Underwhelming support for man made global warming

Greg pointed me to a response to an article that touted

Harvard professor weighs in on climategate

James McCarthy, a respected Harvard professor who was a former Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change lead author, sent a letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) today stressing that e-mails stolen from climate scientists do not undermine the evidenc for manmade global warming. McCarthy is board chair of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).

The letter reads "The scientific process depends on open access to methodology, data, and a rigorous peer-review process. The robust exchange of ideas in the peer-reviewed literature regarding climate science is evidence of the high degree of integrity in this process. The body of evidence that human activity is prominent agent in global warming is overwhelming. The content of these a few personal emails has no impact what-so-ever on our overall understanding that human activity is driving dangerous levels of global warming.”

Ooooh. There is a convincing argument:  "Because I say 'others say so.'" 

I have written several times over the past few years, that when the reality of what has been going on opens up, scientists will rise up to protect their own credibility where before they were afraid to lose their jobs. This just has to be. We need to look at data, not a UN/Barbara Boxer press release.

As a graduate student at Harvard, I was told that fields do not advance because people change their minds; rather, fields advance because people die.

Things are getting sticky for the left-control drones.  Their most recent tool, climate fear, as a way to control the world and divert billions to them, is unraveling. Hence, the above letter to Barbara Boxer, whom I am sure didn't ask for the letter to be sent, saying all is well the the emperor does really have new clothes, even if the tailor spilled the beans that he kills anyone who can't see the garb.

Below, is all you need to read on the increasingly silly, albeit dangerous, notion that man is changing the earth's temperature and killing the polar bears by increasing their population so they may run out of food, then invade Toronto looking to eat little foreign babies  (that is my guess as to the next moving argument. )

I have been publishing denier information for, what, over two years. People refused to admit the possibility that what I said was true.  They read a statistic or report, I think, and it does not register. It is like a hum in their heads.

They ask, "Were did I get that information" which exactly raises the theme of this blog.  Read the information yourself and go look it up, don't wait for a talking head who is invested in lies or works for the liars.  Don't forget, the talking head TV news readers are, in real life, dullards:

From a wiki regarding Peter Jennings: 

...He struggled academically, and Jennings later surmised that it was out of "pure boredom" that he failed 10th grade and dropped out. "I loved girls," he said. "I loved comic books. And for reasons I don't understand, I was pretty lazy."^[2] Jennings then briefly attended Carleton University, where he says he "lasted about 10 minutes" before dropping out.^[3] He also attended the University of Ottawa^[4].

Here is a response to the article above, from someone who didn't drop out of Harvard and who took the time to mention things like facts,  If course, this entry could be a big fraud, so one may want to look at he cited references, unlike those given by the UN.   Just stop saying, "Where did you read that?" 


That siad, you may find it interesting reading the original site, "The Green Blog," not a right wing site.  Click on the title.  Read the other responses. You don't find anyone supporting the fraudulent science.

I am a climate scientist, and it is clear that the evidence that "human activity is prominent [sic] agent in global warming" is NOT overwhelming. The repeated statement that it is does not make it so. Further, even if we accepted the hypothesis, cap-and-trade legislation does not do anything about it.

Here are the facts. We have known for years that the Mann hockey stick model was wrong, and we know why it was wrong (Mann used only selected data to normalize the principal component analysis, not all of it). He retracted the model. We have known for years that the Medieval Warm period occurred, where the temperatures were higher than they are now (Chaucer spoke of vineyards in northern England). Long before ClimateGate it was known that the IPCC people were trying to fudge the data to get rid of the MWP. And for good reason.

If the MWP is "allowed" to exist, this means that temperatures higher than today did not then create a "runaway greenhouse" in the Middle Ages with methane released from the Arctic tundra, ice cap albedo lost, sea levels rising to flood London, etc. etc.), and means that Jim Hansen's runaway greenhouse that posits only amplifying feedbacks (and no damping feedbacks) will not happen now. We now know that the models on which the IPCC alarms are based to not do clouds, they do not do the biosphere, they do not explain the Pliocene warming, and they have never predicted anything, ever, correctly.

As the believers know but, like religious faithful, every wrong prediction (IPCC underestimated some trends) is claimed to justify even greater alarm (not that the models are poor approximations for reality); the underpredictions (where are the storms? Why "hide the decline"?) are ignored or hidden. As for CO2, we have known for years that CO2 increases have never in the past 300,000 years caused temperature rise (CO2 rise trails temperature increase). IPCC scientists know this too (see their "Copenhagen Diagnosis"); we know that their mathematical fudges that dismiss the fact that CO2 has not been historically causative of temperature rise are incorrect as well.

We have also known for years that the alleged one degree temperature rise from 1880 vanishes if sites exposed to urban heat islands are not considered. We have long known that Jones's paper dismissing this explanation (Jones, et al. 1990. Assessment of urbanization effects in time series of surface air temperature over land, Nature 347 169- 172) is wrong and potentially fraudulent (see the same data used to confirm urban heat islands in Wang, W-C, Z. Zeng, T. R Karl, 1990. Urban Heat Islands in China. Geophys. Res. Lett. 17, 2377-2380).

Everyone except Briffa knows that the Briffa conclusions are wrong, and why they are wrong; groups in Finland, Canada (lots of places actually) show cooling by this proxy, not warming; the IPCC even printed the Finn's plot upside down to convert the fact (cooling) into the dogma (warming). 

Prof. McCarthy is, of course, part of the IPCC that has suppressed dissenting viewpoints based on solid climate science. His claim to support by "peer review" is nonsense; he has helped corrupt the peer review process. We now have documentary evidence that Jones, Mann, and the other IPCC scientists have been gaming peer review and blackballing opponents. On this point, the entire IPCC staff, including Prof. McCarthy, neither have nor deserve our trust.

We have tolerated years of the refusal of Mann and Jones to release data. Now, we learn that much of these data were discarded (one of about 4 data sets that exist), something that would in any other field of science lead to disbarment. We have been annoyed by Al Gore, who declared this science "settled", refused to debate, and demonized skeptics (this is anti-science: debate and skepticism are the core of real science, which is never settled). The very fact that Prof. McCarthy attempts to bluff Congress by asserting the existence of fictional "overwhelming evidence" continues this anti-science activity.

All of this was known before Climategate. What was not known until now was the extent to which Jones and Mann were simply deceiving themselves (which happens often in science) or fraudently attempting to deceive others. I am not willing to crucify Jones on the word "trick". Nor, for that matter, on the loss of primary data, keeping only "value added" data (which is hopelessly bad science, but still conceivably not fraud). 

But the computer code is transparently fraudulent. Here, one finds matrices that add unexplained numbers to recent temperatures and subtract them from older temperatures (these numbers are hard-programmed in), splining observational data to model data, and other smoking guns, all showing that they were doing what was necessary to get the answers that the IPCC wanted, not the answers that the data held. They knew what they were doing, and why they were doing it. If, as Prof. McCarthy insists, "peer review" was functioning, and the IPCC reports are rigorously peer reviewed, why was this not caught?

When placing it in context made it highly likely that this type of fraud was occurring?
The second question is: Will this revelation be enough to cause the "global warming believers" to abandon their crusade, and for people to return to sensible environmental science (water use, habitat destruction, land use, this kind of thing)? Perhaps it will.

Contrary to Prof. McCarthy's assertion, we have not lost just one research project amid dozens of others that survive. A huge set of primary data are apparently gone. Satellite data are scarcely 40 years old. Everything is interconnected, and anchored on these few studies. Even without the corruption of the peer review process, this is as big a change as quantum mechanics was in physics a century ago. 

But now we know that peer review was corrupted, and that no "consensus" exists. The "2500 scientists agree" number is fiction (God knows who they are counting, but to get to this number, they must be including referees, spouses, and pets). 

The best argument now for AGW is to argue that CO2 is, after all, a greenhouse gas, its concentration is, after all, increasing, and feedbacks that regulated climate for millions of years might (we can hypothesize) be overwhelmed by human CO2 emissions. It is a hypothesis worthy of investigation, but it has little evidentiary support. 

Thus, there is hope that Climategate will bring to an end the field of political climatology, and allow climatology to again become a science. That said, people intrinsically become committed to ideas. The Pope will not become a Protestant even if angel Gabriel taps him on the shoulder and asks him to. Likewise, Prof. McCarthy may claim until the day he retires that there remains "overwhelming support" for his position, even if every last piece of data supporting it is controverted.

As a graduate student at Harvard, I was told that fields do not advance because people change their minds; rather, fields advance because people die.

Posted by Sean December 2, 09 11:26 PM

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

"Math" Errors in Global "Science"

Some time ago, I reviewed how the "hockey stick" graph of Mr. Mann, which is the Rosetta Stone of Global Warming, had had been found wanting (a nice try, was how one put it).

Below, I have added part of a "Technology" web article (an MIT publication.) The MIT article concerns a "bombshell" and "incredible error" found by McIntyre and McKitrick. Mann's program would take random numbers having no trend and print out a hockey stick, supposedly

I was reminded of this older discussion, yes the errors have been known for years Mr. Gore, by the recent Ross McIntyre's blog recount of a NASA GISS' admission of of "mathematical error" regarding how temperatures have been misreported because of mathematical errors. Funny how errors always fall in the same direction. Also, the errors reporting bias toward warming seem to be computer errors, a scientist's equivalent of "the dog ate it."

As you may have read recently, since 1880, five of the ten warmest years in North America were in the 1920s and 1930s. The warmest recorded year was 1934.

Then, there is the IPCC warming bias errors
where the IPCC anonymous "scientists" forgot to use "real world" data:

The global average surface temperature trend in the 2007 SPM (see Figure SPM-3 top in HYPERLINK "http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf" the IPCC SPM) continues to show warming, but as has been summarized in

Pielke Sr., R.A., C. Davey, D. Niyogi, K. Hubbard, X. Lin, M. Cai, Y.-K. Lim, H. Li, J. Nielsen-Gammon, K. Gallo, R. Hale, R. Mahmood, S. Foster, J. Steinweg-Woods, R. Boyles, S. Fall, R.T. McNider, and P. Blanken, 2007: HYPERLINK "http://climatesci.colorado.edu/publications/R-321.pdf" Unresolved issues with the assessment of multi-decadal global land surface temperature trends. J. Geophys. Res. in press,
there is a significant warm bias in the construction of a global average surface temperature trend.

What these observations mean is that the statement in the IPCC SPM that there is a positive radiative forcing of 1.6 [0.6 to 2.4] Watts per meter squared in 2005 (when this was not true based on real data) is a particularly egregious error.

Rather than relying solely on model based estimates to calculate a global radiative forcing, the authors of the IPCC Report should have also used real world data for the assessment of the net radiative forcing.

A claim that a time period of several years is too short to assess the radiative heating is spurious as long as the sampling of the ocean heat content is sufficiently dense. As discussed in

Pielke Sr., R.A., 2003: HYPERLINK "http://blue.atmos.colostate.edu/publications/pdf/R-247.pdf" Heat storage within the Earth system. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 84, 331-335,

“A snapshot at any time documents the accumulated heat content and its change since the last assessment. Unlike temperature, at some specific level of the ocean, land, or the atmosphere, in which there is a time lag in its response to radiative forcing, there are no time lags associated with heat changes.”

The IPCC finding that the total 2005 net anthropogenic radiative forcing has a best estimate of +1.6 Watts per meter squared and that the total 2005 net radiative forcing has a best estimate of +1.72 Watts per meter squared is inconsistent with the observed changes in upper ocean heat content.

The omission of a discussion of the conflict between real world observations and the model estimates of radiative forcing is a serious error in the IPCC SPM.

GLOBAL WARMING BOMBSHELL

A prime piece of evidence linking human activity to climate change turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics.

By Richard Muller

Progress in science is sometimes made by great discoveries. But science also advances when we learn that something we believed to be true isnt. When solving a jigsaw puzzle, the solution can sometimes be stymied by the fact that a wrong piece has been wedged in a key place.

In the scientific and political debate over global warming, the latest wrong piece may be the hockey stick, the famous plot (shown below), published by University of Massachusetts geoscientist Michael Mann and colleagues. This plot purports to show that we are now experiencing the warmest climate in a millennium, and that the earth, after remaining cool for centuries during the medieval era, suddenly began to heat up about 100 years ago--just at the time that the burning of coal and oil led to an increase in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide.

I talked about this at length in my December 2003 column. Unfortunately, discussion of this plot has been so polluted by political and activist frenzy that it is hard to dig into it to reach the science. My earlier column was largely a plea to let science proceed unmolested. Unfortunately, the very importance of the issue has made careful science difficult to pursue.

But now a shock: Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick. In his original publications of the stick, Mann purported to use a standard method known as principal component analysis, or PCA, to find the dominant features in a set of more than 70 different climate records.

But it wasnt so. McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.

Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called Monte Carlo analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!

That discovery hit me like a bombshell, and I suspect it is having the same effect on many others. Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics. How could it happen? What is going on? Let me digress into a short technical discussion of how this incredible error took place....