This grew from a discussion with an acquaintance from work. It is not meant as a slam but as an opportunity to see if one’s accepted beliefs can withstand the heat.
A person I dig, would love to see play the banjo, and generally support gives me articles from time-to-time. The above is one of them (click to enlarge). While I like tremendously the person, his biases are so evident that it never ceases to amaze me he accepts one position without knowing the opposition to such a belief. And it is a belief — mind you — based on what the person accepts from “authoritities”… which is, the legacy media. Or better yet, what makes it to the front-page of a paper and not what is the op-ed portions of the paper which typically offer debate. Because merely accepting a position without critical thinking is the worse kind of faith there is. Even if of the Christian faith:
“I suspect that most of the individuals who have religious faith are content with blind faith. They feel no obligation to understand what they believe. They may even wish not to have their beliefs disturbed by thought. But if God in whom they believe created them with intellectual and rational powers, that imposes upon them the duty to try to understand the creed of their religion. Not to do so is to verge on superstition.”
Morimer J. Adler, “A Philosopher’s Religious Faith,” in, Kelly James Clark, ed., Philosophers Who Believe: The Spiritual Journeys of 11 Leading Thinkers (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993), 207.
I was going to refute point-for-point the above article, however, I will concentrate mainly on the conversation that ensued over the article. I will, however, deal merely with one paragraph at the end of this post, and it is this one:
THIS MAY SEEM ODD BECAUSE, AS OBAMA’S NEW National Climate Assessment makes clear, the U.S. is already feeling the effects of global warming. The first 13 years of the 21st century were among the 14 hottest on record. California is enduring a historic drought. Wildfires are getting worse throughout the West. And while it’s premature to blame climate change for any particular storm—that stock phrase seemed to appear in every story about Superstorm Sandy—our weird weather trends are consistent with expectations for a warmer world.
I will return to this later. Continuing.
Chit-chat over the above article provided context on what exactly my friend knew (or didn’t know), and is yet another example of his bias hand-fed to him by headlines. The topic of global warming “stalling” (LA Times words: Global warming ‘hiatus’ puts climate change scientists on the spot) over the last 17-years (almost 18 years now) was unknown to him. The LA Times article states that it may last 30-years.
Truth be told, they have NO IDEA. Why? Because they rely on computer models, not the actual climate.
Computer Models?
Yes, most of the headlines we read are driven by computer models or cherry-picking from one data set and not taking ACTUAL temperatures into account. For instance:
See more on this @ Dr. Roy Spenser’s site. (BIO):
Roy W. Spencer received his Ph.D. in meteorology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1981. Before becoming a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 2001, he was a Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, where he and Dr. John Christy received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for their global temperature monitoring work with satellites. Dr. Spencer’s work with NASA continues as the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite. He has provided congressional testimony several times on the subject of global warming.
Dr. Spencer’s research has been entirely supported by U.S. government agencies: NASA, NOAA, and DOE. He has never been asked by any oil company to perform any kind of service. Not even Exxon-Mobil.
(CNSNEWS) Global temperatures collected in five official databases confirm that there has been no statistically significant global warming for the past 17 years, according to Dr. John Christy, professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama Huntsville (UAH).
Christy’s findings are contrary to predictions made by 73 computer models cited in the United Nation’s latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (5AR).
Christy told CNSNews that he analyzed all 73 models used in the 5AR and not one accurately predicted that the Earth’s temperature would remain flat since Oct. 1, 1996. (See Temperatures v Predictions 1976-2013.pdf)
“I compared the models with observations in the key area – the tropics – where the climate models showed a real impact of greenhouse gases,” Christy explained. “I wanted to compare the real world temperatures with the models in a place where the impact would be very clear.” (See Tropical Mid-Troposphere Graph.pdf)
Using datasets of actual temperatures recorded by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (NASA GISS), the United Kingdom’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research at the University of East Anglia (Hadley-CRU), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), satellites measuring atmospheric and deep oceanic temperatures, and a remote sensor system in California, Christy found that “all show a lack of warming over the past 17 years.”
“All 73 models’ predictions were on average three to four times what occurred in the real world,” Christy pointed out. “The closest was a Russian model that predicted a one-degree increase.”
German Meteorologist Says Climate Models Have Gotten 11 Of The Past 12 European Summers Wrong!
German meteorologist Dominik Jung writes at wetter.net that the first preliminary forecast for Central Europe for the upcoming summer issued by the NOAA does not look very favorable. Expect a “grisly summer”, he writes.
He writes that over the last 10 years spring has generally been on the warm and sunny side, but that Central Europeans have had to pay a price for that by having to put up with wet and variable summer weather.
Models wrong 11 out of 12 years!….
… more on this later. One thing you will notice in reading the LA Times article, every pro anthropogenic [man-caused] global warming person named has a professor, or scientist in front of their name or description. Those who disagree with “man-caused” global warming are merely described as skeptics. ALTHOUGH, you at least get this:
Climate scientists, meanwhile, have had a different response. Although most view the pause as a temporary interruption in a long-term warming trend, some disagree and say it has revealed serious flaws in the deliberative processes of the IPCC.
One of the most prominent of these critics is Judith Curry, a climatologist who heads the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She was involved in the third IPCC assessment, which was published in 2001. But now she accuses the organization of intellectual arrogance and bias…
In case you are out of the loop, no warming has occurred in 16-years from when this article appeared in the Mail Online:
✦ The figures reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012 there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures
✦ This means that the ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996
The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week.
The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures.
This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years….
There will always be those who cannot admit the obvious, for obvious reasons (CFACT):
1. The concentration of CO2 in the global atmosphere is lower today, even including human emissions, than it has been during most of the existence of life on Earth.
2. The global climate has been much warmer than it is today during most of the existence of life on Earth. Today we are in an interglacial period of the Pleistocene Ice Age that began 2.5 million years ago and has not ended.
3. There was an Ice Age 450 million years ago when CO2 was about 10 times higher than it is today.
4. Humans evolved in the tropics near the equator. We are a tropical species and can only survive in colder climates due to fire, clothing and shelter.
5. CO2 is the most important food for all life on earth. All green plants use CO2 to produce the sugars that provide energy for their growth and our growth. Without CO2 in the atmosphere carbon-based life could never have evolved.
6. The optimum CO2 level for most plants is about 1600 parts per million, four times higher than the level today. This is why greenhouse growers purposely inject the CO2-rich exhaust from their gas and wood-fired heaters into the greenhouse, resulting in a 40-80 per cent increase in growth.
7. If human emissions of CO2 do end up causing significant warming (which is not certain) it may be possible to grow food crops in northern Canada and Russia, vast areas that are now too cold for agriculture.
8. Whether increased CO2 levels cause significant warming or not, the increased CO2 levels themselves will result in considerable increases in the growth rate of plants, including our food crops and forests.
9. There has been no further global warming for nearly 18 years during which time about 25 per cent of all the CO2 ever emitted by humans has been added to the atmosphere.
I doubt it.
Here is a Patrick Moore quote that shows how the left has politicised the issues we are dealing with above and below:
“I now find that many environmental groups have drifted into self-serving cliques with narrow vision and rigid ideology…. many environmentalists are showing signs of elitism, left-wingism, and downright eco-fascism. The once politically centrist, science-based vision of environmentalism has been largely replaced with extremist rhetoric. Science and logic have been abandoned and the movement is often used to promote other causes such as class struggle and anti-corporatism. The public is left trying to figure out what is reasonable and what is not.”
BIAS
Lets address this BIAS issue, as it came up in discussion. I made the point that in the media you have a culture that is committed to this idea that the earth is getting warmer-and-warmer. In the scientific community however… it has turned into a machine that feeds off the government payroll. Not just our government payroll but the schillings ($$) the U.N. funds such ideas with, and doesn’t fund others with. For instance, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) lead author, Dr. Richard Tol admits no global warming for 17 years ~ rips bias in ipcc ~ the U.N’s “inbuilt alarmism made me step down.” By the time the report was finished, however, it hadn’t warmed for 17 years. In the report we find items like this:
….The report also illustrates just how outmoded the IPCC has become since it was founded in 1988. Its reports are written over a period of three years, and finished months before publication.
When preparations started on AR5, the world hadn’t warmed for 13 years. That is a bit odd, if you believe the models, but not odd enough to merit a lot of attention.
By the time the report was finished, however, it hadn’t warmed for 17 years. That is decidedly odd, but hard to accommodate in a near-final draft that has been through three rounds of review.
After the report was finalized, but before it was published, a number of papers appeared with hypotheses about the pause in warming. AR5 was out of date before it was released.
The IPCC model… is broken.
[….]
Authors who want to see their long hours of IPCC work recognized should thus present their impact as worse than the next one.
It was this inbuilt alarmism that made me step down from the team that drafted the Summary for Policy Makers of Working Group 2. And indeed, the report was greeted by the four horsemen of the apocalypse: famine, pestilence, war, death all made headlines.
Now, Dr. Tol is not a “climatologist” per-se, but thought of as important enough to contribute to the most recent release of the IPCC report that the Obama admin pumps out Executive Orders over. But here is a small sampling of others who dissent:
“We’re not scientifically there yet. Despite what you may have heard in the media, there is nothing like a consensus of scientific opinion that this is a problem. Because there is natural variability in the weather, you cannot statistically know for another 150 years.” — UN IPCC’s Tom Tripp, a member of the UN IPCC since 2004 and listed as one of the lead authors and serves as the Director of Technical Services & Development for U.S. Magnesium.
“Any reasonable scientific analysis must conclude the basic theory wrong!!” — NASA Scientist Dr. Leonard Weinstein who worked 35 years at the NASA Langley Research Center and finished his career there as a Senior Research Scientist. Weinstein is presently a Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute of Aerospace.
“Please remain calm: The Earth will heal itself — Climate is beyond our power to control…Earth doesn’t care about governments or their legislation. You can’t find much actual global warming in present-day weather observations. Climate change is a matter of geologic time, something that the earth routinely does on its own without asking anyone’s permission or explaining itself.” — Nobel Prize-Winning Stanford University Physicist Dr. Robert B. Laughlin, who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1998, and was formerly a research scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
“In essence, the jig is up. The whole thing is a fraud. And even the fraudsters that fudged data are admitting to temperature history that they used to say didn’t happen…Perhaps what has doomed the Climategate fraudsters the most was their brazenness in fudging the data” — Dr. Christopher J. Kobus, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Oakland University, specializes in alternative energy, thermal transport phenomena, two-phase flow and fluid and thermal energy systems.
“The energy mankind generates is so small compared to that overall energy budget that it simply cannot affect the climate…The planet’s climate is doing its own thing, but we cannot pinpoint significant trends in changes to it because it dates back millions of years while the study of it began only recently. We are children of the Sun; we simply lack data to draw the proper conclusions.” — Russian Scientist Dr. Anatoly Levitin, the head of geomagnetic variations laboratory at the Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism, Ionosphere and Radiowave Propagation of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
“Hundreds of billion dollars have been wasted with the attempt of imposing a Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory that is not supported by physical world evidences…AGW has been forcefully imposed by means of a barrage of scare stories and indoctrination that begins in the elementary school textbooks.” — Brazilian Geologist Geraldo Luís Lino, who authored the 2009 book “The Global Warming Fraud: How a Natural Phenomenon Was Converted into a False World Emergency.”
“I am an environmentalist,” but “I must disagree with Mr. Gore” — Chemistry Professor Dr. Mary Mumper, the chair of the Chemistry Department at Frostburg State University in Maryland, during her presentation titled “Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide and Global Warming, the Skeptic’s View.”
“I am ashamed of what climate science has become today.” The science “community is relying on an inadequate model to blame CO2 and innocent citizens for global warming in order to generate funding and to gain attention. If this is what ‘science’ has become today, I, as a scientist, am ashamed.” — Research Chemist William C. Gilbert published a study in August 2010 in the journal Energy & Environment titled “The thermodynamic relationship between surface temperature and water vapor concentration in the troposphere” and he published a paper in August 2009 titled “Atmospheric Temperature Distribution in a Gravitational Field.” [Update December 9, 2010]
“The dysfunctional nature of the climate sciences is nothing short of a scandal. Science is too important for our society to be misused in the way it has been done within the Climate Science Community.” The global warming establishment “has actively suppressed research results presented by researchers that do not comply with the dogma of the IPCC.” — Swedish Climatologist Dr. Hans Jelbring, of the Paleogeophysics & Geodynamics Unit at Stockholm University. [Updated December 9, 2010. Corrects Jelbring’s quote.]
“Those who call themselves ‘Green planet advocates’ should be arguing for a CO2- fertilized atmosphere, not a CO2-starved atmosphere…Diversity increases when the planet was warm AND had high CO2 atmospheric content…Al Gore’s personal behavior supports a green planet – his enormous energy use with his 4 homes and his bizjet, does indeed help make the planet greener. Kudos, Al for doing your part to save the planet.” — Renowned engineer and aviation/space pioneer Burt Rutan, who was named “100 most influential people in the world, 2004″ by Time Magazine and Newsweek called him “the man responsible for more innovations in modern aviation than any living engineer.”
“Global warming is the central tenet of this new belief system in much the same way that the Resurrection is the central tenet of Christianity. Al Gore has taken a role corresponding to that of St Paul in proselytizing the new faith…My skepticism about AGW arises from the fact that as a physicist who has worked in closely related areas, I know how poor the underlying science is. In effect the scientific method has been abandoned in this field.” — Atmospheric Physicist Dr. John Reid, who worked with Australia’s CSIRO’s (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization) Division of Oceanography and worked in surface gravity waves (ocean waves) research.
“We maintain there is no reason whatsoever to worry about man-made climate change, because there is no evidence whatsoever that such a thing is happening.” — Greek Earth scientists Antonis Christofides and Nikos Mamassis of the National Technical University of Athens’ Department of Water Resources and Environmental Engineering.
“There are clear cycles during which both temperature and salinity rise and fall. These cyclesare related to solar activity…In my opinion and that of our institute, the problems connected to the current stage of warming are being exaggerated. What we are dealing with is not a global warming of the atmosphere or of the oceans.” — Biologist Pavel Makarevich of the Biological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
“Because the greenhouse effect is temporary rather than permanent, predictions of significant global warming in the 21st century by IPCC are not supported by the data.” — Hebrew University Professor Dr. Michael Beenstock an honorary fellow with Institute for Economic Affairs who published a study challenging man-made global warming claims titled “Polynomial Cointegration Tests of the Anthropogenic Theory of Global Warming.”
“The whole idea of anthropogenic global warming is completely unfounded. There appears to have been money gained by Michael Mann, Al Gore and UN IPCC’s Rajendra Pachauri as a consequence of this deception, so it’s fraud.” — South African astrophysicist Hilton Ratcliffe, a member of the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa (ASSA) and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and a Fellow of the British Institute of Physics.
Dr. Tol has been smeared though in what many call “climate McCarthyism.” Why? Because the “architects of such policies know they have failed, but they have no alternative except more of the same. Maybe it’s because their argument is weak that they resort to climate McCarthyism. The cost, apart from higher energy bills, is to democracy, and free speech” (Green ‘smear campaign’ against professor who dared to disown ‘sexed up’ UN climate dossier). Even if you believe man is throwing harmful gases into the air, the question becomes this: Can naturally occurring processes selectively buffer the full brunt of global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions resulting from human activities?
- Science Daily answers ~ Yes, find researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Johns Hopkins University in the US and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
This doesn’t matter to the left… it is “settled science” — or — “the debate is over”
SETTLED?
PowerLine knocks another this out of the park! ~ “‘The debate is over’ Is A Core Progressive Tenet”
Joel Kotkin writes about the spread of “debate is over” syndrome. It’s a good article, but marred by the author’s surprise that this “embrace homogeneity of viewpoint” finds expression by the American left, “the same people who historically have identified themselves with open-mindedness and the defense of free speech.”
Actually, “debate is over” syndrome expresses a core tenet of American progressivism, and one that has been present from the beginning. It stems from the historicism of the German philosopher Hegel.
Hegel maintained that history unfolds through a “dialectical” process, in which each stage is the product of the contradictions inherent in the ideas that defined the preceding one. Within these tensions and contradictions, Hegel believed, the philosopher can discern a comprehensive, evolving, rational unity. He called that unity “the absolute idea.”
History consists of an inevitable and progressive march to that idea. The modern State is the final fruit of that progressive march.
It is natural for a Hegelian to pronounce a debate “over” even as it continues to rage. Having discerned the comprehensive rational unity — the absolute idea — positions contrary to that idea can be written off as things of the past.
Hegel’s place in Marxist thought is well known. But if anything, the German holds an even more central position in American Progressive thought, thanks mainly to Woodrow Wilson, the intellectual father of American Progressivism. (Theodore Roosevelt was also influenced by the German philosophy of Hegel’s day, as Jean Yarbrough has shown).
Ronald Pestritto demonstrated the connection in his book Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism, which Scott Johnson and I discussed in this Weekly Standard article. Hegel’s historicism was irresistible to Wilson, who wrote, “the philosophy of any time is, as Hegel says, ‘nothing but the spirit of the time expressed in abstract thought.’”
Wilson took Hegel so much to heart that, in a love letter to his future wife, he observed that “Hegel used to search for–and in most cases find, it seems to me–the fundamental psychological facts of society.” And Wilson’s writing about the State, about administration, and about the U.S. Constitution all are founded in Hegel’s historicism.
As Scott and I argued, one can draw a straight line from Wilson’s Hegelianism to liberal constitutional theory. Wilson endorsed the emerging, Darwinian-inspired theory of a “living Constitution” under which that document’s original meaning must take a back seat whenever it stands in the way of the march of History.
Sound familiar?….
A great article by Charles “the Hammer” Krauthammer, can be found over at the Washington Post. In it, Krauthammer shows that science advances… and really… science is screaming at the climate deniers (the anthropogenic global warming crowd) to “advance.”
…”The debate is settled,” asserted propagandist in chief Barack Obama in his latest State of the Union address. “Climate change is a fact.” Really? There is nothing more anti-scientific than the very idea that science is settled, static, impervious to challenge. Take a non-climate example. It was long assumed that mammograms help reduce breast cancer deaths. This fact was so settled that Obamacare requires every insurance plan to offer mammograms (for free, no less) or be subject to termination.
Now we learn from a massive randomized study — 90,000 women followed for 25 years — that mammograms may have no effect on breast cancer deaths. Indeed, one out of five of those diagnosed by mammogram receives unnecessary radiation, chemo or surgery.
So much for settledness. And climate is less well understood than breast cancer. If climate science is settled, why do its predictions keep changing? And how is it that the great physicist Freeman Dyson, who did some climate research in the late 1970s, thinks today’s climate-change Cassandras are hopelessly mistaken?
They deal with the fluid dynamics of the atmosphere and oceans, argues Dyson, ignoring the effect of biology, i.e., vegetation and topsoil. Further, their predictions rest on models they fall in love with: “You sit in front of a computer screen for 10 years and you start to think of your model as being real.” Not surprisingly, these models have been “consistently and spectacularly wrong” in their predictions, write atmospheric scientists Richard McNider and John Christy — and always, amazingly, in the same direction.
Settled? Even Britain’s national weather service concedes there’s been no change — delicately called a “pause” — in global temperature in 15 years. If even the raw data is recalcitrant, let alone the assumptions and underlying models, how settled is the science?
But even worse than the pretense of settledness is the cynical attribution of any politically convenient natural disaster to climate change, a clever term that allows you to attribute anything — warming and cooling, drought and flood — to man’s sinful carbon burning.
Accordingly, Obama ostentatiously visited drought-stricken California last Friday. Surprise! He blamed climate change. Here even the New York Times gagged, pointing out that far from being supported by the evidence, “the most recent computer projections suggest that as the world warms, California should get wetter, not drier, in the winter.” ….
(WaPo)
BIAS or COVER-UP?
“The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders…. Dr. Lal’s admission will only add to the mounting furor over the melting glaciers assertion, which the IPCC was last week forced to withdraw because it has no scientific foundation.” (David Rose, The Daily Mail, January 24, 2010)
David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture (New York, NY: Sentinel Publishing, 2011), [FN] 161.
Uncovered emails show not merely a bias but a guided attempt to disseminate falsehood in order to push a political agenda. A good synopsis of this “Climate-Gate” comes from Conservapedia, I will include the footnotes as well for people to follow them and read the source material for this synopsis:
The Climategate scandal erupted on November 19, 2009, when a collection of email messages, data files and data processing programs were leaked from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU) located in the UK, revealing scientific fraud and data manipulation by scientists concerning the Global Warming Theory.[1] The scandal that the suffix –gate implies is the state of climate science over the past decade, revealed by more than a thousand emails, documents, and computer code sets between various prominent scientists.[2] The released information is evidence of deceit by climate scientists, which was kept a secret or hidden from the public until the data was leaked from the CRU. The CRU’s apparent obstruction of freedom-of-information requests, as revealed by the leaks, was only the tip of the iceberg.[3] Climategate is said to have revealed the biggest scientific hoax in world history as the worst scandal of this generation.[4][5]
The Climategate emails and climate data became the subject of intense debate, calling to question assumptions on anthropogenic (man-made) global warming. The legitimacy of climate science, and the charges leveled by the CRU and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which claim humans cause climate change, was severely shaken by Climategate. Evidence revealed told the truth about man-made global warming: it’s a fraud.[6][7][8][9][10]
Despite the significance of the scandal and its impact on the theory suggesting humans cause climate change, in a profoundly bizarre situation the Mainstream media attempted to bury the Climategate story.[11] At the same time, liberal Wikipedia quickly censored Climategate and referred to it as an illegal “incident,” as the work of computer hackers stealing data — contrary to Freedom of Information Act requests. In spite of the liberal media’s bias attempt to hide the scandal, news of Climategate quickly spread because many other more notable sources of media covered the story. Commentators and others in the media covered news on Climategate, many of which outlined important takeaways about specific information valuable to the public.[12]
↑ Breaking News Story: CRU has apparently been hacked – hundreds of files released, Watts Up With That?, November 19, 2009.
↑ 2.0 2.1 Iain Murray. Three Things You Absolutely Must Know About Climategate, Pajamas Media, November 24, 2009.
↑ The global-warming scandal is bigger than one email leak. The Tip of the Climategate Iceberg, Wall Street Journal, December 08, 2009.
↑ Christopher Booker. Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation, Telegraph.co.uk, November 28, 2009.
↑ Glenn Beck. The Biggest Scam In History (Video), The Glenn Beck Program, December 01, 2009.
↑ James Delingpole. Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’?, Telegraph.co.uk, November 20, 2009.
↑ Rush Limbaugh. Universe of Lies: Big Warmers Try to Whitewash ClimateGate Fraud, RushLimbaugh.com, November 30, 2009.
↑ Marc Sheppard. CRU’s Source Code: Climategate Uncovered, American Thinker, November 25, 2009.
↑ Steve McIntyre. Yamal: A “Divergence” Problem, climateaudit.org, September 27, 2009.
↑ Andrew Orlowski. One Of The Scandals In The CRU Emails, Sweetness & Light, September 29, 2009.
↑ Allie Duzett. Media Ignore Climate Science Scandal, Accuracy In Media, November 23, 2009.
↑ Larrey Anderson. Revenge of the Computer Nerds, American Thinker, December 09, 2009.
There was a “Climate-Gate 2.0,” where more emails showed strong collusion to fool the public. The Daily Mail in the UK says this in their headline:
- 5,000 leaked emails reveal scientists deleted evidence that cast doubt on claims climate change was man-made
- Experts were under orders from US and UK officials to come up with a ‘strong message’
- Critics claim: ‘The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering’
- Scientist asks, ‘What if they find that climate change is a natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us all’
More than 5,000 documents have been leaked online purporting to be the correspondence of climate scientists at the University of East Anglia who were previously accused of ‘massaging’ evidence of man-made climate change.
Following on from the original ‘climategate’ emails of 2009, the new package appears to show systematic suppression of evidence, and even publication of reports that scientists knew to to be based on flawed approaches.
And not only do the emails paint a picture of scientists manipulating data, government employees at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) are also implicated.
One message appeared to show a member of Defra staff telling colleagues working on climate science to give the government a ‘strong message’. The emails paint a clear picture of scientists selectively using data, and colluding with politicians to misuse scientific information….
I will venture a guess that my friend has never heard about this either. Why? Bias… collusion… culture… money from government… on and on. But the above is always swept away with monikers like “extreme view,” “deniers,” “climate-skeptics,” etc.
Here is Richard A. Muller, professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, explaining the issue with Climate-Gate:
If its not in Time or other sources considered to be the “Legacy-Media,” it must be extreme. (“Extremism” will conclude this rather long post.) To wit, lets deal with two claims from that paragraph from Times near the top. The first one (topic a) I wish to deal with is the statement that “our weird weather trends are consistent with expectations for a warmer world.” The author sorta rejected Superstorm Sandy as being caused by global warming but then attributed it to a warming world. A few things about this.
TOPIC A
First, we haven’t been warming. A simple enough fact.
Secondly, weather, especially tornadoes and hurricanes have lessened over the years. In other words, if Michael Grunwald (the author of the Time article) says weird weather is a indicator, an evidence for, that warming weather is something we should be fearful of and act on, what is normalizing weather and no warming suppose to indicate… OTHER THAN the whole premise of the article in a major magazine is undermined.
- 2a) Hurricanes
This candid admissions from the New York Post:
The 2013 hurricane season just ended as one of the five quietest years since 1960. But don’t expect anyone who pointed to last year’s hurricanes as “proof” of the need to act against global warming to apologize; the warmists don’t work that way.
Warmist claims of a severe increase in hurricane activity go back to 2005 and Hurricane Katrina. The cover of Al Gore’s 2009 book, “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis,” even features a satellite image of the globe with four major hurricanes superimposed.
Yet the evidence to the contrary was there all along. Back in 2005 I and others reviewed the entire hurricane record, which goes back over a century, and found no increase of any kind. Yes, we sometimes get bad storms — but no more frequently now than in the past. The advocates simply ignored that evidence — then repeated their false claims after Hurricane Sandy last year.
And the media play along. For example, it somehow wasn’t front-page news that committed believers in man-made global warming recently admitted there’s been no surface global warming for well over a decade and maybe none for decades more. Nor did we see warmists conceding that their explanation is essentially a confession that the previous warming may not have been man-made at all.
That admission came in a new paper by prominent warmists in the peer-reviewed journal Climate Dynamics. They not only conceded that average global surface temperatures stopped warming a full 15 years ago, but that this “pause” could extend into the 2030s.
But keep in mind, our total Co2 (carbon) emissions is no laughing matter:
Even the IPCC and British Meteorological Office now recognize that average global temperatures haven’t budged in almost 17 years. Little evidence suggests that sea level rise, storms, droughts, polar ice and temperatures or other weather and climate events and trends display any statistically significant difference from what Earth and mankind have experienced over the last 100-plus years…
~Via, John Kerry vs. the World (as in earth)
Besides the Global Warming crowd blaming everything on it (even the violence in the “arab spring“!), its failed predictions about no ice in the north-pole, no more snow in europe, islands drowning, polar bear numbers, and the like… Al Gore’s claims about Hurricanes is [again], laughable, to wit: when you even lose Jeraldo Rivera, your leftist stance may be very laughable:
Via Breitbart:
Al Gore was recently taken to task for exaggerating claims involving the frequency and intensity of hurricanes. The latest weather news makes his misrepresentations look all the more ridiculous.
For the first time since 2002, this year there will be no hurricane activity before September 1.
Reports indicate this is only the 25th time in 161 years that has happened.
The first hurricane of the season has formed on or after September 1 only 25 times in the past 161 years. Since the satellite era began in the mid-1960s, there have only been five years without a hurricane by August 31. The last time a hurricane failed to form before September 1 was in 2002 when Hurricane Gustav formed on September 11.
It would be foolish to make fun of anything involving such potentially dangerous storms and it’s also possible we could still see many late developing storms. However, given all the misleading information passed off on the topic by Gore, his allies and a fawning media, hopefully any lack of serious storm activity won’t be buried by the media for political reasons.
- 2b) Tornadoes
UPDATE! March [2015] ties 1969 record for fewest tornadoes – With only 8:
Eight tornadoes hit the United States last month, tying the record for the fewest tornadoes in March, according to preliminary data from the Storm Prediction Center.
The last time there were so few tornadoes in March was in 1969, said Greg Carbin, a meteorologist with the prediction center in Norman, Okla. Accurate tornado records began in 1950.
A typical March sees about 80 twisters in the United States, the National Climatic Data Center said.
The only notable outbreak of tornadoes this March was last week, when several twisters formed in Oklahoma and Arkansas, killing one person in Tulsa. That’s the only tornado death this year.
Overall, it’s been a rather quiet year so far for tornadoes, with just 30 hitting the United States. Again, 1969 is the only year that was calmer, when 16 twisters were reported in January, February and March, Carbin said…..
To be clear, this is a 60-year low… and we have increased carbon output in the past 15-years almost as much as the previous 60-years.
Via WUWT (the below and above):
….Figure 1 [top] shows all tornadoes above EF1. (See here, why EF1’s are excluded.) The 10-Year Trend is significantly below the level consistently seen up to 1991, although the high totals in 2011 have inevitably caused a small upwards blip.
We see a similar pattern with the stronger EF3+ tornadoes.
I do not claim to know what will happen to tornado numbers in coming years. And anyone who does is lying.
NOAA sums up the situation neatly in their FAQ.
Does “global warming” cause tornadoes? No. Thunderstorms do. The harder question may be, “Will climate change influence tornado occurrence?” The best answer is: We don’t know….
ALL THIS WHILE WE PRODUCE THE MOST CO2 EVA!
Another indicator the main premise of the theory is wrong.
So I will restate more clearly: C02 follows temperature change… it doesn’t lead it. That big giant ball-o’-flame in the sky has much more to do with climate change than Exxon… who has less impact on the enviro than volcanic activity (mankind that is). Below is another recent advancement in understanding out climate (more here):
The next issue I want to challenge is the idea that the 21st century has been the hottest string of years on record. It has not. Take this two sets of data that many reporters and the general public draw from (to the right).
Even the Wall Street Journal chose the higher temperature reading to say that July of 2012 was July was the “hottest month in the contiguous U.S. since records began in 1895.” WUWT found this on accident and it has led to quite a few other revelations as we will see. Here is description in part of what we looking at:
Glaring inconsistencies found between State of the Climate (SOTC) reports sent to the press and public and the “official” climate database record for the United States. Using NCDC’s own data, July 2012 can no longer be claimed to be the “hottest month on record”.
[….]
I initially thought this was just some simple arithmetic error or reporting error, a one-off event, but then I began to find it in other months when I compared the output from the NCDC climate database plotter. Here is a table of the differences I found for the last two years between claims made in the SOTC report and the NCDC database output.
[….]
In almost every instance dating back to the inception of the CONUS Tavg value being reported in the SOTC report, there’s a difference. Some are quite significant. In most cases, the database value is cooler than the claim made in the SOTC report. Clearly, it is a systemic issue that spans over two years of reporting to the press and to the public.
It suggests that claims made by NCDC when they send out these SOTC reports aren’t credible because there are such differences between the data. Clearly, NCDC means for the plotter output they link to, to be an official representation to the public, so there cannot be a claim of me using some “not fit for purpose” method to get that data….
The Wall Street Journal made a graph showing this record setting month (left). The more accurate temperature for July likewise is shown in the same graph (right):
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This looking at the data sets chosen and what is used and isn’t used to support an idea that fails in every way. Combine this obvious cherry-picking with the bias, collusion, and charges against the report that the President used to route Congress, all show we have a problem Houston! But this is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. It seems the NOAA has been skewing these temps for some time. Why? Because the left uses this as a way to promote an ever growing government and the scientists get more-and-more funding. This data fudging story is newer, and it is evolving quickley, including this newest post via Real Science where Steve Goddard notes that More Than 40% Of USHCN Station Data Is Fabricated. Here is Dr. Judith carry’s synopsis (excerpted), in which she critiques a bit Goddard’s post… but then bows to the evidence:
OK, acknowledging that Goddard made some analysis errors, I am still left with some uneasiness about the actual data, and why it keeps changing. For example, Jennifer Marohasy has been writing about Corrupting Australian’s temperature record.
In the midst of preparing this blog post, I received an email from Anthony Watts, suggesting that I hold off on my post since there is some breaking news. Watts pointed me to a post by Paul Homewood entitled Massive Temperature Adjustments At Luling, Texas. Excerpt:
So, I thought it might be worth looking in more detail at a few stations, to see what is going on. In Steve’s post, mentioned above, he links to the USHCN Final dataset for monthly temperatures, making the point that approx 40% of these monthly readings are “estimated”, as there is no raw data.
From this dataset, I picked the one at the top of the list, (which appears to be totally random), Station number 415429, which is Luling, Texas.
Taking last year as an example, we can see that ten of the twelve months are tagged as “E”, i.e estimated. It is understandable that a station might be a month, or even two, late in reporting, but it is not conceivable that readings from last year are late. (The other two months, Jan/Feb are marked “a”, indicating missing days).
But, the mystery thickens. Each state produces a monthly and annual State Climatological Report, which among other things includes a list of monthly mean temperatures by station. If we look at the 2013 annual report for Texas, we can see these monthly temperatures for Luling.
Where an “M” appears after the temperature, this indicates some days are missing, i.e Jan, Feb, Oct and Nov. (Detailed daily data shows just one missing day’s minimum temperature for each of these months).
Yet, according to the USHCN dataset, all ten months from March to December are “Estimated”. Why, when there is full data available?
But it gets worse. The table below compares the actual station data with what USHCN describe as “the bias-adjusted temperature”. The results are shocking.
In other words, the adjustments have added an astonishing 1.35C to the annual temperature for 2013. Note also that I have included the same figures for 1934, which show that the adjustment has reduced temperatures that year by 0.91C. So, the net effect of the adjustments between 1934 and 2013 has been to add 2.26C of warming.
Note as well, that the largest adjustments are for the estimated months of March – December. This is something that Steve Goddard has been emphasising.
It is plain that these adjustments made are not justifiable in any way. It is also clear that the number of “Estimated” measurements made are not justified either, as the real data is there, present and correct.
Watts appears in the comments, stating that he has contacted John Nielsen-Gammon (Texas State Climatologist) about this issue. Nick Stokes also appears in the comments, and one commenter finds a similar problem for another Texas station.
Homewood’s post sheds light on Goddard’s original claim regarding the data drop out (not just stations that are no longer reporting, but reporting stations that are ‘estimated’). I infer from this that there seems to be a real problem with the USHCN data set, or at least with some of the stations. Maybe it is a tempest in a teacup, but it looks like something that requires NOAA’s attention. As far as I can tell, NOAA has not responded to Goddard’s allegations. Now, with Homewood’s explanation/clarification, NOAA really needs to respond….
(H/T to Climate Realist ~ See WUWT and Hockey Schtick for more)
So here is a post of mine [from last week] that shows the outcome of correcting the information WITH THEIR OWN DATA!
- The NASA US historical temperature record has changed significantly since 1999, to create the appearance of warming. Previously the NASA records showed the US cooling since the 1930s.
This comes with a h/t to Drudge!
- The scandal of fiddled global warming data The US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record
When future generations try to understand how the world got carried away around the end of the 20th century by the panic over global warming, few things will amaze them more than the part played in stoking up the scare by the fiddling of official temperature data. There was already much evidence of this seven years ago, when I was writing my history of the scare, The Real Global Warming Disaster. But now another damning example has been uncovered by Steven Goddard’s US blog Real Science, showing how shamelessly manipulated has been one of the world’s most influential climate records, the graph of US surface temperature records published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been “adjusting” its record by replacing real temperatures with data “fabricated” by computer models. The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data. In several posts headed “Data tampering at USHCN/GISS”, Goddard compares the currently published temperature graphs with those based only on temperatures measured at the time. These show that the US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on “fabricated” data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century….
Which is why this will be known as the hoax of the century:
UNLESS, that is, the masses believe more-and-more that climate skepticism is truly evil, as David Suzuki believes, jail will soon await:
Richard Tol, Leslie Woodcock, James Lovelock, and others all feel the sting of the machine they were a part of. A part of because these and other men-and-women specialists have abandoned what they previously supported as being true. But this machine they helped build has a way of growing too large to fail. And it is biting them in the ass!
This comes way of WUWT, and highlights the tendency of the Left towards totalitarian thinking in order to make their vision “work.
Scientists who don’t believe in catastrophic man-made global warming should be put in prison, a US philosophy professor argues on a website funded by the UK government.
Lawrence Torcello – assistant professor of philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology, NY, writes in an essay at The Conversation that climate scientists who fail to communicate the correct message about “global warming” should face trial for “criminal negligence”. (H/T Bishop Hill)
What are we to make of those behind the well documented corporate funding of global warming denial? Those who purposefully strive to make sure “inexact, incomplete and contradictory information” is given to the public? I believe we understand them correctly when we know them to be not only corrupt and deceitful, but criminally negligent in their willful disregard for human life. It is time for modern societies to interpret and update their legal systems accordingly.
More @Breitbart
What next, numbers tattooed on our arms because we hold an opinion different from Torcello?
Reason.org ends with a great commentary on this freedom restricting idea of the above lunatic:
In 2012, in a proceeding straight out of the Inquisition, an Italian court convicted six scientists for providing “inexact, incomplete and contradictory information” in the lead-up to the earthquake. Now, a philosophy professor says that case may provide a worthwhile example for the treatment of scientific dissenters—specifically, “climate deniers who receive funding as part of a sustained campaign to undermine the public’s understanding of scientific consensus.”…
…He ultimately allows that he wouldn’t actually criminalize poor scientific communication—just anybody who might support dissenting scientists, or receive such support.
If those with a financial or political interest in inaction had funded an organised campaign to discredit the consensus findings of seismology, and for that reason no preparations were made, then many of us would agree that the financiers of the denialist campaign were criminally responsible for the consequences of that campaign. I submit that this is just what is happening with the current, well documented funding of global warming denialism….
We have good reason to consider the funding of climate denial to be criminally and morally negligent. The charge of criminal and moral negligence ought to extend to all activities of the climate deniers who receive funding as part of a sustained campaign to undermine the public’s understanding of scientific consensus.
If you’re trying to figure out how that doesn’t threaten the free exercise of speech, Torcello assures us, “We must make the critical distinction between the protected voicing of one’s unpopular beliefs, and the funding of a strategically organized campaign to undermine the public’s ability to develop and voice informed opinions.”
So…You can voice a dissenting opinion, so long as you don’t benefit from it or help dissenters benefit in any way?
By the way, according to RIT, Torcello researches “the moral implications of global warming denialism, as well as other forms of science denialism.” Presumably, his job is a paid one. But this is OK, because…the majority of scientists agree with his views on the issue?
Let’s allow that they do—and that a majority of scientists agree about man-made climate change and a host of other issues. Just when does the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition meet to decide what is still subject to debate, and what is now holy writ? And is an effort to “undermine the public’s understanding of scientific consensus” always criminally negligent?…
More @Reason
Its funny how the left HATES profit.
CONSENSUS (97%)
Below is another item we spoke of, and it is that of “consensus.” I have previously posted on it, of which a portion of what is below is from THAT post, which was born from a debate via FaceBook. But I also recommend the Wall Street Journal article by Dr. Roy Spencer [remember his bio was up this page a bit] as well as WUWT topic on the matter. Climate Depot has a list of his posts as well.
(Click Graph To See Previously Hidden Data)
We’ve all been subjected to the incessant “97% of scientists agree …global warming…blah blah” meme, which is nothing more than another statistical fabrication by John Cook and his collection of “anything for the cause” zealots. As has been previously pointed out on WUWT, when you look at the methodology used to reach that number, the veracity of the result falls apart, badly. You see, it turns out that Cook simply employed his band of “Skeptical Science” (SkS) eco-zealots to rate papers, rather than letting all authors of the papers rate their own work (Note: many authors weren’t even contacted and their papers wrongly rated, see here). The result was that the “97% consensus” was a survey of the SkS raters beliefs and interpretations, rather than a survey of the authors opinions of their own science abstracts. Essentially it was pal-review by an activist group with a strong bias towards a particular outcome as demonstrated by the name “the consensus project”.
[….]
Dr. Judith Curry writes:
Look at the views in column 1, then look at the % in the rightmost column: 52% state the the warming since 1850 is mostly anthropogenic. One common categorization would categorize the other 48% as ‘deniers’.
So, the inconvenient truth here is that about half of the world’s largest organization of meteorological and climate professionals don’t think humans are “mostly” the cause of Anthropogenic Global Warming the rest will probably get smeared as “deniers”
(Read More at WUWT)
[….]
I wish to note, that, the truth was not a 97% consensus, but that about half disagreed with man causing it. Which is about the same percentage Dr. Happer says on CNBC:
Warming has stopped longer than that! About 17-years. So, Sen. Inhofe asked the EPA for any stats to back up this claim… the predictable outcome is seen below, and shows how the reasoning displayed by politicians in this debate are circular
Not only is the consensus wrong, and even the EPA cannot answer simple questions to defend Obama’s statement that the earth has warmed at an alarming rate over the past decade when it has “stalled” or cooled over more than a decade. But below (linked in the cartoon) are peer reviewed counter claims or challenges to the consensus that the 97% claim ignored.
† The list has been cited by Scientists (1, 2) and Professors (3)
“Wow, the list is pretty impressive …It’s Oreskes done right.”
– Luboš Motl, Ph.D. Theoretical Physics
“I really appreciate your important effort in compiling the list.”
– Willie Soon, Ph.D. Astrophysicist and Geoscientist
“A tour de force list of scientific papers…”
– Robert M. Carter, Ph.D. Palaeontology
“…it’s a very useful resource. Thanks to the pop tech team.”
– Joanne Nova, Author of The Skeptics Handbook
“I do confess a degree of fascination with Poptech’s list…”
– John Cook, Skeptical Science
A BAD DREAM
WASHINGTON (WNB) – As radical Islamic forces continue to rapidly overtake Iraq, Secretary of State John Kerry gave an impassioned speech today about the dire threat facing the world.
“Our country and the world must take immediate and decisive action to safeguard the lives and welfare of literally millions of people,” said Kerry. “At the rate we’re going, climate change could conceivably raise the temperature of the oceans to a point where the additional sweat from overheating fish will make the oceans too salty to sustain life. We must act – now.”
Later, when asked about the situation in Iraq, Kerry replied, “We’re closely monitoring the effect on the climate and fish in the area.”