Lies, damned lies, and statistics

Some light reading from icecap.us. On the right is the earth's temperature vis a vis CO2, as best it can be determined. Temperature is down as CO2 is up. As noted several times below, CO2 has been much higher in the past.

Watch as the noise becomes louder against "warming" until, suddenly, the topic changes. People will look at you like you are discussing mini dresses. No one is ever wrong, anymore. They just move on.

The investment banker, Al Gore, won't care. He's already set. I wish I didn't have a moral center.

First, I didn't think this had a name:

The Gore Effect (The phenomenon that leads to unseasonably cold temperatures, driving rain, hail, or snow whenever Al Gore visits an area to discuss global warming) remains in full effect. Planet Gore reader Rosa e-mails from Milan:

As you perhaps know, Mr Gore visited Italy last week, precisely Milan (Nothern Italy). He gave a speech on his usual theme: the globe is warming, there’s a lot of warning signs, we shouldn’t be so foolish to dismiss them, we must act now, etc. Outside the hall, it was snowing and snowing. Well, perhaps you think it’s usual in a northern Italian city to have three snow spells within two weeks. In fact, it’s quite rare....

Some articles, you can read full texts at the site.

Dec 19, 2008

Reply to RealClimate’s Attacks on the NIPCC Climate Report

By: Joseph L. Bast and James M. Taylor, Heartland Institiute

On November 28, the global warming alarmist Web site “RealClimate” posted a ridiculously lame attack by Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt against ”Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate,” the summary for policymakers of the 2008 report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).

The NIPCC report was written by S. Fred Singer, Ph.D. and an additional 23 contributors, including some of the most accomplished atmospheric scientists in the world. The paper references approximately 200 published papers and scientific reports in support of its conclusions. It provides strong evidence that human activity is not causing a global warming crisis.

Mann and Schmidt call the NIPCC report “dishonest” and “nonsense,” a document “served up” by “S. Fred Singer and his merry band of contrarian luminaries financed by the notorious ‘Heartland Institute’. But instead of critiquing the scientific arguments presented in the NIPCC report, Mann and Schmidt simply dismiss and belittle them and refer readers mostly to their own past blog comments. Time spent following those links reveals a hodgepodge of opinions and superficial comments, a boatload of rhetoric, and very little science--an entirely unsatisfactory way to support such serious charges.

In case your forgot, Mann is the guy whose hockey stick graph is the key to the recent outcry. As I mentioned, previously, it was wrong, but who cares about math when the future is at stake.

I think the next guy, Happer, is the former college teacher of Mr. Gore, who got a C+, but zeroed in on global warming as a good pennant. The words below echo what happened to the teacher, if it is not he. (Somewhere in the archives you can find who it was). As I reall, now, Mr. Gore went out of his way to discredit Happer and was rebuffed by the TV news folks. That late night guy with the funny hair. (Below is a redo of a prior set of information)

Dec 22, 2008

‘Prominent Scientist Fired By Gore Says Warming Alarm ‘Mistaken’

EPW Minority Blog

Joins Senate Report of More Than 650 Dissenting Scientists. Award winning Princeton University Physicist Dr. Will Happer, who was reportedly fired by former Vice President Al Gore in 1993 for failing to adhere to Gore's scientific views, has now declared man-made global warming fears “mistaken.”

“I am convinced that the current alarm over carbon dioxide is mistaken,” Happer, who has published over 200 scientific papers, told EPW on December 22, 2008...

...“I had the privilege of being fired by Al Gore, since I refused to go along with his alarmism. I did not need the job that badly,” Happer said this week. Happer is a Professor at the Department of Physics at Princeton University and former Director of Energy Research at the Department of Energy from 1990 to 1993, has published over 200 scientific papers, and is a fellow of the American Physical Society, The American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Academy of Sciences....

...“I was told that science was not going to intrude on policy,” Happer explained in 1993.

“I have spent a long research career studying physics that is closely related to the greenhouse effect, for example, absorption and emission of visible and infrared radiation, and fluid flow,” Happer said this week. “Fears about man-made global warming are unwarranted and are not based on good science. The earth’s climate is changing now, as it always has. There is no evidence that the changes differ in any qualitative way from those of the past,” he added.

“Over the past 500 million years since the Cambrian, when fossils of multicellular life first became abundant, the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have been much higher than current levels, about 3 times higher on average. Life on earth flourished with these higher levels of carbon dioxide,” he explained. “Computer models used to generate frightening scenarios from increasing levels of carbon dioxide have scant credibility,” Happer added.

More below with a look at the Heartland Institute, thus, apparently filled with lies, which did not fund the report as was the sweeping defense. Shooting the messenger is a flag of weakness.

Dec 21, 2008

Global Cooling Brings Early White Christmas

By Deroy Murdock

Winter officially arrives with Sunday’s solstice. But for many Americans, autumn 2008’s final days already feel like deepest, coldest January. New Englanders still lack electricity after a Dec. 11 ice storm snapped power lines. Up to 8 inches of snow struck New Orleans and southern Louisiana that day and didn’t melt for 48 hours in some neighborhoods.

In Southern California this week, a half-inch of snow brightened Malibu’s hills while a half-foot barricaded highways and marooned commuters in desert towns east of Los Angeles. Three inches of the white stuff shuttered Las Vegas’ McCarren Airport that day and dusted the Strip’s hotels and casinos.
What are the odds of that? Actually, the odds are rising that snow, ice and cold will grow increasingly common. As serious scientists repeatedly explain, global cooling is here. It is chilling temperatures and so-called “global-warming.”

According to the National Climatic Data Center, 2008 will be America’s coldest year since 1997, thanks to La Nina and precipitation in the central and eastern states. Solar quietude also may underlie global cooling. [I told you so] This year’s sunspots and solar radiation approach the minimum in the sun’s cycle, corresponding with lower Earth temperatures. This echoes Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Dr. Sallie Baliunas’ belief that solar variability, much more than CO2, sways global temperatures.

Meanwhile, the National Weather Service reports that last summer was Anchorage’s third-coldest on record. “Not since 1980 has there been a summer less reflective of global warming,” Craig Medred wrote in the Anchorage Daily News. Consequently, Alaska’s glaciers are thickening in the middle. “It’s been a long time on most glaciers where they’ve actually had positive mass balance,” U.S. Geological Survey glaciologist Bruce Molnia told Medred October 13.

The reference to financing seems intended to imply that the authors of the NIPCC report were paid by The Heartland Institute, which is not true. RealClimate has been informed of this, but hasn’t corrected its false claim. To go on implying it anyway tells you all you need to know about the integrity of the RealClimate authors.

And what about “the notorious ‘Heartland Institute’”? It's a 24-year-old national nonprofit organization that gets 95 percent of its funding from non-energy-related donors and 84 percent of its funding from non-corporate sources (in 2007). It has a long history of publishing reliable scientific and economic analysis of global warming. Heartland’s credibility is certainly less questionable than that of RealClimate, a front group created specifically to attack global warming skeptics by Fenton Communications, a truly “notorious” PR agency.

Mann and Schmidt’s assault on Fred Singer reminds us of Canadian environmentalist Lawrence Solomon’s observation, in his book The Deniers, that the qualifications of most alarmists in the global warming debate fall short of those of the skeptics. Now consider Mann’s and Schmidt’s qualifications. Mann is the author of the “hockey stick” temperature graph that did so much to fuel global warming hysteria when it was featured in an IPCC report, but which a Congressionally appointed panel of experts found was not supported by scientific data. Gavin Schmidt is a climate modeler at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and in recent weeks has been

frantically trying to explain why his organization falsely reported that October 2008 was the warmest October in recorded history. Many climate researchers believe Mann and Schmidt are deliberately falsifying temperature data to keep their global warming scare going a few more years.

With no apparent sense of irony or shame, these two discredited authors call one of the world’s leading scientists “dishonest.”

Mann and Schmidt pretend to be engaged in a scientific debate over global warming, but they are not. They have banned global warming “skeptics” from posting on their blog, resort to ad hominem attacks against anyone who dissents, and have repeatedly declined invitations to appear in public forums to debate their critics. They are what the history of their organization says they are: A PR shop for discredited global warming alarmism.

Dec 23, 2008

Minus 60 (deg C)

By Steve McIntyre, Climate Audit

Climate Audit, December 18, 2008

One of the interesting by-products of the GISS screw-up in October was that we learned the names and locations of quite a few Siberian weather stations - that are glaring “hot spots” on temperature anomaly maps. However, most of these places are among the coldest places on earth.

One of them was Verhojansk, about which Anthony Watts had an interesting post last week; it was one of the screwed up NOAA-Hansen sites. It vies for the title of coldest place (in the Northern Hemisphere) with nearby Ojmjakon. (the place where the lowest-ever temperature in the Northern hemisphere was recorded - Verkhoyansk with a record of minus 67.8 degrees Celsius (minus 90 degrees Fahrenheit) and Oymyakon with a minimum of minus 67.7 degrees Celsius (minus 89.9 degrees Fahrenheit).

Dec 22, 2008

Scientist Adjusts Data—Presto, Antarctic Cooling Disappears

Posted by JBlethen, Heliogenic Climate Change

"New research presented at the AGU today suggests that the entire Antarctic continent may have warmed significantly over the past 50 years. The study calls into question existing lines of evidence that show the region has mostly cooled over the past half-century.

Using an iterative process to analyse the data, they found warming over the entire Antarctic continent for the period 1957-2006. Restricting their analysis to 1969 to 2000, a period for which other studies have found a net cooling trend, Steig's study found slight cooling in east Antarctica, but net warming over west Antarctica.” “Evidence that Antarctica has warmed significantly over past 50 years”

Abstract excerpt: “We use statistical climate field reconstruction techniques to determine monthly temperature anomalies for the near-surface of the Antarctic ice sheet since 1957. Two independent data sets are used to provide estimates of the spatial covariance patterns of temperature: automatic weather stations and thermal infrared satellite observations. Quality-controlled data from occupied instrumental weather stations are used to determine the amplitude of changes in those covariance patterns through time. We use a modified principal component analysis technique (Steig et al., in review, Nature) to optimize the combination of spatial and temporal information. Verification statistics obtained from subsets of the data demonstrate the resulting reconstructions represent improvements relative to climatological mean values.”

Mann’s not the only one inventing his own “modified” PCA. Looks like Steig “got rid of” antarctic cooling the same way Mann got rid of medieval warming. Why not just look at the station data instead of “adjusting” it (graph above and linked here)? It shows a 50-year cooling trend. Read post here.

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”—Disraeli