planet Earth also lag the cooling periods, then how can it be that CO2 levels are causally related to terrestrial heating periods at all? I am not sure what the ice core records are related the time response of CO2 to the cooling trends. If there is also a lag in CO2 levels behind a cooling period, then it appears that CO2 levels not only do not initiate warming periods but are also unrelated to the onset of cooling periods. It would appear that the actual CO2 levels are rather impotent as an amplifier either way…warming or cooling. We are talking about planet Earth after all and not Venus whose atmospheric pressure is many times larger than Earth’s.

posted March 09, 2010 01:17 PM            

Dear John,

The coolings appear to be caused primarily and initially by increase in the Earth-Sun distance during northern hemisphere summer, due to changes in the Earth’s orbit. As the orbit is not round, but elliptical, sunshine is weaker during some parts of the year than others. This is the so-called Milankovitch hypothesis [this really should say "theory" -- eric], which you may have heard about. Just as in the warmings, CO2 lags the coolings by a thousand years or so, in some cases as much as three thousand years.

But do not make the mistake of assuming that these warmings and coolings must have a single cause. It is well known that multiple factors are involved, including the change in planetary albedo, change in nitrous oxide concentration, change in methane concentration, and change in CO2 concentration. I know it is intellectually satisfying to identify a single cause for some observed phenomenon, but that unfortunately is not the way Nature works much of the time.

Nor is there any requirement that a single cause operate throughout the entire 5000 – year long warming trends, and the 70,000 year cooling trends.

Thus it is not logical to argue that, because CO2 does not cause the first thousand years or so of warming, nor the first thousand years of cooling, it cannot have caused part of the many thousands of years of warming in between.

Think of heart disease – one might be tempted to argue that a given heart patient’s condition was caused solely by the fact that he ate french fries for lunch every day for 30 years. But in fact his 10-year period of no exercise because of a desk job, in the middle of this interval, may have been a decisive influence. Just because a sedentary lifestyle did not cause the beginning of the plaque buildup, nor the end of the buildup, would you rule out a contributing causal role for sedentary lifestyle?

There is a rich literature on this topic. If you are truly interested, I urge you to read up.

The contribution of CO2 to the glacial-interglacial coolings and warmings amounts to about one-third of the full amplitude, about one-half if you include methane and nitrous oxide.

So one should not claim that greenhouse gases are the major cause of the ice ages. No credible scientist has argued that position (even though Al Gore implied as much in his movie). The fundamental driver has long been thought, and continues to be thought, to be the distribution of sunshine over the Earth’s surface as it is modified by orbital variations. This hypothesis was proposed by James Croll in the 19th century, mathematically refined by Milankovitch in the 1940s, and continues to pass numerous critical tests even today.

The greenhouse gases are best regarded as a biogeochemical feedback, initiated by the orbital variations, but then feeding back to amplify the warming once it is already underway. By the way, the lag of CO2 of about 1000 years corresponds rather closely to the expected time it takes to flush excess respiration-derived CO2 out of the deep ocean via natural ocean currents. So the lag is quite close to what would be expected, if CO2 were acting as a feedback.

The response time of methane and nitrous oxide to climate variations is measured in decades. So these feedbacks operate much faster.

The quantitative contribution of CO2 to the ice age cooling and warming is fully consistent with current understanding of CO2’s warming properties, as manifested in the IPCC’s projections of future warming of 3±1.5 C for a doubling of CO2 concentration. So there is no inconsistency between Milankovitch and current global warming.

Hope this is illuminating.

posted March 09, 2010 02:25 PM            

The lag time between rising temperatures which cause rising CO2 concentrations averages 800 years.

The reason for this is elementary...and you would know why it's elementary if you knew what the biggest CO2 sink on planet earth is...and how long it takes to heat up...and cool down.

Your argument, along with the rest of the religious nuts of man made global warming is terminally flawed and cannot be salvaged.

posted March 09, 2010 04:36 PM            

Jwhop,

The only flaw in this thread is your belief that by talking authoritatively you can convince someone.

quote:

---

The fact these crackpots had to falsify data, conceal data, including temperature records and computer codes used in their computer models...which don't jibe with actual recorded temperatures is further proof they're scam artists and not in any way scientists practicing scientific methodology.

---

posted April 18, 2010 11:18 PM            

And now, these nuts wonder why only the terminally uninformed believe a word they say.

So, Pluto has been warming up...along with other planets in the solar system.

Any day now Algore and O'Bomber will start berating the Plutonians about their SUVs, smokestacks, jet aircraft and carbon footprints. That's probably not such a hot idea considering the personality profiles of those ruled by Pluto.

April 18, 2010
The case against AGW: Pluto's atmosphere
Timothy Birdnow

More proof that Global Warming - if global warming there be - is driven by solar activity.

According to NASA, Hubble telescopic images of the Kuiper Belt Object (formerly planet) Pluto showed marked atmospheric increase between 1994 and 2003:

"The data reveal an icy molasses-colored world with a surprising amount of activity. Buie compared Hubble images taken in 1994 vs. 2003 and discovered that Pluto's northern hemisphere has brightened while the southern hemisphere has dimmed. Ground-based observations suggest that Pluto's atmosphere doubled in mass during approximately the same time period. And no one is certain what's causing the molasses-colored splotches on Pluto's surface."

Now, why would the Plutonian atmosphere double? Solar driven global warming.

Granted, Pluto's year is 249 Earth years long, and it reached perihelion (closest approach to the Sun) September 5, 1989 (due to it's rather eccentric, or elongated, orbit Pluto was closer to the Sun than Neptune between 1979 and 1999) and so Pluto has been receiving more solar radiation, but it is interesting to note that Earth's temperature peaked during the same time period. A doubling of the Plutonian atmosphere during this same period clearly illustrates a warmer planetoid, in contradiction to what we have been told by climate alarmists. The claim that the Sun has little to do with planetary temperatures is clearly false when one considers the case of Pluto, at any rate.

It is also interesting to note that the atmospheric doubling occurred AFTER Pluto moved out beyond the orbit of Neptune; if this is purely seasonal, would not we have witnessed the thaw occurring BEFORE perihelion?

Either the Sun has minimal influence on planetary temperatures, or is a primary forcing. Pluto, like Mars, and Jupiter and Neptune's moon Triton, suggests (along with common sense, that oft-neglected commodity) that the role of the Sun is being seriously neglected by advocates of anthropogenic global warming theory.

Perhaps one or two worlds exhibiting warming trends could be explained as coincidence, but too many coincidences form a pattern. But too much has been invested in the AGW theory to allow an inconvenient truth to stand in the way. This latest analysis of Pluto speaks volumes.

posted April 29, 2010 09:59 AM            

Their party is almost over. Now, after being caught altering climate data, they're on the business end of well deserved ridicule...and they don't like it. They can't take even small doses of their own medicine.

One crackpot so called "scientist" says he'll sue. I wouldn't do that if I were Mann. That would open him up to demands for the production of records, depositions, interrogatories and admissions...all under OATH...and in a Court of Law. They've already lost in the Court of Public Opinion.

posted April 29, 2010 10:27 AM            

Of course, that doesn't mean O'Bomber and the rest of the destroyers of the American economy are going to abandon "Cap and Trade". It was never about reducing or eliminating "Global Warming".

It was always about "controlling the people" and there's no lie too big to tell if your goal is to reduce the people of the United States to the status of serfs in a little Socialist gulag.

April 29, 2010
The Climategate Investigation
By Dexter Wright

Last month, while the American media were distracted by the health care vote in Congress, the British Parliament published the results of its investigation into East Anglia University's Climate Research Unit (CRU) that has been at the center of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) controversy. It seems that many were hoping that no one would read this report, at least not beyond the milquetoast executive summary.

Buried deep within the report is a compelling piece of evidence. In volume two, there is a memorandum submitted as evidence from Lord Lawson of Blaby, chairman of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which was in response to four very significant questions from the investigating committee. This memo confirms the claims by many global warming skeptics that the scientists at CRU were trying to hide data and silence the skeptics. The questions asked by the investigative committee are as follows:

(i) Have the CRU scientists been manipulating the raw surface temperature data in a way that is less than wholly objective and dispassionate?

(ii) Have they refused dissenting scientists and/or other outsiders with a bona fide interest in global warming access to the raw data, contrary to the proper canons of scientific research and to the demands of scientific integrity?

(iii) Have they been improperly seeking to avoid answering Freedom of information Act requests?

(iv) Have they actively sought to prevent papers by dissenting scientists, statisticians, or other informed commentators from being peer-reviewed and/or published, again contrary to the proper canons of scientific research and to the demands of scientific integrity?

Lord Lawson's response to these questions is damning:

We believe that there is compelling evidence both independent of the leaked email exchanges and arising from those emails to suggest that the answers to (ii), (iii) and (iv) above are clearly 'yes'.

However, Lord Lawson chooses his words more carefully in answering the smoking-gun question at the top of the list:

Moreover, we are disturbed by the CRU scientists' treatment of the so-called divergence problem. That is the fact that, for that period of time where both a proxy global temperature series and a recorded global temperature series are available, the two series markedly diverge. This clearly suggests either that the proxy series is unreliable or that the recorded series is unreliable (or possibly both: the point is that they cannot both be true). The CRU scientists' attempt to hide the problem by concealing the divergence demonstrates, we believe, a lack of integrity.

Integrity is at the very heart of the AGW debate -- not just the integrity of the discredited scientists involved, but also the integrity of the data used by the CRU. For many years, the global warming skeptics have been citing that the differing data sets are not in agreement and have asked the simple question "why?" Their assertion has always been that until a scientific explanation for the differences is found, there can be no definitive conclusion concerning AGW. This question was always avoided by the now-discredited Dr. Jones, who headed up the CRU. But finally, some light has been shed onto the question of integrity of the data. In this same memo, Lord Lawson clarifies some of the confusion concerning the differing data sets:

[T]here are, in fact, four (not two) other international data sets, all based in the United States. Two of them - NASA and NOAA - are neither wholly independent of each other (unsurprisingly, since they are both US Government agencies) nor wholly independent of the CRU set, as indeed some of the leaked emails indicates. The third, and fourth, which -- unlike CRU, NASA and NOAA - use not surface weather stations but satellite observations, are compiled by the University of Alabama at Hunstville (UAH) and Remote Sensing Systems (RSS). They are entirely independent of the CRU. They use the same satellite data as each other but different methodology and produce similar results to each other, which differ from those of the CRU.

It seems that the only reliable data sets are satellite-derived data. However, those data were not used in the Nobel Prize-winning U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). So the Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to a report which was compiled by discredited scientists using discredited data. Does this discredit the Nobel Committee?

In recent years, when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has made an error by awarding a medal to an athlete who was found to have cheated, the IOC demands that the medal be returned. This is to assure that the integrity of the games is not tarnished.

posted April 29, 2010 11:38 AM            

In November 2009, private e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were stolen and made public. Climate change disbelievers called it "Climategate," saying that the e-mails proved collusion and conspiracies that would discredit man-made global warming. We found that there was no solid evidence of wrongdoing in the e-mails, but noted that a detailed investigation by the university was underway.

As it turns out, this investigation came to more or less the same conclusion we did. The report reads, in part: "We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it. Rather we found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganised researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention." Researchers should have worked more closely with professional statisticians, the university said, but the investigation did not find evidence that they were using misleading statistical methods.

This follows a Parliamentary hearing of former CRU head Phil Jones, in which the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee said that climate scientists should be more forthright in publishing data and methodologies, but concluded that Jones should be allowed to return to his post at CRU. Jones had stepped aside after the e-mails came to light. The committee found no evidence for unusual obstructionism or peer review mishandling on the part of Jones:

Committee Report: We believe that the focus on CRU and Professor Phil Jones, Director of CRU, in particular, has largely been misplaced. …

In the context of the sharing of data and methodologies, we consider that Professor Jones’s actions were in line with common practice in the climate science community. It is not standard practice in climate science to publish the raw data and the computer code in academic papers. …

We are content that the phrases such as "trick" or "hiding the decline" were colloquial terms used in private e-mails and the balance of evidence is that they were not part of a systematic attempt to mislead. Likewise the evidence that we have seen does not suggest that Professor Jones was trying to subvert the peer review process. Academics should not be criticised for making informal comments on academic papers.

posted April 29, 2010 12:07 PM            

The propaganda arm of the Annenberg Trust..which is a public policy group attempting to sway public opinion on various subjects...including man made global warming is simply not credible as a source of information.

factcheck failed to delve into the actual study and simply took the Executive Summary at face value...because it suits their cause to do so.

But, buried in the report are the facts as they were laid out and those facts are damaging and damning as to the credibility of the crackpot so called scientists at CRU and their associate crackpots at University of Pennsylvania and Jim Hansen at NASA...all of whom falsified data to reach an unscientific conclusion that man made carbon dioxide is the cause of global warming...which isn't even happening. Temperatures have been falling since 1998.

You are drawn to lost causes aren't you acoustic?

posted April 29, 2010 12:17 PM            

Anyone that visits factcheck KNOWS otherwise, so save it. When they're doing articles on unfair attacks by Republicans on other Republicans it's going to be difficult to make your case that they're attempting to sway public opinion as will as the times it takes Democrats to task for the things they say.

Factcheck found correctly, and when the investigation by the non-scientist is done, they'll update further.

posted May 09, 2010 10:17 AM            

Saving the earth from diabolical carbon dioxide is at best a hot button emotional issue with which emoting leftists who are divorced from reality...use to feel good about themselves. See how much we care! Hahah

As for me, I'll take my facts from those qualified to deliver scientific opinions...and not from political hacks.

May 09, 2010
The Problems with Al Gore
By David Deming

There are two problems with Al Gore. First, he's a demagogue who lacks an appreciation for the ethics and methods of science. Second, he's a not a scientist, but a celebrity and politician who does not understand the technical aspects of science. Put succinctly, the man simply doesn't know what he's talking about. But Gore is now advising the world on complex technical issues related to energy and climate. That's a problem for the human race.

As described in my book, Science and Technology in World History, Vol. 1, what we know as modern science began in ancient Greece in the 6th century BC. The Greek philosophers embraced intellectual freedom, open discussion, and critical analysis. Pupils were not only allowed to question and criticize their teachers, but were encouraged to do so. Debate was elevated by Plato and his students to the science of dialectic. In the Platonic Dialogue, Timaeus, it is noted that anyone who can present a better plan "shall carry off the palm, not as an enemy, but as a friend."

But Al Gore refuses to debate his critics. He has repeatedly dodged a debate with Christopher Monckton. Instead of engaging skeptics in reasoned discussions, Gore has relentlessly demonized those who disagree with him. In a series of infamous character assassinations, he has stated that people who are skeptical of the hysterical global warming scenario he has been promoting (and profiting from) are comparable to the lunatic fringe that believes the Apollo Moon landings were filmed on a movie stage. He has also compared global warming skeptics to people who believe the Earth is flat.

Scientific issues like climate change are not morality plays. Scientists are objective and tentative. To be a scientist is to be skeptical. Science is never "settled," because there can be no finality in any empirical system of knowledge. Only God has all the data. Scientists employ multiple working hypotheses. They work together cooperatively, eager to have their mistakes pointed out to them, so as to advance a disinterested search for truth.

One of the finest examples of this ethic is found in a letter written by Robert Hooke to Isaac Newton on January 20, 1676. Hooke told Newton, "I have a mind very desirous of and very ready to embrace any truth that shall be discovered though it may much thwart and contradict any opinions or notions I have formerly embraced." Why was Hooke eager to have his errors pointed out? Because, he explained, "my aim is the discovery of truth," therefore "I can endure to hear objections."

But Al Gore can endure no objections. His aim is not to find truth, but to tendentiously assemble and present information so as to mislead. An example of Gore's dissembling is found in the film, An Inconvenient Truth. One of the most memorable scenes in An Inconvenient Truth is the unveiling of a startling graph that shows a strong correlation between carbon dioxide and temperature over the last several hundred thousand years. Gore then states "when there's more carbon dioxide the temperature gets warmer." Because the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now relatively high, the audience is led to believe that a drastic rise in global temperature is imminent.

But carbon dioxide does not determine temperature the way that Gore suggests. On the contrary, temperature controls carbon dioxide by modulating its release and absorption from the oceans. The temperature changes found in the ice core data cannot be caused by carbon dioxide changes, because the increases in atmospheric temperature precede increases in carbon dioxide by several hundred years.

The Earth's oceans contain more than fifty times the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is more soluble in cold water. As the oceans warm, they release carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. When the oceans cool, they absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The science is no more complex than noting that a warm coke has more fizz than a cold one. Temperature controls carbon dioxide, not the other way around.

A film like An Inconvenient Truth is carefully scripted and checked for errors. Al Gore can be made to appear as if he knows the science. But a recent television interview [Video] was more revealing. Promoting geothermal energy, Gore said that the temperature in the interior of the Earth is "several million degrees." But it isn't. It's not even close.

Since people first started lowering thermometers into boreholes in the nineteenth century, we have known that the temperature of the Earth's core is no more than several thousand degrees Celsius. The temperature at the inner-outer core boundary is constrained by a phase transition to be in the neighborhood of 6000 °C. More to the point, the temperature of near-surface rocks in geothermal areas is typically hundreds of °C. At temperatures exceeding 1000 °C in the Earth's crust, rock begins to melt. So Gore was wrong by at least a factor of a thousand, or by one-hundred-thousand percent.

Gore's blithe and erroneous characterization of the Earth's internal temperature was not an insignificant slip of the tongue. Widespread development of geothermal energy is not feasible precisely because Earth's internal temperatures are not as high as Gore believes. That is why the practical exploitation of geothermal energy is limited to areas like Iceland, a country that virtually sits on top of a volcano.

After declaring that temperatures inside the Earth are "several million degrees," Gore claimed that we have "new drill bits that don't melt in that heat." How can anyone be so remarkably ignorant as to think we have metallurgical techniques capable of producing drill bits that don't melt in temperatures of "several million degrees?"

Gore then made the stunning assertion that geothermal resources in the US alone are so enormous that they could meet our entire energy needs for 35,000 years. Is it not remarkable that we ignore such a vast, unexploited source of energy? Is it not astonishing that generations of scientists and engineers have failed to recognize the potential for withdrawing virtually limitless amounts of free energy from the Earth?

If the promise of geothermal energy sounds too good to be true, the reason is that it's not true. The United States gets less than one percent of its energy from geothermal sources. Extracting geothermal energy is inherently an inefficient process because you have to work against the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It's easy to turn mechanical energy into heat, but difficult to efficiently reverse the process. Geothermal energy production is limited to exceptional areas like Iceland precisely because the high temperatures necessary are found only in a very few locations.

Al Gore may not know what he's talking about, but he's not alone. The world is full of ignorant people. As a college professor, I interact constantly with students, many of whom are very concerned with global warming. But in my interactions I have invariably found that the more science a student knows, the more skeptical they are of the standard global warming alarmist scenario. Students majoring in engineering or physics have some appreciation for the scientific method and the uncertainties involved in understanding and predicting climate change. Unlike Gore, they also understand that the ability to develop alternative energy sources is limited by the laws of physics and chemistry, not political willpower.

Students who buy into global warming alarmism are almost always from non-technical majors such as journalism. They can't think quantitatively, critically, or analytically. They have beliefs, but no interest in or appreciation for facts. Accordingly, they are almost completely ignorant of any relevant facts. Their minds are immature and their thought processes undisciplined. They don't understand the difference between fact and opinion. One student recently told me that we have to stop using oil because global warming was caused by the heat given off by the combustion of fossil fuels.

Human beings must acquire some education and knowledge before they can begin to develop an appreciation for the extent of their own ignorance. But these global warming alarmists know nothing, and therefore believe they understand everything.

If I have been too hard on Mr. Gore, I ought to close by noting that ignorance is the normal human condition, intelligence the exception. Al Gore is not the only person who doesn't understand science. US President Barack Obama takes advice from Gore. And a group of Norwegian politicians recently distinguished themselves by awarding Nobel Prizes to both Gore and Obama. As Nobel Prize recipients, Gore and Obama have joined an elite group that includes Portuguese physician Egas Moniz. In 1949, Moniz was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine for devising an innovative procedure known as the frontal lobotomy. It seems fitting that Gore and Obama are grouped with Moniz, since their apparent goal is to lobotomize human civilization.

David Deming is a geophysicist and associate professor of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Science and Technology in World History

posted May 09, 2010 04:59 PM            

quote:

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As for me, I'll take my facts from those qualified to deliver scientific opinions...and not from political hacks.

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You mean climate scientists like the ones at RealClimate?

posted May 10, 2010 09:38 AM            

Of course he did acoustic. You just didn't notice or don't understand plain English...which is my pick for why you "missed it".

In fact, this author, geophysicist, nailed the number one fact about the temperature-carbon dioxide relationship. This is the fact which puts the lie to everything these crackpot, religious fanatic, so called scientists have been saying.

I've posted this information before acoustic...and several times at that. The fact you keep missing the obvious doesn't do you any credit as a person capable of rational thought.

Algore, Mann, Hansen and the rest of the religious fanatic crackpots and so called scientists assert that rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere CAUSE rising temperatures on Earth. These idiots are locked into this crackpot theory and never miss an opportunity to show their ignorance on the subject. Neither do the rest of crackpot chorus miss an opportunity to sound off like the chorus of ignorance they are.

Pay close attention acoustic. Perhaps you'll get it this time.

From the article:

"But carbon dioxide does not determine temperature the way that Gore suggests. On the contrary, temperature controls carbon dioxide by modulating its release and absorption from the oceans. The temperature changes found in the ice core data cannot be caused by carbon dioxide changes, because the increases in atmospheric temperature PRECEDE increases in carbon dioxide by several hundred years."...(**about 800 years on average**)

There acoustic. That's all anyone needs to know to disprove the crackpot theory of man made global warming.

Btw acoustic, you might want to look up the dictionary definition of PRECEDE.

See how easy this is acoustic? A little basic science and...instead of the earth being turned into a raging inferno by rising carbon dioxide concentrations....it's the crackpot theory of man made global warming which is turned into a crispy critter.

The entire premise upon which the crackpots base their religious fanatacism is destroyed by only one scientific fact.

How embarrassing this must be to Algore, Mann, Hansen and the rest of the religous crackpots.

posted May 10, 2010 12:51 PM            

quote:

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In fact, this author, geophysicist, nailed the number one fact about the temperature-carbon dioxide relationship. This is the fact which puts the lie to everything these crackpot, religious fanatic, so called scientists have been saying.

I've posted this information before acoustic...and several times at that. The fact you keep missing the obvious doesn't do you any credit as a person capable of rational thought.

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It's not something I've missed. It's something that's untrue.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/04/the-lag-between-temp-and-co2/
http://www.pewclimate.org/science-impacts/realities-vs-misconceptions#water vapor
If that link doesn't work, it's the bottom misconception on this page: http://www.pewclimate.org/science-impacts/realities-vs-misconceptions

This is what REAL scientists have found. Like I said, he didn't disprove any science in that article.

Solar Radiance:
http://www.pewclimate.org/science-impacts/realities-vs-misconceptions#sun

posted May 10, 2010 01:27 PM            

Ice core samples going back 650,000 years have been cored, sectioned and tested. The results are in and those results are undeniable.

Temperature PRECEDES rises in carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere...by an average of 800 years.

Let's dispense with the non scientific Pew organization first...which you cite.

The earth has not been heating for the last 12 years...since 1998. In fact, there's been a cooling trend.

Now for real climate...

They agree with me and with real climate scientists that CARBON DIOXIDE releases into the atmosphere LAG rising temperatures. They do not PRECEDE rising temperatures. They also agree the sun is the heating factor by which the earth is heated...or cooled depending on solar radiance and how much of that radiance is striking the earth directly...as opposed to indirectly and at what distance the earth is from the sun...which varies.

Even when the props are knocked out from under their most cherished crackpot theory, the crackpot fanatics of the global warming religion continue evading the most obvious facts.

The good news in that with every passing day, there are fewer of these fanatics. Soon, it will be just you, O'Bomber, Mann, Hansen and Jones...everyone else having finally gotten it.

posted May 10, 2010 04:39 PM            

If you're unaware of Pew Climate's scientific credentials, look them up: http://www.pewclimate.org/about

RealClimate confirms the information Al Gore put out, so it disagrees with your American Thinker article as well as yourself.

On historical timescales, CO2 has definitely led, not lagged, temperature.

...

In summary, the ice core data in no way contradict our understanding of the relationship between CO2 and temperature, and there is nothing fundamentally wrong with what Gore says in the film. Indeed, Gore could have used the ice core data to make an additional and stronger point, which is that these data provide a nice independent test of climate sensitivity, which gives a result in excellent agreement with results from models.

A final point. In Barton’s criticism of Gore he also points out that CO2 has sometimes been much higher than it is at present. That is true. CO2 may have reached levels of 1000 parts per million (ppm) — perhaps much higher — at times in the distant geological past (e.g. the Eocene, about 55 million years ago). What Barton doesn’t bother to mention is that the earth was much much warmer at such times. In any case, more relevant is that CO2 has not gone above about 290 ppm any time in the last 650,000 years (at least), until the most recent increase, which is unequivocally due to human activities.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/04/the-lag-between-temp-and-co2/