Critics and Sceptics

Freedom is the freedom to say two plus two equal four. If that is given, all else follows" - George Orwell, 1984

This page is about scientists who have been critical of climate alarmism or the political manipulation of the IPCC process. There is no suggestion that agw is not happening, merely that contrary to the IPCC and the corporate media, there is a great deal of informed and intelligent scepticism. The issues are :-

1) Scepticism about the usefulness of computer models amongst scientists like Freeman Dyson (recognised as one of the greatest science minds of the age) and many others, including two nobel prize winning physicists.

2). Scepticism about the temperature record itself. Exposed by Steve McIntyre, Andrew Montford and the USA's top statistician Edward Wegeman. Particularly in relation to the so called hockey stick by Michael Mann and his team, along with Real Climate connected scientists which sought to hide the fact that it was warmer in medieval times than it is now. The Real Climate website was set up to defend the hockey stick, a direct attack on the principles of scientific objectivity. Gavin Schmidt, the creator is an employee of NASA GISS, in the same department as James Hansen is head.

3) Professor Phil Jones of UEA wrote that the rate of warming in the late twentieth century is the same as it was in the late ninteenth century. Between that and the medieval warm period, the picture that emerges is that current temperatures are not exceptional..

4) The climategate emails clearly revealed the major players in the climate science community to be involved in a Richard Nixon style campaign of dirty tricks against what they regarded as their opponents. That is not science, that is tribal warfare and corrupt practice.

5) The manipulative nature of the IPCC process itself and its reliance on information from environmental pressure groups like WWF and Greenpeace.

6) The total support of a corporate media propaganda campaign funded by advertising from beneficiaries of climate policy. Namely the carbon trading industry, a multi trillion dollar financial scam invented by Enron and supported by BP, Conoco Philips, Shell, E.ON, EDF, Gazprom, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley. See the finance page.

AGW Sceptics

Freeman Dyson, Ivar Giaever (Nobel Prize), Robert Laughlin (Nobel Prize), Edward Teller, Hal Lewis, James Lovelock, Robert Jastrow and William Nierenberg..

http://www.populartechnology.net/2010/07/eminent-physicists-skeptical-of-agw.html

Freeman Dyson (reputed to be the greatest scientist not to win a Nobel Prize)

“My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.” –

http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge219.html#dysonf

Freeman Dyson - Independent nespaper interview

First, the computer models are very good at solving the equations of fluid dynamics but very bad at describing the real world. The real world is full of things like clouds and vegetation and soil and dust which the models describe very poorly. Second, we do not know whether the recent changes in climate are on balance doing more harm than good. The strongest warming is in cold places like Greenland. More people die from cold in winter than die from heat in summer. Third, there are many other causes of climate change besides human activities, as we know from studying the past. Fourth, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is strongly coupled with other carbon reservoirs in the biosphere, vegetation and top-soil, which are as large or larger. It is misleading to consider only the atmosphere and ocean, as the climate models do, and ignore the other reservoirs. Fifth, the biological effects of CO2 in the atmosphere are beneficial, both to food crops and to natural vegetation. The biological effects are better known and probably more important than the climatic effects. Sixth, summing up the other five reasons, the climate of the earth is an immensely complicated system and nobody is close to understanding it.

I am saying that all predictions concerning climate are highly uncertain. On the other hand, the remedies proposed by the experts are enormously costly and damaging, especially to China and other developing countries. On a smaller scale, we have seen great harm done to poor people around the world by the conversion of maize from a food crop to an energy crop. This harm resulted directly from the political alliance between American farmers and global-warming politicians. Unfortunately the global warming hysteria, as I see it, is driven by politics more than by science. If it happens that I am wrong and the climate experts are right, it is still true that the remedies are far worse than the disease that they claim to cure.

On the intolerance of Warmists:

You complain that people who are sceptical about the party line do not agree about other things. Why should we agree? The whole point of science is to encourage disagreement and keep an open mind. That is why I blame The Independent for seriously misleading your readers. You give them the party line and discourage them from disagreeing.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/letters-to-a-heretic-an-email-conversation-with-climate-change-sceptic-professor-freeman-dyson-2224912.html

Professor Jonathon Jones (Physics – Oxford University)

People have asked why mainstream scientists are keeping silent on these issues. As a scientist who has largely kept silent, at least in public, I have more sympathy for silence than most people here. It’s not for the obvious reason, that speaking out leads to immediate attacks, not just from Gavin and friends, but also from some of the more excitable commentators here.

Far more importantly most scientists are reluctant to speak out on topics which are not their field. We tend to trust our colleagues, perhaps unreasonably so, and are also well aware that most scientific questions are considerably more complex than outsiders think, and that it is entirely possible that we have missed some subtle but critical point.

However, “hide the decline” is an entirely different matter. This is not a complicated technical matter on which reasonable people can disagree: it is a straightforward and blatant breach of the fundamental principles of honesty and self-criticism that lie at the heart of all true science. The significance of the divergence problem is immediately obvious, and seeking to hide it is quite simply wrong. The recent public statements by supposed leaders of UK science, declaring that hiding the decline is standard scientific practice are on a par with declarations that black is white and up is down. I don’t know who they think they are speaking for, but they certainly aren’t speaking for me.

I have watched Judy Curry with considerable interest since she first went public on her doubts about some aspects of climate science, an area where she is far more qualified than I am to have an opinion. Her latest post has clearly kicked up a remarkable furore, but she was right to make it.

The decision to hide the decline, and the dogged refusal to admit that this was an error, has endangered the credibility of the whole of climate science. If the rot is not stopped then the credibility of the whole of science will eventually come into question.

Judy’s decision to try to call a halt to this mess before it’s too late is brave and good. So please cut her some slack; she has more than enough problems to deal with at the moment.

If you’re wondering who I am, then you can find me at the Physics Department at Oxford University. Feb 23, 2011 at 10:29 PM | Jonathan Jones

http://www.realclimategate.org/2011/02/hide-the-decline-2-pictures-for-2000-comments/

Petr Chylek

To blame the current warming on humans, there was a perceived need to “prove” that the current global average temperature is higher than it was at any other time in recent history (the last few thousand years). This task is one of the main topics of the released CRU emails.

Some people were soeager to prove this point that it became more important than scientific integrity.The next step was to show that this “unprecedented high current temperature” has to be a result of the increasing atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.

The fact that the Atmosphere Ocean General Circulation Models are not able to explain the post-1970 temperature increase by natural forcing was interpreted as proof that it was caused by humans. It is more logical to admit that the models are not yet good enough to capture natural climate variability (how much or how little do we understand aerosol and clouds,and ocean circulation?), even though we can all agree that part of theobserved post-1970 warming is due to the increase of atmospheric CO2 concentration.

Thus, two of the three pillars of the global warming and carbon dioxide paradigm are open to reinvestigation.The damage has been done. The public trust in climate science has been eroded. At least a part of the IPCC 2007 report has been put in question. We cannot blame it on a few irresponsible individuals. The entire esteemed climate research community has to take responsibility.

Laboratory Fellow, Remote Sensing Team Leader, ISR-2 MS-B244

Los Alamos National Laboratory

http://www.thegwpf.org/opinion-pros-a-cons/218-petr-chylek-open-letter-to-the-climate-research-community.html

also

http://www.agu.org/cgi-bin/SFgate/SFgate?&listenv=table&multiple=1&range=1&directget=1&application=fm07&database=%2Fdata%2Fepubs%2Fwais%2Findexes%2Ffm07%2Ffm07&maxhits=200&=%22A21H-04%22

Chylek has published over 100 scientific papers in remote sensing, atmospheric radiation, climate change, cloud and aerosol physics, applied laser physics and ice core analysis. His work has been cited more than 3000 times. Chylek is best known for his work in remote sensing, water vapor, aerosols and their relation to climate change.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petr_Chylek

Jeffrey Marque, editor of Physics & Society, published by the American Physical Society wrote

There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO₂ emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution

http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/200807/editor.cfm

Hal Lewis

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d'être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford's book organizes the facts very well.) I don't believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

http://thegwpf.org/ipcc-news/1670-hal-lewis-my-resignation-from-the-american-physical-society.html

Judith Curry

Nevertheless, the policy cart was put before the scientific horse, justified by the precautionary principle. Once the UNFCCC treaty was a done deal, the IPCC and its scientific conclusions were set on a track to become a self fulfilling prophecy. The entire framing of the IPCC was designed around identifying sufficient evidence so that the human-induced greenhouse warming could be declared unequivocal, and so providing the rationale for developing the political will to implement and enforce carbon stabilization targets. National and international science programs were funded to support the IPCC objectives. What should have been a political debate about energy policy, environmental quality, and reducing vulnerability to weather and climate disasters, became a debate about the nuances of climate science, with climate scientists as the pawns and whipping boys.

So were the scientists innocent victims and pawns in all this? Were they just hardworking scientists doing their best to address the impossible expectations of the policy makers? Well, many of them were. However, at the heart of the IPCC is a cadre of scientists whose careers have been made by the IPCC. These scientists have used the IPCC to jump the normal meritocracy process by which scientists achieve influence over the politics of science and policy. Not only has this brought some relatively unknown, inexperienced and possibly dubious people into positions of influence, but these people become vested in protecting the IPCC, which has become central to their own career and legitimizes playing power politics with their expertise.

http://judithcurry.com/2010/11/03/reversing-the-direction-of-the-positive-feedback-loop/

James Lovelock in the Guardian

on CRU scientists

I was utterly disgusted. My second thought was that it was inevitable. It was bound to happen. Science, not so very long ago, pre-1960s, was largely vocational. Back when I was young, I didn't want to do anything else other than be a scientist. They're not like that nowadays. They don't give a damn. They go to these massive, mass-produced universities and churn them out. They say: "Science is a good career. You can get a job for life doing government work." That's no way to do science.

I have seen this happen before, of course. We should have been warned by the CFC/ozone affair because the corruption of science in that was so bad that something like 80% of the measurements being made during that time were either faked, or incompetently done

on computer models
I remember when the Americans sent up a satellite to measure ozone and it started saying that a hole was developing over the South Pole. But the damn fool scientists were so mad on the models that they said the satellite must have a fault. We tend to now get carried away by our giant computer models. But they're not complete models. They're based more or less entirely on geophysics. They don't take into account the climate of the oceans to any great extent, or the responses of the living stuff on the planet. So I don't see how they can accurately predict the climate.

on sceptics

there are some sceptics that I fully respect. Nigel Lawson is one. He writes sensibly and well.

on predicting temperatures

If you look back on climate history it sometimes took anything up to 1,000 years before a change in one of the variables kicked in and had an effect. And during those 1,000 years the temperature could have gone in the other direction to what you thought it should have done. What right have the scientists with their models to say that in 2100 the temperature will have risen by 5C?

The great climate science centres around the world are more than well aware how weak their science is. If you talk to them privately they're scared stiff of the fact that they don't really know what the clouds and the aerosols are doing. They could be absolutely running the show. We haven't got the physics worked out yet. One of the chiefs once said to me that he agreed that they should include the biology in their models, but he said they hadn't got the physics right yet and it would be five years before they do. So why on earth are the politicians spending a fortune of our money when we can least afford it on doing things to prevent events 50 years from now? They've employed scientists to tell them what they want to hear.

on scientists

Sometimes their view might be quite right, but it might also be pure propaganda. This is wrong. They should ask the scientists, but the problem is scientists won't speak. If we had some really good scientists it wouldn't be a problem, but we've got so many dumbos who just can't say anything, or who are afraid to say anything. They're not free agents.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/mar/29/james-lovelock

I do not agree with everything Roger Pielke, Jr. writes or does, but there is no doubt that he has contributed far more to climate science than hundreds of "me too" climatologists who took the easy path to grant funds, tenure and short-term successful careers in climatology.

- Oliver K. Manuel
PhD Nuclear Chemistry
Postdoc Space Physics
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo

http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/interesting-timing-to-be-removed-from.html

THE UN's climate change chief, Rajendra Pachauri, has acknowledged a 17-year pause in global temperature rises, confirmed recently by Britain's Met Office, but said it would need to last "30 to 40 years at least" to break the long-term global warming trend.

Dr Pachauri, the chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that open discussion about controversial science and politically incorrect views was an essential part of tackling climate change.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nothing-off-limits-in-climate-debate/story-e6frg6n6-1226583112134

Jan. 8, 2013: In the galactic scheme of things, the Sun is a remarkably constant star. While some stars exhibit dramatic pulsations, wildly yo-yoing in size and brightness, and sometimes even exploding, the luminosity of our own sun varies a measly 0.1% over the course of the 11-year solar cycle.

There is, however, a dawning realization among researchers that even these apparently tiny variations can have a significant effect on terrestrial climate. A new report issued by the National Research Council (NRC), "The Effects of Solar Variability on Earth's Climate," lays out some of the surprisingly complex ways that solar activity can make itself felt on our planet.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/08jan_sunclimate/

Jenny Murray asked Christine Rice about her early career as a scientist researching “global warming.”

Rice replied:

I was amazed really by the inadequacy of what we had, because we’re talking about climate change which is over tens of thousands of years as opposed to the twenty years of data that we had. So in a way we were putting out a lot of ideas and not really having concrete scientific research to support it, and I suppose at that point I did lose a little bit of my spark, thinking well I could propose an idea and I could probably draft a thesis that would support it and yet I wouldn’t really convince myself necessarily.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100097342/christine-rice-your-new-favourite-mezzo-soprano/

What did you do after graduating?

I started a DPhil in the atmospheric physics department at Oxford because I had some idealistic notion of contributing to the world’s knowledge of global warming and its potential dangers. I was rather dismayed to discover how fervently scientists on both sides of the climate-change argument could argue their particular thesis and manipulate the data to prove their conclusions. It seemed a little like religious faith — if you believed a thing to be true, then it could be — and I got the distinct impression that I was about to embark on the same process. Once I got stuck into being at the computer every day, I knew this was not the right place for me.

http://www.iop.org/careers/workinglife/profiles/page_37727.html

CERN 'gags' physicists in cosmic ray climate experiment

The chief of the world's leading physics lab at CERN in Geneva has prohibited scientists from drawing conclusions from a major experiment. The CLOUD ("Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets") experiment examines the role that energetic particles from deep space play in cloud formation. CLOUD uses CERN's proton synchrotron to examine nucleation.

CERN Director General Rolf-Dieter Heuer told Welt Online that the scientists should refrain from drawing conclusions from the latest experiment.

"I have asked the colleagues to present the results clearly, but not to interpret them," reports veteran science editor Nigel Calder on his blog. Why?

Because, Heuer says, "That would go immediately into the highly political arena of the climate change debate. One has to make clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/18/cern_cosmic_ray_gag/

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Climategate 'hide the decline' explained by Berkeley professor Richard A. Muller

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BQpciw8suk&feature=player_embedded#at=26

Yamal and Hide-the-Decline

The effect of using “all the data to hand” is potentially quite dramatic. The graphic below compares the Briffa 2009 chronology (red) to the average of site RCS chronologies for the 20 Vaganov sites in the 10-degree box. As you can see, there is considerable correlation between the two chronologies, though the Briffa version is spikier than the much larger Vaganov network. The discrepancy becomes very pronounced from the 1970s on – the Vagnov network shows the characteristic “decline” in the late 20th century that also characterized the large Schweingruber network, while the Briffa Limited Hangout network surges to new records.

Figure 4. Comparison of Briffa 2009 chronology and regional chronology from Vaganov data.

http://climateaudit.org/2011/04/09/yamal-and-hide-the-decline/

Hal Lewis: My Resignation From The American Physical Society

Friday, 08 October 2010 17:19 Hal Lewis .From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara

To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society

6 October 2010

Dear Curt:

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence---it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d'être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford's book organizes the facts very well.) I don't believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:

1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate

2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer "explanatory" screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.

3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.

4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind---simply to bring the subject into the open.

5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members' interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.

6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.

APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people's motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don't think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don't have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I'm not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.

I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.

Hal

Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, former Chairman; Former member Defense Science Board, chmn of Technology panel; Chairman DSB study on Nuclear Winter; Former member Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; Former member, President's Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman APS study on Nuclear Reactor Safety Chairman Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; Former member USAF Scientific Advisory Board; Served in US Navy in WW II; books: Technological Risk (about, surprise, technological risk) and Why Flip a Coin (about decision making)

http://thegwpf.org/ipcc-news/1670-hal-lewis-my-resignation-from-the-american-physical-society.html

IPCC manipulation

UN climate change panel to be warned over reports

A review of the practices of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been conducted in response to intense criticism of the body, whose reports are used by governments to inform policy decisions on global warming.

The findings of the review are due to be handed to the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon tomorrow.

Conducted by a committee of representatives from the world's leading scientific bodies, the analysis is expected to recommend a number of changes to the way the IPCC compiles and checks its extensive 1,000 page reports.

The committee, which is made up of scientific organisations that form the InterAcademy Council, is also expected to recommend changes to help the IPCC keep its reports, which take around six years to complete, more up to date with current science.

Evidence given to the committee has also called for a tightening of the way facts and references are checked before the reports are published.

The IPCC has been under scrutiny after it admitted making an error in its 2007 report, that stated Himalayan glaciers could melt to a fifth of current levels by 2035 – a statement that was wrong by over 300 years.

The panel has also been criticised over the sources of information it used to compile the report after a number of statements were found to be based on information taken from reports by environmental lobby groups, magazine articles and student dissertations.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7969460/UN-climate-change-panel-to-be-warned-over-reports.html

Manufactured 'Science': Another IPCC Scientist Reveals How UN Scientists talked about 'trying to make IPCC report so dramatic that US would just have to sign Kyoto Protocol'

Alabama State Climatologist Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, served as a UN IPCC lead author in 2001 for the 3rd assessment report and detailed how he personally witnessed UN scientists attempting to distort the science for political purposes.

"I was at the table with three Europeans, and we were having lunch. And they were talking about their role as lead authors. And they were talking about how they were trying to make the report so dramatic that the United States would just have to sign that Kyoto Protocol," Christy told CNN on May 2, 2007. - (For more on UN scientists turning on the UN years ago, see Climate Depot's full report here . )

Christy has since proposed major reforms and changes to the way the UN IPCC report is produced. Christy has rejected the UN approach that produces "a document designed for uniformity and consensus." Christy presented his views at a UN meeting in 2009. The IPCC needs "an alternative view section written by well-credentialed climate scientists is needed," Christy said. "If not, why not? What is there to fear? In a scientific area as uncertain as climate, the opinions of all are required," he added.

Thirdly, confidence that the climate system is highly sensitive to greenhouse gases can been shown to be overstated due to assumptions about how the sensitivity is calculated. Latest measurements clearly suggest a strong negative feedback in the short wave – in other words, in warming episodes, clouds respond to cool the climate. Another problem with popular sensitivity estimates is the dependence on essentially one century of an oblique greenhouse-proxy (mean surface temperature) combined with the notion that all of the natural, multi-decadal variability can be defined so accurately that the left-over warming is assumed to be human-induced. The investigation rather should examine all levels of natural variability that have been observed and seek to defensibly eliminate those as possible causes.

An alternative view is necessary, one that is not censured for the so-called purpose of consensus. This will present to our policymakers an honest picture of scientific discourse and process. I submit this proposal because our level of ignorance of the climate system is still enormous and our policymakers need to know that. We have much work to do.

http://climatedepot.com/a/5064/Manufactured-Science-Another-IPCC-Scientist-Reveals-How-UN-Scientists-talked-about-trying-to-make-IPCC-report-so-dramatic-that-US-would-just-have-to-sign-Kyoto-Protocol

IPCC Third Assessment Report - Climate Change 2001

In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. The most we can expect to achieve is the prediction of the probability distribution of the system's future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions. This reduces climate change to the discernment of significant differences in the statistics of such ensembles. The generation of such model ensembles will require the dedication of greatly increased computer resources and the application of new methods of model diagnosis. Addressing adequately the statistical nature of climate is computationally intensive, but such statistical information is essential.

http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/505.htm

Africagate: top British scientist says UN panel is losing credibility

The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. The claim has been quoted in speeches by Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, and by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general.

This weekend Professor Chris Field, the new lead author of the IPCC’s climate impacts team, told The Sunday Times that he could find nothing in the report to support the claim

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7017907.ece

Memorandum by Professor Paul Reiter, Institut Pasteur; Paris

20. The issue of consensus is key to understanding the limitations of IPCC pronouncements. Consensus is the stuff of politics, not of science. Science proceeds by observation, hypothesis and experiment. Professional scientists rarely draw firm conclusions from a single article, but consider its contribution in the context of other publications and their own experience, knowledge, and speculations. The complexity of this process, and the uncertainties involved, are a major obstacle to meaningful understanding of scientific issues by non-scientists.

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200506/ldselect/ldeconaf/12/12we21.htm

House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs

THE IPCC AND TECHNICAL INFORMATION

Memorandum by Professor Paul Reiter, Institut Pasteur; Paris

14. The amateurish text of the chapter reflected the limited knowledge of the 22 authors. Much of the emphasis was on "changes in geographic range (latitude and altitude) and incidence (intensity and seasonality) of many vector-borne diseases" as "predicted" by computer models. Extensive coverage was given to these models, although they were all based on a highly simplistic model originally developed as an aid to malaria control campaigns. The authors acknowledged that the models did not take into account "the influence of local demographic, socioeconomic, and technical circumstances".

15. Glaring indicators of the ignorance of the authors included the statement that "although anopheline mosquito species that transmit malaria do not usually survive where the mean winter temperature drops below 16-18ºC, some higher latitude species are able to hibernate in sheltered sites". In truth, many tropical species must survive in temperature below this limit, and many temperate species can survive temperatures of -25ºC, even in "relatively exposed" places.

16. The authors also claimed that climate change was already causing malaria to move to higher altitudes (eg in Rwanda). They quoted information published by non-specialists that had been roundly denounced in the scientific literature

19. These confident pronouncements, untrammelled by details of the complexity of the subject and the limitations of these models, were widely quoted as "the consensus of 1,500 of the world's top scientists" (occasionally the number quoted was 2,500). This clearly did not apply to the chapter on human health, yet at the time, eight out of nine major web sites that I checked placed these diseases at the top of the list of adverse impacts of climate change, quoting the IPCC.

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200506/ldselect/ldeconaf/12/12we21.htm

Chris Landsea (Resignation Letter of Chris Landsea from IPCC)

Dear colleagues,

After some prolonged deliberation, I have decided to withdraw from participating in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). I am withdrawing because I have come to view the part of the IPCC to which my expertise is relevant as having become politicized. In addition, when I have raised my concerns to the IPCC leadership, their response was simply to dismiss my concerns.

http://www.climatechangefacts.info/ClimateChangeDocuments/LandseaResignationLetterFromIPCC.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Landsea

In fact, a prominent UN scientist questioned the reliability of such climate models. In a recent candid statement, IPCC scientist Dr. Jim Renwick—a lead author of the IPCC 4th Assessment Report—publicly admitted that the computer models that predict a coming catastrophe may not be so reliable after all. Renwick stated, "Half of the variability in the climate system is not predictable, so we don't expect to do terrifically well."

Let me repeat: a UN scientist admitted, "Half of the variability in the climate system is not predictable."

A leading scientific skeptic, meteorologist Dr. Hendrik Tennekes, a scientific pioneer in the development of numerical weather prediction and former director of research at The Netherlands' Royal National Meteorological Institute, recently took the critique of climate computer models one step further. Tennekes said in February 2007, "I am of the opinion that most scientists engaged in the design, development, and tuning of climate models are in fact software engineers. They are unlicensed, hence unqualified to sell their products to society."

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressRoom.Facts&ContentRecord_id=E1BEFFF7-802A-23AD-4794-179EB41CF348

Dr Renwick now tells us get it right only half the time. Worse, he
tells us they are unable to predict weather beyond a week or two, yet in
conjunction with the IPCC they presume to tell us what to expect over the
next few decades.

http://nzclimatescience.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=23&Itemid=32

Where does the IPCC terminology "Very highly confident" come from?

In the SPM, they issue pronouncements with probabilities and degrees of confidence expressed as "likely", "very likely" and "virtually certain". In a footnote, they relate these adjectives to confidence levels of 67%, 90% and 99%, which is detailed in the UncertaintyGuidanceNote.pdf IPCC policy for team members document.

Where does this terminology come from?
In statistics, similar terminology is used but with different meanings to make claims of statistically "significant" (95%), "highly significant" (99%), and "very highly significant" (99.9%).

Many of us were confused by the similar - but not the same - terminology used in the SPM and posted questions at RealClimate asking for an explanation of what the SPM terminology meant since the meaning is not provided by the IPCC documents. No answer was provided by RealClimate.

Where does this terminology come from and what does it mean?
Per a footnote in the SPM, as well as this paper by Dr. Steven Schneider, Professor of Biology at Stanford University, most of these estimates came from subjective "expert judgment". Dr. Schneider's paper appears to have been written for the IPCC and used as the basis of the terminology used by the IPCC. While some estimates may be data-derived, the SPM does not say which are based on data and which are based on subjective analysis. (Read Dr. Schneider's paper for yourself to understand the recommended best practices.)

To learn more about the consensus process, expert judgment, the use of the Delphi method, the use of qualitative and quantitative analysis, read on.

The Delphi Method
Based on IPCC documents and the "consensus" terminology, this comes from use of the Delphi Method, developed by the RAND Corporation for the U.S. Department of Defense, about half a century ago to make predictions about the future or other events for which there is insufficient data to make a statistical forecast.

In the Delphi Method, a moderator or facilitator exchanges questions anonymously amongst the participants (in this context, typically a panel of "experts"), summarizes the answers, and sends the summary back to the participants. The process repeats as participants may change their perspectives on each iteration, perhaps because they learned something from the other responses. Over time, the method may lead to the anonymous members of the group finding "consensus" on some questions while not achieving consensus on other topics. The facilitator makes a judgment as to when the review process should be halted as no further progress is being made.

http://hamradio-online.com/commonsense/2007/10/where-does-ipcc-terminology-very-highly.html

Dennis Bray on global warming science politics

1. To begin, Koba’s reign of tyranny, was a reign that was indulged by Western intellectuals.

Climate change, particularly its remediation, is a point of contention. It is, however, indulged by Western intellectuals as if there only facts and no assumptions . (See statement by professional/scientific organization)

2. The Cheka - The Extraordinary Commission - (a soviet state security organization) operated by instilling fear in people. People needed to know they were never safe for the Cheka to operate successfully.

The IPCC and Co. tend to let people know they are never safe and people need to be kept this way if the IPCC and Co is to maintain its existence. (Although recently, the IPCC has been accused of understating the potential dangers of global warming and the public are beginning to have their doubts.)

3. Stalin, history books will tell us, waged war on the truth. Torture and fear were used to force people to collude in a fiction.

Well, we don’t have torture yet, but we do have some healthy doses of fear instilled in the public, (although, it is beginning to subside, at least according to recent polls). The extent of the fear even gave rise to new forms of therapy for those individual no longer able to deal with the daily bombardment of environmental threat (at least in the USA). And, according to the fall out of climategate there is definitely an attempt to wage war on the truth.

4. Bendy, the poet, was evicted from the Writer’s Union for writing a satirical opera (Bogatyrs).

While no one, to my knowledge, has been evicted from any scientific institute yet (for being a skeptic) they have certainly been penalized in pal review system.

5. Stalin was noted as saying ‘There is a man, there is a problem. No man, no problem.’

Much to do with global warming often comes back to issues of over population and the evils of humanity.

6. Tsipko, a noted Russian philosopher characterized the Bolsheviks as having a desire to astonish the world.

Some of the alleged global warming impacts certainly seem astonishing.

7. In December 1930 Stalin told the Institute of Red Professors ‘We have to turn upside down and turn over the whole pile of shit that has accumulated in questions of philosophy and natural science.’ According to Volkogonov, ‘... philosophy dried up ...’ and ...‘ no one had the courage to write anything more on the subject.’

See Climategate

8. Kolakowski: ‘Half starved people, lacking the bare necessities of life, attended meetings at which they repeated the government’s lies about how well off they were, and in a bizarre way they half believed what they were saying ... Truth, they knew, was a Party matter, and therefore lies became true even if they contradicted the plain facts of the experience.’ According to Kolakowski, means define the ends and means, in the USSR, were all you were ever going to get.

Half starved populations of developing countires are continually told to act on behalf of the greater good. Closer to home, there WAS a large public majority that believed in AGW. Experience so far seems to be contradicting facts (as far as I know I still don’t need to go by ferry to visit the Cologne Cathedral). Measures taken to combat AGW are always decried as being not enough - i.e. while the means are being implicated there never seems to be an end in sight. Witness the perpetuation of talk-fests.

9. Santayanas description of Stalin the fanatic: He redoubles his efforts while forgetting his aims. He doesn’t want to think to know. He just wants to believe.

We just know there is AGW and we just know it will lead to Armageddon. Some time.
10. Malia, talking on the ubiquitous unreality of Soviet socialism tells us: In short, there is no such thing as socialism, and the Soviet Union built it.’

Maybe: There is no such thing as global warming to the extent it is professed - silicon created it

http://klimazwiebel.blogspot.com/2010/05/maybe-some-inconvenient-similarities.html

Dennis Bray is an active emeritus professor at University of Cambridge. His group is also part of the Oxford Centre for Integrative Systems Biology. After a first career in Neurobiology, working on cell growth and movement, Dennis Bray moved in Cambridge to develop computational models of cell signaling, in particular in relation to bacterial chemotaxis.

On November 3, 2006, he was awarded the Microsoft European Science Award for his work on chemotaxis of E. coli.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Bray

*************************************************************************

IPCC Corruption

Hansen's colleagueAndrew A. Lacis eviscerates AR4 Chapter 9

There is no scientific merit to be found in the Executive Summary. The presentation sounds like something put together by Greenpeace activists and their legal department. The points being made are made arbitrarily with legal sounding caveats without having established any foundation or basis in fact. The Executive Summary seems to be a political statement that is only designed to annoy greenhouse skeptics. Wasn’t the IPCC Assessment Report intended to be a scientific document that would merit solid backing from the climate science community – instead of forcing many climate scientists into having to agree with greenhouse skeptic criticisms that this is indeed a report with a clear and obvious political agenda. Attribution can not happen until understanding has been clearly demonstrated. Once the facts of climate change have been established and understood, attribution will become self-evident to all. The Executive Summary as it stands is beyond redemption and should simply be deleted

Rejected. [Executive Summary] summarizes Ch 9, which is based on the peer reviewed literature.

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2010/2/9/hansens-colleague-eviscerates-ar4-chapter-9.html

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100025592/ipcc-fourth-assessment-report-is-rubbish-says-yet-another-expert/

Despite protests from expert reviewers, 42% of the documents cited in one chapter of the climate bible are grey literature rather than peer-reviewed.

Economist Richard Tol has been taking another look at everyone's favourite mega-document, the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. In guest posts on blogs here and here, he argues that while one section of the report (produced by Working Group 2) "appears to have systematically overstated the negative impacts of climate change," another section (written by Working Group 3) appears to have systematically understated the costs to society associated with emissions reduction.

http://nofrakkingconsensus.blogspot.com/2010/03/almost-half-non-peer-reviewed.html

Dr. Andrew A. Lacis

Affiliation: National Aeronautics and Space Administration

NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
2880 Broadway
New York, NY 10025 USA

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/staff/alacis.html

A LEADING British government scientist has warned the United Nations’ climate panel to tackle its blunders or lose all credibility.

Robert Watson, chief scientist at Defra, the environment ministry, who chaired the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 1997 to 2002, was speaking after more potential inaccuracies emerged in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on global warming.

This weekend Professor Chris Field, the new lead author of the IPCC’s climate impacts team, told The Sunday Times that he could find nothing in the report to support the claim. The revelation follows the IPCC’s retraction of a claim that the Himalayan glaciers might all melt by 2035.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7017907.ece

Gate du Jour – Now it’s Greenpeace reports in the IPCC AR4

Donna Laframboise, who gave us the list of World Wildlife Fund non peer reviewed studies cited in the IPCC AR4 continues to make lists. Here’s her latest list. Those calm, rational, thoughtful folks at Greenpeace seem to have had a significant hand in the IPCC climate bible.

She writes:

Considered the climate Bible by governments around the world, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is meant to be a scientific analysis of the most authoritative research.

Instead, it references literature generated by Greenpeace – an organization known more for headline-grabbing publicity stunts than sober-minded analysis. (Eight IPCC-cited Greenpeace publications are listed at the bottom of this post.)

In one section of this Nobel-winning report, climate change is linked to coral reef degradation. The sole source for this claim? A Greenpeace report titled “Pacific in Peril” (see Hoegh-Guldberg below). Here the report relies on a Greenpeace document to establish the lower-end of an estimate involving solar power plants (Aringhoff).

Read more at her blog here. In the meantime, here’s the list:

GREENPEACE-GENERATED LITERATURE CITED BY THE 2007 NOBEL-WINNING IPCC REPORT

* Aringhoff, R., C. Aubrey, G. Brakmann, and S. Teske, 2003: Solar thermal power 2020, Greenpeace International/European Solar Thermal Power Industry Association, Netherlands
* ESTIA, 2004: Exploiting the heat from the sun to combat climate change. European Solar Thermal Industry Association and Greenpeace, Solar Thermal Power 2020, UK
* Greenpeace, 2004: http://www.greenpeace.org.ar/cop10ing/SolarGeneration.pdf accessed 05/06/07
* Greenpeace, 2006: Solar generation. K. McDonald (ed.), Greenpeace International, Amsterdam
* GWEC, 2006: Global wind energy outlook. Global Wind Energy Council, Bruxelles and Greenpeace, Amsterdam, September, 56 pp., accessed 05/06/07
* Hoegh-Guldberg, O., H. Hoegh-Guldberg, H. Cesar and A. Timmerman, 2000: Pacific in peril: biological, economic and social impacts of climate change on Pacific coral reefs. Greenpeace, 72 pp.
* Lazarus, M., L. Greber, J. Hall, C. Bartels, S. Bernow, E. Hansen, P. Raskin, and D. Von Hippel, 1993: Towards a fossil free energy future: the next energy transition. Stockholm Environment Institute, Boston Center, Boston. Greenpeace International, Amsterdam.
* Wind Force 12, 2005: Global Wind Energy Council and Greenpeace, http://www.gwec.net/index.php?id=8, accessed 03/07/07

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/29/now-its-greenpeace-reports-cited-in-the-ipcc-ar4/

Jerry Ravetz on Climategate

Roger Piekle Jr wrote

Jerry Ravetz, a giant among scholars in the history and philosophy of science and someone who I am happy to call a friend and colleague, has written a thoughtful essay on the remarkable events that have unfolded in climate science of recent months. Here is an excerpt:

The total assurance of the mainstream scientists in their own correctness and in the intellectual and moral defects of their critics, is now in retrospect perceived as arrogance. For their spokespersons to continue to make light of the damage to the scientific case, and to ignore the ethical dimension of Climategate, is to risk public outrage at a perceived unreformed arrogance. If there is a continuing stream of ever more detailed revelations, originating in the blogosphere but now being brought to a broader public, then the credibility of the established scientific authorities will continue to erode. Do we face the prospect of the IPCC reports being totally dismissed as just more dodgy dossiers, and of hitherto trusted scientists being accused of negligence or worse? There will be those who with their own motives will be promoting such a picture. How can it be refuted?

And what about the issue itself? Are we really experiencing Anthropogenic Carbon-based Global Warming? If the public loses faith in that claim, then the situation of science in our society will be altered for the worse. There is very unlikely to be a crucial experience that either confirms or refutes the claim; the post-normal situation is just too complex. The consensus is likely to depend on how much trust can still be put in science. The whole vast edifice of policy commitments for Carbon reduction, with their many policy prescriptions and quite totalitarian moral exhortations, will be at risk of public rejection. What sort of chaos would then result? The consequences for science in our civilisation would be extraordinary.

In the course of the development of climate-change science, all sorts of loose ends were left unresolved and sometimes unattended. Even the most fundamental quantitative parameter of all, the forcing factor relating the increase in mean temperature to a doubling of CO2, lies somewhere between 1 and 3 degrees, and is thus uncertain to within a factor of 3. The precision (at about 2%) in the statements of the ?safe limits? of CO2 concentration, depending on calculations with this factor, is not easily justified.

As an example, it relied totally on a small set of deeply uncertain tree-ring data for the Medieval period, to refute the historical evidence of a warming then; but it needed to discard that sort of data for recent decades, as they showed a sudden cooling from the 1960?s onwards! In the publication, the recent data from other sources were skilfully blended in so that the change was not obvious; that was the notorious ?Nature trick? of the CRU e-mails

Even now, the catalogue of unscientific practices revealed in the mainstream media is very small in comparison to what is available on the blogosphere. Details of shoddy science and dirty tricks abound. By the end, the committed inner core were confessing to each other that global temperatures were falling, but it was far too late to change course. The final stage of corruption, cover-up, had taken hold. For the core scientists and the leaders of the scientific communities, as well as for nearly all the liberal media, ‘the debate was over’. Denying Climate Change received the same stigma as denying the Holocaust. Even the trenchant criticisms of the most egregious errors in the IPCC reports were kept ‘confidential’. And then came the e-mails.

http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/02/jerry-ravetz-on-climategate.html

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/09/climategate-plausibility-and-the-blogosphere-in-the-post-normal-age/

Jerry Ravetz part 2 – Answer and explanation to my critics

He has written numeous books on science philosophy, he was a Fulbright scholar. He currently holds a position as Associate Fellow at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at the University of Oxford.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_Ravetz

Ever more question marks have been raised in recent weeks over the reputations of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and of its chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri. But the latest example to emerge is arguably the most bizarre and scandalous of all. It centres on a very specific scare story which was included in the IPCC's 2007 report, although it was completely at odds with the scientific evidence – including that produced by the British expert in charge of the relevant section of the report. Even more tellingly, however, this particular claim has repeatedly been championed by Dr Pachauri himself.

Only last week Dr Pachauri was specifically denying that the appearance of this claim in two IPCC reports, including one of which he was the editor, was an error. Yet it has now come to light that the IPCC, ignoring the evidence of its own experts, deliberately published the claim for propaganda purposes.

One of the most widely quoted and most alarmist passages in the main 2007 report was a warning that, by 2020, global warming could reduce crop yields in some countries in Africa by 50 per cent. Dr Pachauri not only allowed this claim to be included in the short Synthesis Report, of which he was co-editor, but has publicly repeated it many times since.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7231386/African-crops-yield-another-catastrophe-for-the-IPCC.html

IPCC STATEMENT ON TRENDS IN DISASTER LOSSES

This press release from the IPCC would have been a fine opportunity to set the scientific and procedural record straight and admit to what are obvious and major errors in content and process. Instead, it has decided to defend the indefensible, which any observer can easily see through. Of course there is no recourse here as the IPCC is unaccountable and there is no formal way to address errors in its report or its errors and misdirection via press release. Not a good showing by the IPCC.

http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/01/ipcc-statement-on-trends-in-disaster.html

After Climategate, Pachaurigate and Glaciergate: Amazongate

Here’s the latest development, courtesy of Dr Richard North – and it’s a cracker. It seems that, not content with having lied to us about shrinking glaciers, increasing hurricanes, and rising sea levels, the IPCC’s latest assessment report also told us a complete load of porkies about the danger posed by climate change to the Amazon rainforest.

This is to be found in Chapter 13 of the Working Group II report, the same part of the IPCC fourth assessment report in which the “Glaciergate” claims are made. There, is the startling claim that:

At first sight, the reference looks kosher enough but, following it through, one sees:

This, then appears to be another WWF report, carried out in conjunction with the IUCN – The International Union for Conservation of Nature.

The link given is no longer active, but the report is on the IUCN website here. Furthermore, the IUCN along with WWF is another advocacy group and the report is not peer-reviewed. According to IPCC rules, it should not have been used as a primary source.

It gets even better. The two expert authors of the WWF report so casually cited by the IPCC as part of its, ahem, “robust” “peer-reviewed” process weren’t even Amazon specialists. One, Dr PF Moore, is a policy analyst:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100023598/after-climategate-pachaurigate-and-glaciergate-amazongate/

The scandal deepens – IPCC AR4 riddled with non peer reviewed WWF papers

It turns out that the WWF is cited all over the IPCC AR4 report, and as you know, WWF does not produce peer reviewed science, they produce opinion papers in line with their vision. Yet IPCC’s rules are such that they are supposed to rely on peer reviewed science only. It appears they’ve violated that rule dozens of times, all under Pachauri’s watch.

A new posting authored by Donna Laframboise, the creator of NOconsensus.org (Toronto, Canada) shows what one can find in just one day of looking.

Extensive list of papers.

http://nofrakkingconsensus.blogspot.com/2010/01/more-dodgy-citations-in-nobel-winning.html

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/24/the-scandal-deepens-ipcc-ar4-riddled-with-non-peer-reviewed-wwf-papers/

Scientist admits IPCC used fake data to pressure policy makers

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’

Dr Lal’s admission will only add to the mounting furore over the melting glaciers assertion, which the IPCC was last week forced to withdraw because it has no scientific foundation.

According to the IPCC’s statement of principles, its role is ‘to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis, scientific, technical and socio-economic information – IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy’. The claim that Himalayan glaciers are set to disappear by 2035 rests on two 1999 magazine interviews with glaciologist Syed Hasnain, which were then recycled without any further investigation in a 2005 report by the environmental campaign group WWF. It was this report that Dr Lal and his team cited as their source

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/23/breaking-news-scientist-admits-ipcc-used-fake-data-to-pressure-policy-makers/

UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters

THE United Nations climate science panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.

It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny — and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak. The report's own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough.

The claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that global warming is already affecting the severity and frequency of global disasters, has since become embedded in political and public debate. It was central to discussions at last month's Copenhagen climate summit, including a demand by developing countries for compensation of $100 billion (£62 billion) from the rich nations blamed for creating the most emissions.

Ed Miliband, the energy and climate change minister, has suggested British and overseas floods — such as those in Bangladesh in 2007 — could be linked to global warming. Barack Obama, the US president, said last autumn: "More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent."

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7000063.ece

Last week, the IPCC, led by its increasingly controversial chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, was forced to issue an unprecedented admission: the statement in its 2007 report that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 had no scientific basis, and its inclusion in the report reflected a "poor application" of IPCC procedures.

What has now come to light, however, is that the scientist from whom this claim originated, Dr Syed Hasnain, has for the past two years been working as a senior employee of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), the Delhi-based company of which Dr Pachauri is director-general. Furthermore, the claim – now disowned by Dr Pachauri as chairman of the IPCC – has helped TERI to win a substantial share of a $500,000 grant from one of America's leading charities, along with a share in a three million euro research study funded by the EU.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7062667/Pachauri-the-real-story-behind-the-Glaciergate-scandal.html

UN climate change panel based claims on student dissertation and magazine article

In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.

However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.

The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master's degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.

The revelations, uncovered by The Sunday Telegraph, have raised fresh questions about the quality of the information contained in the report, which was published in 2007.

It comes after officials for the panel were forced earlier this month to retract inaccurate claims in the IPCC's report about the melting of Himalayan glaciers.

Sceptics have seized upon the mistakes to cast doubt over the validity of the IPCC and have called for the panel to be disbanded.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7111525/UN-climate-change-panel-based-claims-on-student-dissertation-and-magazine-article.html

A scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory noticed that the paper had a simple error in arithmetic—and that when the error was corrected, there was no evidence of slowing circulation. The scientist, Petr Chylek, published his criticism of the paper in the popular journal Physics Today [2007]. I asked Chylek why his criticism was not published in Nature. Chylek replied: "Although they [Nature] did not deny that my criticism was correct, they decided not to publish as being of no great interest to Nature readers".

[BH adds: link fixed per later comment. Also changed "correction" to "criticism" as per DK request]

March 26, 2010 | Douglas J. Keenan

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2010/3/26/false-alarm.html

*******************************

The BBC's environment analyst Roger Harrabin put questions to Professor Jones, including several gathered from climate sceptics. The questions were put to Professor Jones with the co-operation of UEA's press office.

Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming

Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

C - Do you agree that from January 2002 to the present there has been statistically significant global cooling?

No. This period is even shorter than 1995-2009. The trend this time is negative (-0.12C per decade), but this trend is not statistically significant.

Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?

An initial point to make is that in the responses to these questions I've assumed that when you talk about the global temperature record, you mean the record that combines the estimates from land regions with those from the marine regions of the world. CRU produces the land component, with the Met Office Hadley Centre producing the marine component.

Temperature data for the period 1860-1880 are more uncertain, because of sparser coverage, than for later periods in the 20th Century. The 1860-1880 period is also only 21 years in length. As for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates are not statistically significantly different (see numbers below).

I have also included the trend over the period 1975 to 2009, which has a very similar trend to the period 1975-1998.

So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8511670.stm

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/14/phil-jones-momentous-qa-with-bbc-reopens-the-science-is-settled-issues/#more-16418

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm?ad=1

Phil Jones momentous Q&A with BBC reopens the “science is settled” issues

Specifically, the Q-and-As confirm what many skeptics have long suspected:

Neither the rate nor magnitude of recent warming is exceptional.
There was no significant warming from 1998-2009. According to the IPCC we should have seen a global temperature increase of at least 0.2°C per decade.
The IPCC models may have overestimated the climate sensitivity for greenhouse gases, underestimated natural variability, or both.
This also suggests that there is a systematic upward bias in the impacts estimates based on these models just from this factor alone.
The logic behind attribution of current warming to well-mixed man-made greenhouse gases is faulty.
The science is not settled, however unsettling that might be.
There is a tendency in the IPCC reports to leave out inconvenient findings, especially in the part(s) most likely to be read by policy makers.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/14/phil-jones-momentous-qa-with-bbc-reopens-the-science-is-settled-issues/

The effect on Jones was devastating. The worldwide outcry plunged him into the snakepit of international politics. It was, he agrees, “a David Kelly moment”.

“I did think about it, yes. About suicide. I thought about it several times, but I think I’ve got past that stage now.” With the support of his family, and particularly the love of his five-year-old granddaughter, he began to look forward again. He is still unwell, getting through the day on beta-blockers and the night on sleeping pills, and he has lost a stone in weight. But at last there is optimism

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7017905.ece

The UK's Royal Society is reviewing its public statements on climate change after 43 Fellows complained that it had oversimplified its messages.

They said the communications did not properly distinguish between what was widely agreed on climate science and what is not fully understood. The society's ruling council has responded by setting up a panel to produce a consensus document. The panel should report in July and the report is to be published in September. It is chaired by physicist John Pethica, vice-president of the Royal Society. Its deliberations are reviewed by two critical sub-groups, each believed to comprise seven members. Each of these groups contains a number of society Fellows who are doubtful in some way about the received view of the risks of rising CO2 levels. One panel member told me: "The timetable is very tough - one draft has already been rejected as completely inadequate."

The review member said it might not be possible for the document to be agreed at all. "This is a very serious challenge to the way the society operates," I was told. "In the past we have been able to give advice to governments as a society without having to seek consensus of all the members. "There is very clear evidence that governments are right to be very worried about climate change. But in any society like this there will inevitably be people who disagree about anything - and my fear is that the society may become paralysed on this issue." Another review member told me: "The sceptics have been very strident and well-organised. It's not clear to me how we are going to get precise agreement on the wording - we are scientists and we're being asked to do a job of public communication that is more like journalism." But both members said they agreed that some of the previous communications of the organisation in the past were poorly judged.

Question everything

A Royal Society pamphlet Climate Change Controversies is the main focus of the criticism. A version of it is on the organisation's website. It was written in response to attacks on mainstream science which the Royal Society considered scurrilous. It reads: "This is not intended to provide exhaustive answers to every contentious argument that has been put forward by those who seek to distort and undermine the science of climate change…" One Fellow who said he was not absolutely convinced of the dangers of CO2 told me: "This appears to suggest that anyone who questions climate science is malicious. But in science everything is there to be questioned - that should be the very essence of the Royal Society. Some of us were very upset about that. "I can understand why this has happened - there is so much politically and economically riding on climate science that the society would find it very hard to say 'well, we are still fairly sure that greenhouse gases are changing the climate' but the politicians simply wouldn't accept that level of honest doubt."

Another society protester said he wanted to be called a climate agnostic rather than a sceptic. He said he wanted the society's website to "do more to question the accuracy of the science on climate feedbacks" (in which a warming world is believed to make itself warmer still through natural processes). "We sent an e-mail round our friends, mainly in physical sciences," he said. "Then when we had got 43 names we approached the council in January asking for the website entry on climate to be re-written. I don't think they were very pleased. I don't think this sort of thing has been done before in the history of the society. "But we won the day, and the work is underway to re-write it. I am very hopeful that we will find a form of words on which we can agree. "I know it looks like a tiny fraction of the total membership (1,314) but remember we only emailed our friends - we didn't raise a general petition."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/science_and_environment/10178124.stm

1. The Institute is concerned that, unless the disclosed e-mails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context.

2. The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law. The principle that scientists should be willing to expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others, which requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials, is vital. The lack of compliance has been confirmed by the findings of the Information Commissioner. This extends well beyond the CRU itself - most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other international institutions who are also involved in the formulation of the IPCC's conclusions on climate change.

3. It is important to recognise that there are two completely different categories of data set that are involved in the CRU e-mail exchanges:

· those compiled from direct instrumental measurements of land and ocean surface temperatures such as the CRU, GISS and NOAA data sets; and

· historic temperature reconstructions from measurements of 'proxies', for example, tree-rings.

4. The second category relating to proxy reconstructions are the basis for the conclusion that 20th century warming is unprecedented. Published reconstructions may represent only a part of the raw data available and may be sensitive to the choices made and the statistical techniques used. Different choices, omissions or statistical processes may lead to different conclusions. This possibility was evidently the reason behind some of the (rejected) requests for further information.

5. The e-mails reveal doubts as to the reliability of some of the reconstructions and raise questions as to the way in which they have been represented; for example, the apparent suppression, in graphics widely used by the IPCC, of proxy results for recent decades that do not agree with contemporary instrumental temperature measurements.

6. There is also reason for concern at the intolerance to challenge displayed in the e-mails. This impedes the process of scientific 'self correction', which is vital to the integrity of the scientific process as a whole, and not just to the research itself. In that context, those CRU e-mails relating to the peer-review process suggest a need for a review of its adequacy and objectivity as practised in this field and its potential vulnerability to bias or manipulation.

7. Fundamentally, we consider it should be inappropriate for the verification of the integrity of the scientific process to depend on appeals to Freedom of Information legislation. Nevertheless, the right to such appeals has been shown to be necessary. The e-mails illustrate the possibility of networks of like-minded researchers effectively excluding newcomers. Requiring data to be electronically accessible to all, at the time of publication, would remove this possibility.

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/uc3902.htm

Der Spiegel article

Under the pressure of [Steve] McIntyre's attacks, Jones had to admit something incredible: He had deleted his notes on how he performed the homogenization. This means that it is not possible to reconstruct how the raw data turned into his temperature curve.

For Peter Webster, a meteorologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, this course of events is "one of the biggest sins" a scientist can commit. "It's as if a chef was no longer able to cook his dishes because he lost the recipes."While amateur climatologist McIntyre spent years begging in vain for the raw data, Webster eventually managed to convince Jones to send them to him. He is the only scientist to date who has been given access to the data. "To be honest, I'm shocked by the sloppy documentation," Webster told SPIEGEL.

Unnoticed by the public, Webster has spent several months searching for inconsistencies in the Jones curve. For example, it has been known for some time that there are noticeable jumps in ocean temperature readings. The reason for the inconsistencies is that, beginning in the 1940s, water temperature was no longer measured in buckets filled with seawater, but at the intake valves for the water used to cool ship engines.But when he analyzed Jones's data, Webster discovered suspiciously similar jumps in temperature -- but on land. "Water buckets can't explain this," says Webster.
The Jones team attributes another sudden jump in temperature readings to the decline in air pollution since the 1970s as a result of stricter emissions laws. Particles suspended in the air block solar radiation, so that temperatures rise when the air becomes cleaner. Air pollution in the south has always been much lower than in the north, because, as Webster explains, "there is less land and therefore less industry in the Southern Hemisphere."

Oddly enough, however, the temperature increase in the south is just as strong as it is in the north. "That isn't really possible," says Webster.
Webster doesn't believe that inconsistencies like these will invalidate the Jones curve altogether. "But we would like to know, of course, what's behind all of these phenomena." If a natural mechanism were at least partly to blame for the rise in temperatures, it would decrease the share of human influence in current global warming.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,686697,00.html

Physicist and meteorologist Craig Bohren, distinguished professor emeritus at the Pennsylvania State University (retired)

The pronouncements of climate modelers, who don't do experiments, don't make observations, don't even confect theories, but rather [in my opinion] play computer games using huge programs containing dozens of separate components the details of which they may be largely ignorant, don't move me. I am much more impressed by direct evidence: retreating glaciers, longer growing seasons, the migration of species, rising sea level, etc.

I have lived long enough to have seen many doomsday scenarios painted by people who profited by doing so, but which never came to pass. This has made me a skeptic. Perhaps global warming is an example of the old fable about the boy who cried wolf, but this time the doomsayers are, alas, right. Maybe, but I can't help noting that some of the prominent global warmers of today were global coolers of not so long ago. In particular, Steven Schneider, now at Stanford, previously at NCAR, about 30 years ago was sounding the alarm about an imminent ice age. The culprit then was particles belched into the atmosphere by human activities. No matter how the climate changes he can correctly say that he predicted it. No one in the atmospheric science community has been more successful at getting publicity. NCAR used to send my department clippings from newspaper and magazine articles in which NCAR researchers were named. We'd get thick wads of clippings, almost all of which were devoted to Schneider. Perhaps global warming is bad for the rest of us, but for Schneider and others it has been a godsend.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/aprilholladay/2006-08-07-global-warming-truth_x.htm

Low-lying Pacific islands 'growing not sinking'

A new geological study has shown that many low-lying Pacific islands are growing, not sinking.

The islands of Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Federated States of Micronesia are among those which have grown, because of coral debris and sediment.

The study, published in the magazine the New Scientist, predicts that the islands will still be there in 100 years' time.

However it is still unsure whether many of them will be inhabitable.

Prognosis 'incorrect'

In recent times, the inhabitants of many low-lying Pacific islands have come to fear their homelands being wiped off the map because of rising sea levels.

But this study of 27 islands over the last 60 years suggests that most have remained stable, while some have actually grown.

Using historical photographs and satellite imaging, the geologists found that 80% of the islands had either remained the same or got larger - in some cases, dramatically so.

They say it is due to the build-up of coral debris and sediment, and to land reclamation.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia_pacific/10222679.stm

Certainly climate change is real; it occurs all the time. To claim that the little we’ve seen is larger than any change we “have been able to discern’’ for a thousand years is disingenuous. Panels of the National Academy of Sciences and Congress have concluded that the methods used to claim this cannot be used for more than 400 years, if at all. Even the head of the deservedly maligned Climatic Research Unit acknowledges that the medieval period may well have been warmer than the present.

The claim that everything other than models represents “mere opinion and speculation’’ is also peculiar. Despite their faults, models show that projections of significant warming depend critically on clouds and water vapor, and the physics of these processes can be observationally tested (the normal scientific approach); at this point, the models seem to be failing.

Finally, given a generation of environmental propaganda, a presidential science adviser (John Holdren) who has promoted alarm since the 1970s, and a government that proposes funding levels for climate research about 20 times the levels in 1991, courage seems hardly the appropriate description – at least for scientists supporting such alarm

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/19/lindzen-on-climate-science-advocacy-and-modeling-at-this-point-the-models-seem-to-be-failing/

Bishop Hill

Steig's method massacred

Feb 8, 2011 Climate: Surface

Ryan O'Donnell has posted a splendid pictorial guide to the oddities of Eric Steig's method for creating trends in the Antarctic. If you have been one of the people not following the story too well so far, here's a little layman's version of the posting, which assumes no prior knowledge. I hope this helps.

There's a lot of talk of the Antarctic peninsula. This is fairly obvious at the left hand side of each map below. The name refers only to the narrow bit of land though. The slightly fatter bit that joins the Peninsula to the main part of the Antarctic continent is West Antarctica.

Now Steig's method purported to show that he whole continent was warming, and particularly West Antarctica. Previously it had been thought that only the peninsula was warming

http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2011/2/8/steigs-method-massacred.html?lastPage=true#comment11844601

Editor of Nature forced to resign from climate review panel

Within hours of the launch of an independent panel to investigate claims that climate scientists covered up flawed data on temperature rises, one member has been forced to resign after sceptics questioned his impartiality.

In an interview last year with Chinese State Radio, enquiry panel member Philip Campbell, editor-in-chief of Nature said: "The scientists have not hidden the data. If you look at the emails there is one or two bits of language that are jargon used between professionals that suggest something to outsiders that is wrong."He went on: "In fact the only problem there has been is on some official restrictions on their ability to disseminate data otherwise they have behaved as researchers should."

Dr Campbell, was invited to sit on the enquiry panel because of his expertise in the peer review process as editor of one of the world’s leading science journals. The journal has published some of the leading papers on climate change research, including those supporting the now famous "hockey stick" graph, the subject of intense criticism by climate sceptics.Dr Campbell has now withdrawn his membership of the panel, telling Channel 4 News: "I made the remarks in good faith on the basis of media reports of the leaks. "As I have made clear subsequently, I support the need to for a full review of the facts behind the leaked e-mails.

"There must be nothing that calls into question the ability of the independent Review to complete this task, and therefore I have decided to withdraw from the team."

The interview, posted on the Bishop Hill blog, run by climate sceptic Andrew Montford, will come as an embarrassment to the enquiry's chair Sir Muir Russell.

http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/science_technology/aposclimategateapos+review+member+resigns/3536642

The UK government's chief scientist, Sir John Beddington, is the latest rat to flee the sinking ship Climatology.

Professor Beddington said that particular caution was needed when communicating predictions about climate change made with the help of computer models.

“It’s unchallengeable that CO2 traps heat and warms the Earth and that burning fossil fuels shoves billions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. But where you can get challenges is on the speed of change.

“When you get into large-scale climate modelling there are quite substantial uncertainties. On the rate of change and the local effects, there are uncertainties both in terms of empirical evidence and the climate models themselves.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7003622.ece

The impact of global warming has been exaggerated by some scientists and there is an urgent need for more honest disclosure of the uncertainty of predictions about the rate of climate change, according to the Government’s chief scientific adviser.

John Beddington was speaking to The Times in the wake of an admission by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that it grossly overstated the rate at which Himalayan glaciers were receding.

Professor Beddington said that climate scientists should be less hostile to sceptics who questioned man-made global warming. He condemned scientists who refused to publish the data underpinning their reports.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7003622.ece

Harries et al. 2001

Was this evidence conclusive as claimed? At least one researcher thought not. E. Raschke at the GKSS Research Center, University of Hamburg, Germany cited Harries et al. 2001 article and said:

Several greenhouse gases, which are in part or entirely produced by human activities, have accumulated in the atmosphere since approximately the middle of the 19th century. They are assumed to have an additional greenhouse effect causing a further increase of atmospheric temperatures near the ground and a decrease in the layers above approximately 15 km altitude. The currently observed near-surface warming over nearly the entire globe is already considered by a large fraction of our society to be result of this additional greenhouse effect.

Complete justification of this assumption is, however, not yet possible, because there are still too many unknowns in our knowledge of participating processes and in our modeling capabilities.
When I searched the 2007 IPCC document for Raschke?s name the result was ?No instances found.?. The number of citations for Raschke?s paper is zero, compared with 39 for Harries? 2001 Nature article. Clearly, skepticism does not pay.

http://landshape.org/enm/interpretation-bias/

NASA scientist and RealClimate.org's Gavin Schmidt declared in a February 17, 2011 posting: “There is no theory or result that indicates that climate change increases extremes in general.” See: NASA Scientist & RealClimate.org's Gavin Schmidt: Global Warming Does Not Cause Extreme Weather Events

Schmidt includes all sorts of caveats, including the phrase “in general,” but Schmidt's declaration may be misread by many as some sort of statement that proponents of man-made global warming do not claim that an increase in many types of extreme storms are “predicted” or “consistent” with their climate model based virtual world. [Note: The latest global warming debacle comes in the form of new studies attempting to link specific rain and flood events to man-made global warming. See: Prof Pielke Jr.: 'Many will still want to connect the dots between greenhouse gas emissions and recent floods. Connecting the dots is fun, but it is not science' & Astrophysicist Calls AGW Caused Flood Study 'Drivel' & NY Times not buying claims of AGW/flood paper: 'The problem is that the Nature paper is not definitive at all' ]

Physicist Dr. Lubos Motl commented on Schmidt's new ambiguous extreme weather/AGW claim. “The idea that all extremes are getting stronger - a basic pillar of the climate doomsday beliefs - is actually so silly that even one of the most famous climate cranks, Gavin Schmidt, has been able to figure it out and admit that it's wrong,” Motl wrote on February 18, 2011 .

“The idea that climate extremes are supposed to get larger is one of the most omni-present manifestations of the climate doomsday religion,” Motl wrote. “This thesis contradicts pretty much all empirical data as well as theoretical analyses of the climate.

Motl called the link "complete pseudoscientific nonsense" and added: "There's been no significant global trend in either of them during the last 100 years or so.”

http://www.climatedepot.com/a/9845/Climate-Astrology-Are-warmists-now-claiming-extreme-weather-is-NOT-LINKED-to-global-warming

Reversing the direction of the positive feedback loop

Posted on November 3, 2010 by curryja | 105 Comments

by Judith Curry

The scientists provided the initial impulse for this feedback loop back in the 1970’s and 1980’s. The enviro advocacy groups quickly saw the possibilities and ran with it, with the scientists’ blessing. The enviro advocacy groups saw the climate change issue as an opportunity to enlist scientific support for their preferred energy policy solution. Libertarian think tanks, the traditional foes of the enviro advocacy groups, began countering with doubts about the science. International efforts to deal with the climate change problem were launched in 1992 with the UNFCCC treaty.

Wait a minute, what climate change problem? In 1992, we had just completed the first IPCC assessment report, here was their conclusion: “The size of this warming is broadly consistent with predictions of climate models, but it is also of the same magnitude as natural climate variability. . . The unequivocal detection of the enhanced greenhouse effect from observations is not likely for a decade or more.”

http://judithcurry.com/2010/11/03/reversing-the-direction-of-the-positive-feedback-loop/#more-930

Global Warming: the Collapse of a Grand Narrative

Professor Stott, emeritus professor of biogeography at the University of London

And what can one say about ‘the science’? ‘The ‘science’ is already paying dearly for its abuse of freedom of information, for unacceptable cronyism, for unwonted arrogance, and for the disgraceful misuse of data at every level, from temperature measurements to glaciers to the Amazon rain forest. What is worse, the usurping of the scientific method, and of justified scientific scepticism, by political policies and political propaganda could well damage science sensu lato - never mind just climate science - in the public eye for decades. The appalling pre-Copenhagen attacks by the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and his climate-change henchman, Ed Miliband, on those who dared to be critical of the science of climate change were some of the most unforgivable I can recall.

http://web.me.com/sinfonia1/Clamour_Of_The_Times/Clamour_Of_The_Times/Entries/2010/1/30_Global_Warming%3A_the_Collapse_of_a_Grand_Narrative.html

Morelimited data suggest that stratospheric water vapor probablyincreased between 1980 and 2000, which would have enhanced thedecadal rate of surface warming during the 1990s by about 30%compared to estimates neglecting this change. These findingsshow that stratospheric water vapor represents an importantdriver of decadal global surface climate change.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/science.1182488

Sir, As a scientist and one who also requested data from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) under the Freedom of Information Act, I am pleased that the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has found that University of East Anglia (UEA) and CRU failed in its duties under the Act (“Scientists in stolen e-mail scandal hid climate data”, Jan 28).

Two things must now happen. First, all data, adjustment procedures and computer code relating to the CRU temperature records must be released for proper scientific scrutiny and verification. Until the data is verified all published papers that rely on the CRU temperature record for their conclusions must be withdrawn as being “unproven”.

Second, Professor Phil Jones, the unit’s director, must do the honourable thing and resign. Failing that, he must be dismissed if UEA and CRU are to retain any scientific credibility.

Dr Don Keiller
Deputy Head of Life Sciences,
Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/letters/article7006829.ece

He said the false claim in the IPCC's report was symptomatic of a wider problem with the way evidence was presented in the field of climate science. "Certain unqualified statements have been unfortunate," he said. "We have a problem in communicating uncertainty. There's definitely an issue there. If there wasn't, there wouldn't be the level of scepticism. All of these predictions have to be caveated by saying, 'There's a level of uncertainty about that'."

He explained that large-scale climate modelling using computers meant "quite substantial uncertainties" which needed to be communicated. While it was unchallengeable that burning fossil fuels released CO₂ that warms the Earth, "where you can get challenges is on the speed of change".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jan/27/climate-change-uk-top-scientist-urges-caution

New Compendium Paper on Surface Temperature Records

Download http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/surface_temp.pdf

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/26/new-paper-on-surface-temperature-records/

500 Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skepticism of "Man-Made" Global Warming

Brookhaven National Laboratory: Why Hasn’t Earth Warmed as Much as Expected?

According to current best estimates of climate sensitivity, the amount of CO₂ and other heat-trapping gases added to Earth’s atmosphere since humanity began burning fossil fuels on a significant scale during the industrial period would be expected to result in a mean global temperature rise of 3.8°F—well more than the 1.4°F increase that has been observed for this time span. Schwartz’s analysis attributes the reasons for this discrepancy to a possible mix of two major factors: 1) Earth’s climate may be less sensitive to rising greenhouse gases than currently assumed and/or 2) reflection of sunlight by haze particles in the atmosphere may be offsetting some of the expected warming.

“Because of present uncertainties in climate sensitivity and the enhanced reflectivity of haze particles,” said Schwartz, “it is impossible to accurately assign weights to the relative contributions of these two factors. This has major implications for understanding of Earth’s climate and how the world will meet its future energy needs.

Schwartz observes that formulating energy policy with the present uncertainty in climate sensitivity is like navigating a large ship in perilous waters without charts. “We know we have to change the course of this ship, and we know the direction of the change, but we don’t know how much we need to change the course or how soon we have to do it.”

Schwartz and Charlson coauthored the paper with Ralph Kahn, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland; John Ogren, NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory in Colorado; and Henning Rodhe, Stockholm University.

The early online release of the paper is available at AMS’s journals online site.

http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1175%2F2009JCLI3461.1&ct=1

Research at Brookhaven was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science

http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/pubaf/pr/PR_display.asp?prID=1067

Mosher: The Hackers

What the recent disclosures about Pachauri show is that the IPCC process is now totally compromised, compromised from the inside. Like a system exploited by a destructive hack, that system may be beyond repair. It’s time to reformat the hard drive and start from scratch, as climate scientist Hulme, spotted 101 times in the Climategate files and closely tied to Pachauri, suggested–perhaps in a moment of clarity after the discovery of the emails

“It is also possible that the institutional innovation that has been the I.P.C.C. has run its course. Yes, there will be an AR5 but for what purpose? The I.P.C.C. itself, through its structural tendency to politicize climate change science, has perhaps helped to foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production.”

Just how was the CRU system hacked? And can such hacks be prevented or are they a very part of the nature of authoritarian systems? As discussed in our book “Climategate: The Crutape Letters , now available on Kindle and in Ebook format, the “hacks” were focused on the publication process.

The IPCC reports were intended to be summaries of the science, both what we know and what we don’t know. These summaries were written for policy makers who would use the science and its findings to take action: action to prevent climate change, mitigate it, adapt to it, and to fund new studies where knowledge was uncertain. And action is where the money is. Every hack of the system cashes out into some form of compensation to the hackers: more money for their organizations or more prestige for themselves.

As the mails show the hacking of the CRU process and the scientific process itself was exposed primarily because of the “pressure” put on the hackers by the FIOA process. And as the mails also show, the hackers moved to thwart the FOIA process by corrupting FOIA officers. In fact, the most egregious hack of the system, Jones’s request that people delete mails, came as the direct result of trying to cover up a hack of the process, the hack surrounding the ‘Jesus Paper.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/26/mosher-the-hackers/

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/19/brookhaven-national-laboratory-why-hasnt-earth-warmed-as-much-as-expected/

Misquoted, says man behind glacier goof up

The man blamed so far for the false alarm about the Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035 surfaced on Tuesday to say he never made such an exact assertion and, worse, he had been misquoted.

“On the basis of our research in 1999 I must have said that glaciers in the Central and Eastern Himalayas will lose mass during the next 40/ 50 years at their present rate of decline,” Hasnain told Hindustan Times.

But a date was put to this “approximation”, Hasnain said, by a journalist, Fred Pearce, who quoted him in an article in New Scientist, a respected London-based magazine.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/Misquoted-says-man-behind-glacier-goof-up/H1-Article3-499568.aspx

PARIS - A top scientist said Monday he had warned in 2006 that a prediction of catastrophic loss of Himalayan glaciers, published months later by the UN's Nobel-winning climate panel, was badly wrong.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report said in 2007 it was "very likely" that the glaciers, which supply water to more than a billion people across Asia, would vanish by 2035 if global warming trends continued.

"This number is not just a little bit wrong, but far out of any order of magnitude," said Georg Kaser, an expert in tropical glaciology at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.

http://www.canada.com/technology/climate+report+Scientist+warned+glacier+forecast+wrong/2455973/story.html

NASA GISS Inaccurate Press Release On The Surface Temperature Trend Data

UPDATE PM JANUARY 16 2010 – Jim Hansen has released a statement on his current conclusions regarding the global average surface temperature trends [and thanks to Leonard Ornstein and Brian Toon for alerting us to this information]. The statement is If It’s That Warm, How Come It’s So Damned Cold? by James Hansen, Reto Ruedy, Makiko Sato, Ken Lo

My comments below remain unchanged. Readers will note that Jim Hansen does not cite or comment on any of the substantive unresolved uncertainties and systematic warm bias that we report on in our papers. They only report on their research papers. This is a clear example of ignoring peer reviewed studies which conflict with one’s conclusions.

http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2010/01/16/nasa-giss-inaccurate-press-release-on-the-surface-temperature-trend-data/

The 2010 answer to the question by Andy Revkin
“Is most of the observed warming over the last 50 years likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations”?
remains NO.

There is new information, however, that prompts me to update my answer.
This is based on insight provided by Roy Spencer, as summarized in his post of April 20 2010 titled
The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists
where he presented his new book with the same title published by Encounter Books.
The text in his April 20th post that provides this perspective of the natural climate system is
“The most obvious way for warming to be caused naturally is for small, natural fluctuations in the circulation patterns of the atmosphere and ocean to result in a 1% or 2% decrease in global cloud cover. Clouds are the Earth’s sunshade, and if cloud cover changes for any reason, you have global warming — or global cooling.
How could the experts have missed such a simple explanation? Because they have convinced themselves that only a temperature change can cause a cloud cover change, and not the other way around. The issue is one of causation. They have not accounted for cloud changes causing temperature changes.”

http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2010/05/04/update-to-andy-revkins-question-in-2005-is-most-of-the-observed-warming-over-the-last-50-years-likely-to-have-heen-due-to-the-increase-in-greenhouse-gas-concentrations%E2%80%9D/

More evidence of gatekeeping

Now, someone has identified themselves as being the authors of one of the papers concerned. Commenting at Climate Audit, Lars Kamel says this:

One of those rejected papers about Siberian temperatures may have been by me. The time is about right. I got it rejected because of nonsense from a reviewer and the editor saw it as an attack on him when I critized the quality of the review. After that, I gave up the idea of ever getting something AGW critical published in a journal.

Another scientist has been speaking out on the same issue. Dutch professor, Arthur Rorsch, is making further allegations of misdeeds by climatologists. In an article entitled "Sick science" he explains how difficult it was for sceptics to get published.

"It is exactly as we feared.If I were to submit an article from a friendly colleague who wanted to publish in a scientific journal, we would always get a rejection; without proper argumentation. I was not the only Dutch researcher that happened to. Climate skeptics everywhere ran into brick walls.

He describes the emails as demonstrating an intent to deceive and has this to say of the state of climatology: This is no longer genuine science. These are politically motivated people...it is a religion, or rather, a belief.

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/12/17/more-evidence-of-gatekeeping.html

Climategate - Phil Jones

Also Siberia is one of the worst places to look at homogeneity, as the stations aren't
that close together (as they are in Fennoscandia and most of Canada) and also the temperature
varies an awful lot from year to year. Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears. I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL.Cheers Phil

http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=407&filename=1080742144.txt

Commenting at Climate Audit, Lars Kamel says this:

One of those rejected papers about Siberian temperatures may have been by me. The time is about right. I got it rejected because of nonsense from a reviewer and the editor saw it as an attack on him when I critized the quality of the review. After that, I gave up the idea of ever getting something AGW critical published in a journal.

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/12/17/more-evidence-of-gatekeeping.html

Climategate goes American: NOAA, GISS and the mystery of the vanishing weather stations

What it shows is that, just like in Britain at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) temperature data records have been grotesquely distorted by activist scientists in order to exaggerate the appearance of late 20th century global warming. They achieved this – with an insouciant disregard for scientific integrity which quite beggars belief – through the simple expedient of ignoring most of those weather station sited in higher, colder places and using mainly ones in warmer spots. Then, they averaged out the temperature readings given by the warmer stations to give a global average. Et voila: exactly the scary “climate change” they needed to persuade bodies like the IPCC that AGW was a clear and present danger requiring urgent pan-governmental action.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100022474/climategate-goes-american-noaa-giss-and-the-mystery-of-the-vanishing-weather-stations/

Carrots

To which Paul Vaughan responded as follows:

Actually not so hard.

Personal anecdote:
Last spring when I was shopping around for a new source of funding, after having my funding slashed to zero 15 days after going public with a finding about natural climate variations, I kept running into funding application instructions of the following variety:

Successful candidates will:
1) Demonstrate AGW.
2) Demonstrate the catastrophic consequences of AGW.
3) Explore policy implications stemming from 1 & 2.

Follow the money — perhaps a conspiracy is unnecessary where a carrot will suffice

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/11/perhaps-a-conspiracy-is-unnecessary-where-a-carrot-will-suffice/

Top scientists rally to the defence of the Met Office

One scientist told The Times he felt under pressure to sign. “The Met Office is a major employer of scientists and has long had a policy of only appointing and working with those who subscribe to their views on man-made global warming,” he said.

Professor Slingo denied that the Met Office had put anyone under pressure. “The response has been absolutely spontaneous. As a scientist you sign things you agree with, not because you are worried about what the Met Office might think of you,” she said.

The 1,700 signatories, a fraction of the research scientists working in Britain, include Sir John Houghton, former chairman of the science working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Sir Brian Hoskins, head of the Grantham Institute at Imperial College, and Professor Lord Hunt of Chesterton, a climate scientist at University College London.

Professor Slingo said the statement was carefully worded to avoid claiming all climate scientists were beyond reproach. It says the evidence for man-made global warming is “deep and extensive” and comes from “decades of painstaking and meticulous research by many thousands of scientists across the world who adhere to the highest levels of professional integrity”.

Benny Peiser, of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which claims man-made climate change has been exaggerated, said the petition showed that the Met Office was rattled.

www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6951029.ece

The Climate Science Isn't Settled

RICHARD S. LINDZEN

Claims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre. There is general support for the assertion that GATA has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century. The quality of the data is poor, though, and because the changes are small, it is easy to nudge such data a few tenths of a degree in any direction. Several of the emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) that have caused such a public ruckus dealt with how to do this so as to maximize apparent changes.

The general support for warming is based not so much on the quality of the data, but rather on the fact that there was a little ice age from about the 15th to the 19th century. Thus it is not surprising that temperatures should increase as we emerged from this episode. At the same time that we were emerging from the little ice age, the industrial era began, and this was accompanied by increasing emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2, methane and nitrous oxide. CO2 is the most prominent of these, and it is again generally accepted that it has increased by about 30%

The main statement publicized after the last IPCC Scientific Assessment two years ago was that it was likely that most of the warming since 1957 (a point of anomalous cold) was due to man. This claim was based on the weak argument that the current models used by the IPCC couldn't reproduce the warming from about 1978 to 1998 without some forcing, and that the only forcing that they could think of was man. Even this argument assumes that these models adequately deal with natural internal variability—that is, such naturally occurring cycles as El Nino, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, etc.

There are quite a few papers in the literature that also point to the absence of positive feedbacks. The implied low sensitivity is entirely compatible with the small warming that has been observed. So how do models with high sensitivity manage to simulate the currently small response to a forcing that is almost as large as a doubling of CO2? Jeff Kiehl notes in a 2007 article from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the models use another quantity that the IPCC lists as poorly known (namely aerosols) to arbitrarily cancel as much greenhouse warming as needed to match the data, with each model choosing a different degree of cancellation according to the sensitivity of that model.

What does all this have to do with climate catastrophe? The answer brings us to a scandal that is, in my opinion, considerably greater than that implied in the hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit (though perhaps not as bad as their destruction of raw data): namely the suggestion that the very existence of warming or of the greenhouse effect is tantamount to catastrophe. This is the grossest of "bait and switch" scams. It is only such a scam that lends importance to the machinations in the emails designed to nudge temperatures a few tenths of a degree.

The notion that the earth's climate is dominated by positive feedbacks is intuitively implausible, and the history of the earth's climate offers some guidance on this matter. About 2.5 billion years ago, the sun was 20%-30% less bright than now (compare this with the 2% perturbation that a doubling of CO2 would produce), and yet the evidence is that the oceans were unfrozen at the time, and that temperatures might not have been very different from today's. Carl Sagan in the 1970s referred to this as the "Early Faint Sun Paradox."

For more than 30 years there have been attempts to resolve the paradox with greenhouse gases. Some have suggested CO2—but the amount needed was thousands of times greater than present levels and incompatible with geological evidence. Methane also proved unlikely. It turns out that increased thin cirrus cloud coverage in the tropics readily resolves the paradox—but only if the clouds constitute a negative feedback. In present terms this means that they would diminish rather than enhance the impact of CO2.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574567423917025400.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Freeing Energy Policy From The Climate Change Debate

The 20-year effort by environmentalists to establish climate science as the primary basis for far-reaching action to decarbonize the global energy economy today lies in ruins. Backlash in reaction to “Climategate” and recent controversies involving the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s 2007 assessment report are but the latest evidence that such efforts have evidently failed.

http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2257

Study shows CFCs, cosmic rays major culprits for global warming

Cosmic rays and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), both already implicated in depleting the Earth's ozone layer, are also responsible for changes in the global climate, a University of Waterloo scientist reports in a new peer-reviewed paper.

In his paper, Qing-Bin Lu, a professor of physics and astronomy, shows how CFCs - compounds once widely used as refrigerants - and cosmic rays - energy particles originating in outer space - are mostly to blame for climate change, rather than carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. His paper, derived from observations of satellite, ground-based and balloon measurements as well as an innovative use of an established mechanism, was published online in the prestigious journal Physics Reports.

"My findings do not agree with the climate models that conventionally thought that greenhouse gases, mainly CO2, are the major culprits for the global warming seen in the late 20th century," Lu said. "Instead, the observed data show that CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays most likely caused both the Antarctic ozone hole and global warming. These findings are totally unexpected and striking, as I was focused on studying the mechanism for the formation of the ozone hole, rather than global warming."

http://insciences.org/article.php?article_id=8012

Climate change data dumped

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece

November 1st, 2009 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

Despite the fact that the magnitude of anthropogenic global warming depends mostly upon the strengths of feedbacks in the climate system, there is no known way to actually measure those feedbacks from observational data.

The IPCC has admitted as much on p. 640 of the IPCC AR4 report, at the end of section 8.6, which is entitled Climate Sensitivity and Feedbacks:

A number of diagnostic tests have been proposed…but few of them have been applied to a majority of the models currently in use. Moreover, it is not yet clear which tests are critical for constraining future projections (of warming). Consequently, a set of model metrics that might be used to narrow the range of plausible climate change feedbacks and climate sensitivity has yet to be developed.

.....

But without accurate long-term measurements of global cloud cover changes, we might never know to what extent global warming is simply a manifestation of natural climate variability, or whether cloud feedbacks are positive or negative. And without direct evidence, the IPCC can conveniently point to carbon dioxide change as the culprit. But this explanation seems rather anthropocentric to me, since it is easier for humans to keep track of global carbon dioxide changes than cloud changes.

Also, the IPCC can conveniently (and truthfully) claim that the behavior of their models is broadly “consistent with” the observed behavior of the real climate system. Unfortunately, this is then misinterpreted by the public, politicians, and policymakers as a claim that the amount of warming those models produce (a direct result of feedback) has been tested, which is not true.

As the IPCC has admitted, no one has yet figured out how to perform such a test. And until such a test is devised, the warming estimates produced by the IPCC’s twenty-something climate models are little more than educated guesses. It verges on scientific malpractice that politicians and the media continue to portray the models as accurate in this regard, without any objections from the scientists who should know better.

http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/11/in-their-own-words-the-ipcc-on-climate-feedbacks/

Five Reasons Why Water Vapor Feedback Might Not Be Positive

September 14th, 2010 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

But when one looks at the details objectively, it is not so obvious that water vapor feedback in the context of long-term climate change is positive. Remember, it’s not the difference between warmer tropical air masses and cooler high-latitude air masses that will determine water vapor feedback…its how those air masses will each change over time in response to more carbon dioxide. Anything that alters precipitation processes during that process can cause either positive or negative water vapor feedback.

http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/09/five-reasons-why-water-vapor-feedback-might-not-be-positive

Global Warming Advocacy Science: A Cross Examination by Jason Scott Johnston who is the Robert G. Fuller, Jr. Professor of Law and Director, Program on Law, Environment and Economy of the University of Pennsylvania – Law School.

Legal scholarship has come to accept as true the various pronouncements of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other scientists who have been active in the movement for greenhouse gas (ghg) emission reductions to combat global warming. The only criticism that legal scholars have had of the story told by this group of activist scientists – what may be called the climate establishment – is that it is too conservative in not paying enough attention to possible catastrophic harm from potentially very high temperature increases.

This paper departs from such faith in the climate establishment by comparing the picture of climate science presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other global warming scientist advocates with the peer-edited scientific literature on climate change. A review of the peer-edited literature reveals a systematic tendency of the climate establishment to engage in a variety of stylized rhetorical techniques that seem to oversell what is actually known about climate change while concealing fundamental uncertainties and open questions regarding many of the key processes involved in climate change. Fundamental open questions include not only the size but the direction of feedback effects that are responsible for the bulk of the temperature increase predicted to result from atmospheric greenhouse gas increases: while climate models all presume that such feedback effects are on balance strongly positive, more and more peer-edited scientific papers seem to suggest that feedback effects may be small or even negative.

His short biographical vita reads

“Jason Scott Johnston has published dozens of articles in American law journals, such as the Yale Law Journal,and in peer-reviewed economics journals, such as the Journal of Law, Economics and Organization. He is currently working on books about the law and economics, corporate environmentalism, global warming policy, and the comparative law and economics of environmental federalism. He has served on the Board of Directors of the American Law and Economics Association and on the National Science Foundation’s Law and Social Science grant review panel. He won Penn Law’s Robert A. Gorman Award for Teaching Excellence in 2003.”

http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2010/05/21/a-new-paper-global-warming-advocacy-science-a-cross-examination-by-jason-scott-johnston/

Lindzen on negative climate feedback

From 1985 until 1989 the models and observations are more or less the same – they have, in fact, been tuned to be so. However, with the warming after 1989, the observations characteristically exceed 7 times the model values. Recall that if the observations were only 2-3 times what the models produce, it would correspond to no feedback. What we see is much more than this – implying strong negative feedback. Note that the ups and downs of both the observations and the model (forced by observed sea surface temperature) follow the ups and downs of temperature (not shown).

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/30/lindzen-on-negative-climate-feedback/

Håkan GruddDepartment of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, 10691 Stockholm, Sweden

The new data show generally higher temperature estimates than previous reconstructions based on Torneträsk tree-ring data. The late-twentieth century, however, is not exceptionally warm in the new record: On decadal-to-centennial timescales, periods around ad 750, 1000, 1400, and 1750 were equally warm, or warmer. The 200-year long warm period centered on ad1000 was significantly warmer than the late-twentieth century (p < 0.05) and is supported by other local and regional paleoclimate data. The new tree-ring evidence from Torneträsk suggests that this “Medieval Warm Period” in northern Fennoscandia was much warmer than previously recognized.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/8j71453650116753/?p=fcd6adbe04ff4cc29b7131b5184282eb&pi=0

CHILL: A reassessment of Global Warming

Although the world's climate has undergone many cyclical changes, the phrase 'climate change' has taken on a sinister meaning, implying catastrophe for humanity, ecology and the environment. We are told that we are responsible for this threat, and that we should act immediately to prevent it. But the apparent scientific consensus over the causes and effects of climate change is not what it appears. Chill is a critical survey of the subject by a committed environmentalist and scientist....

http://ethos-uk.com/publishing.html

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Chill-Reassessment-Global-Warming-Theory/dp/1905570198

“In fact global warming has stopped and a cooling is beginning. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth – quite the contrary. And this means that the projections of future climate are unreliable,” writes Henrik Svensmark.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/10/svensmark-global-warming-stopped-and-a-cooling-is-beginning-enjoy-global-warming-while-it-lasts/

The Gulf Stream does not appear to be slowing down, say US scientists who have used satellites to monitor tell-tale changes in the height of the sea.

Confirming work by other scientists using different methodologies, they found dramatic short-term variability but no longer-term trend.

A slow-down - dramatised in the movie The Day After Tomorrow - is projected by some models of climate change.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8589512.stm

SURFACE TEMPERATURE RECORDS: POLICY DRIVEN DECEPTION?

by Joseph D’Aleo & Anthony Watts | January 26, 2010

1. Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and unidirectionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant “global warming” in the 20th century.

2. All terrestrial surface-temperature databases exhibit very serious problems that render them useless for determining accurate long-term temperature trends.

3. All of the problems have skewed the data so as greatly to overstate observed warming both regionally and globally.

4. Global terrestrial temperature data are gravely compromised because more than three-quarters of the 6,000 stations that once existed are no longer reporting.

5. There has been a severe bias towards removing higher-altitude, higher-latitude, and rural stations, leading to a further serious overstatement of warming.

6. Contamination by urbanization, changes in land use, improper siting, and inadequately-calibrated instrument upgrades further overstates warming.

7. Numerous peer-reviewed papers in recent years have shown the overstatement of observed longer term warming is 30-50% from heat-island contamination alone.

8. Cherry-picking of observing sites combined with interpolation to vacant data grids may make heat-island bias greater than 50% of 20th-century warming.

9. In the oceans, data are missing and uncertainties are substantial. Comprehensive coverage has only been available since 2003, and shows no warming.

10. Satellite temperature monitoring has provided an alternative to terrestrial stations in compiling the global lower-troposphere temperature record. Their findings are increasingly diverging from the station-based constructions in a manner consistent with evidence of a warm bias in the surface temperature record.

11. NOAA and NASA, along with CRU, were the driving forces behind the systematic hyping of 20th-century “global warming”.

12. Changes have been made to alter the historical record to mask cyclical changes that could be readily explained by natural factors like multidecadal ocean and solar changes.

13. Global terrestrial data bases are seriously flawed and can no longer be trusted to assess climate trends or VALIDATE model forecasts.

14. An inclusive external assessment is essential of the surface temperature record of CRU, GISS and NCDC “chaired and paneled by mutually agreed to climate scientists who do not have a vested interest in the outcome of the evaluations.”

15. Reliance on the global data by both the UNIPCC and the US GCRP/CCSP also requires a full investigation and audit.

http://penoflight.com/climatebuzz/?p=723

It's about to get colder (and the models don't work)

Forecasts of climate change are about to go seriously out of kilter. One of the world's top climate modellers said Thursday we could be about to enter "one or even two decades during which temperatures cool.

"People will say this is global warming disappearing," he told more than 1500 of the world's top climate scientists gathering in Geneva at the UN's World Climate Conference.

"I am not one of the sceptics," insisted Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, Germany. "However, we have to ask the nasty questions ourselves or other people will do it."

Few climate scientists go as far as Latif, an author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But more and more agree that the short-term prognosis for climate change is much less certain than once thought.

Nature vs humans

This is bad timing. The UN's World Meteorological Organization called the conference in order to draft a global plan for providing "climate services" to the world: that is, to deliver climate predictions useful to everyone from farmers worried about the next rainy season to doctors trying to predict malaria epidemics and builders of dams, roads and other infrastructure who need to assess the risk of floods and droughts 30 years hence.

But some of the climate scientists gathered in Geneva to discuss how this might be done admitted that, on such timescales, natural variability is at least as important as the long-term climate changes from global warming. "In many ways we know more about what will happen in the 2050s than next year," said Vicky Pope from the UK Met Office.

Cold Atlantic

Latif predicted that in the next few years a natural cooling trend would dominate over warming caused by humans. The cooling would be down to cyclical changes to ocean currents and temperatures in the North Atlantic, a feature known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO).

Breaking with climate-change orthodoxy, he said NAO cycles were probably responsible for some of the strong global warming seen in the past three decades. "But how much? The jury is still out," he told the conference. The NAO is now moving into a colder phase.

Latif said NAO cycles also explained the recent recovery of the Sahel region of Africa from the droughts of the 1970s and 1980s. James Murphy, head of climate prediction at the Met Office, agreed and linked the NAO to Indian monsoons, Atlantic hurricanes and sea ice in the Arctic. "The oceans are key to decadal natural variability," he said.

Another favourite climate nostrum was upturned when Pope warned that the dramatic Arctic ice loss in recent summers was partly a product of natural cycles rather than global warming. Preliminary reports suggest there has been much less melting this year than in 2007 or 2008.

In candid mood, climate scientists avoided blaming nature for their faltering predictions, however. "Model biases are also still a serious problem. We have a long way to go to get them right. They are hurting our forecasts," said Tim Stockdale of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, UK.

The world may badly want reliable forecasts of future climate. But such predictions are proving as elusive as the perfect weather forecast.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17742-worlds-climate-could-cool-first-warm-later.html

What happened to global warming - BBC?

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8299079.stm

Dr. Kevin Trenberth, Head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research

I have often seen references to predictions of future climate by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), presumably through the IPCC assessments (the various chapters in the recently completedWorking Group I Fourth Assessment report ican be accessed through this listing). In fact, since the last report it is also often stated that the science is settled or done and now is the time for action.

In fact there are no predictions by IPCC at all. And there never have been. The IPCC instead proffers “what if” projections of future climate that correspond to certain emissions scenarios. There are a number of assumptions that go into these emissions scenarios. They are intended to cover a range of possible self consistent “story lines” that then provide decision makers with information about which paths might be more desirable. But they do not consider many things like the recovery of the ozone layer, for instance, or observed trends in forcing agents. There is no estimate, even probabilistically, as to the likelihood of any emissions scenario and no best guess.

Even if there were, the projections are based on model results that provide differences of the future climate relative to that today. None of the models used by IPCC are initialized to the observed state and none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed climate. In particular, the state of the oceans, sea ice, and soil moisture has no relationship to the observed state at any recent time in any of the IPCC models. There is neither an El Niño sequence nor any Pacific Decadal Oscillation that replicates the recent past; yet these are critical modes of variability that affect Pacific rim countries and beyond. The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, that may depend on the thermohaline circulation and thus ocean currents in the Atlantic, is not set up to match today’s state, but it is a critical component of the Atlantic hurricanes and it undoubtedly affects forecasts for the next decade from Brazil to Europe. Moreover, the starting climate state in several of the models may depart significantly from the real climate owing to model errors. I postulate that regional climate change is impossible to deal with properly unless the models are initialized.

http://blogs.nature.com/climatefeedback/2007/06/predictions_of_climate.html

BBC didn't report on conference. Richard Black's comment

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/richardblack/2009/09/the_power_of_prophesy.html#comments

'Global warming: Our best guess is likely wrong'

A new peer-reviewed study may shake the foundation upon which man-made global warming fears are based. The new study discovered "something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models."

The study, which was published on July 14, 2009 in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Geoscience, found CO2 was not to blame for a major ancient global warming period and instead found “unknown processes accounted for much of warming in the ancient hot spell.” The press release for the study was headlined: "Global warming: Our best guess is likely wrong."

"In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record," said oceanographer Gerald Dickens, a co-author of the study and professor of Earth science at Rice University. "There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models."

http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=3718

Why the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets are Not Collapsing

Cliff Ollier
School of Earth and Geographical Sciences, The University of
Western Australia, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia.

Colin Pain
Canberra City ACT 2601, Australia.

Global warming alarmists have suggested that the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica may collapse, causing disastrous sea level rise. This idea is based on the concept of an ice sheet sliding down an inclined plane on a base lubricated by meltwater, which is itself increasing because of global warming.

In reality the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets occupy deep basins, and cannot slide down a plane. Furthermore glacial flow depends on stress (including the important yield stress) as well as temperature, and much of the ice sheets are well below melting point.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/08/27/why-the-greenland-and-antarctic-ice-sheets-are-not-collapsing/

Resisting climate hysteria

by Richard S. Lindzen - Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at MIT

July 26, 2009

A Case Against Precipitous Climate Action

http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2009/07/resisting-climate-hysteria

Petitioning for a revised statement on climate change

S. Fred Singer¹, Hal Lewis², Will Happer³, Larry Gould⁴, Roger Cohen⁵ & Robert H. Austin⁶

University of Virginia
University of California, Santa Barbara
Princeton University
University of Hartford
Durango, Colorado
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA
Email: austin@princeton.edu

We write in response to your issue discussing "the coming climate crunch", including the Editorial 'Time to act' (Nature 458, 1077–1078; 2009).

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v460/n7254/full/460457b.html

The American Physical Society

Climate alarmism is a particularly embarrassing attitude for professional institutions that should represent disciplines with very high intellectual standards because climate alarmism is associated with extremely poor intellectual (and ethical) standards, besides other negative characteristics.

The American Physical Society (APS) was therefore embarrassed on November 18th, 2007 when its bodies approved an alarmist statement that was much more constructive and issue-oriented than the statements of many institutions outside physics but it was still a scientists' variation of the same blinded, biased, irrational hysteria.

It shouldn't be surprising that members around Will Happer, a renowned Princeton physicist (see the picture), wrote an

Open Letter to the American Physical Society (click)

where they mention that the climate has always been changing and warming and trace gases have many positive effects, according to scientific literature. The proposed new statement also discusses the unreliability of the existing climate models and urges the scientists to investigate all these effects objectively, and to study technological options related to the climate that are independent of the cause.

The petition has been signed by

more than 50 well-known past and current APS members, including a Nobel prize winner.

Add your name if you are one, too.

Happily, Nature just published a letter from six members that informs that the APS is currently reviewing its 2007 statement:

Petitioning for a revised statement on climate change

By S. Fred Singer, Hal Lewis, Will Happer, Larry Gould, Roger Cohen & Robert H. Austin

We write in response to your issue discussing "the coming climate crunch", including the Editorial 'Time to act' (Nature 458, 10771078; 2009). We feel it is alarmist.

We are among more than 50 current and former members of the American Physical Society (APS) who have signed an open letter to the APS Council this month, calling for a reconsideration of its November 2007 policy statement on climate change (see open letter at http://tinyurl.com/lg266u; APS statement at http://tinyurl.com/56zqxr). The letter proposes an alternative statement, which the signatories believe to be a more accurate representation of the current scientific evidence. It requests that an objective scientific process be established, devoid of political or financial agendas, to help prevent subversion of the scientific process and the intolerance towards scientific disagreement that pervades the climate issue.

On 1 May 2009, the APS Council decided to review its current statement via a high-level subcommittee of respected senior scientists. We applaud this decision. It is the first such reappraisal by a major scientific professional society that we are aware of, and we hope it will lead to meaningful change that reflects a more balanced view of climate-change issues.

http://motls.blogspot.com/2009/07/aps-is-reviewing-its-statements-on.html

US government senate committee minority report (2008)

"I am a skeptic…Global warming has become a new religion." - Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever.

"Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly….As a scientist I remain skeptical." - Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a PhD in meteorology and formerly of NASA who has authored more than 190 studies and has been called "among the most preeminent scientists of the last 100 years."

Warming fears are the "worst scientific scandal in the history…When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists." - UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist.

"The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn't listen to others. It doesn't have open minds… I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by people who are not geologists," - Indian geologist Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia at Punjab University and a board member of the UN-supported International Year of the Planet.

"The models and forecasts of the UN IPCC "are incorrect because they only are based on mathematical models and presented results at scenarios that do not include, for example, solar activity." - Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera, a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico

"It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don't buy into anthropogenic global warming." - U.S Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA.

"Even doubling or tripling the amount of carbon dioxide will virtually have little impact, as water vapour and water condensed on particles as clouds dominate the worldwide scene and always will." – . Geoffrey G. Duffy, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering of the University of Auckland, NZ.

"After reading [UN IPCC chairman] Pachauri's asinine comment [comparing skeptics to] Flat Earthers, it's hard to remain quiet." - Climate statistician Dr. William M. Briggs, who specializes in the statistics of forecast evaluation, serves on the American Meteorological Society's Probability and Statistics Committee and is an Associate Editor of Monthly Weather Review.

"For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?" - Geologist Dr. David Gee the chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress who has authored 130 plus peer reviewed papers, and is currently at Uppsala University in Sweden.

"Gore prompted me to start delving into the science again and I quickly found myself solidly in the skeptic camp…Climate models can at best be useful for explaining climate changes after the fact." - Meteorologist Hajo Smit of Holland, who reversed his belief in man-made warming to become a skeptic, is a former member of the Dutch UN IPCC committee.

"Many [scientists] are now searching for a way to back out quietly (from promoting warming fears), without having their professional careers ruined." - Atmospheric physicist James A. Peden, formerly of the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh.

"Creating an ideology pegged to carbon dioxide is a dangerous nonsense…The present alarm on climate change is an instrument of social control, a pretext for major businesses and political battle. It became an ideology, which is concerning." - Environmental Scientist Professor Delgado Domingos of Portugal, the founder of the Numerical Weather Forecast group, has more than 150 published articles.

"CO2 emissions make absolutely no difference one way or another….Every scientist knows this, but it doesn't pay to say so…Global warming, as a political vehicle, keeps Europeans in the driver's seat and developing nations walking barefoot." - Dr. Takeda Kunihiko, vice-chancellor of the Institute of Science and Technology Research at Chubu University in Japan.

"The [global warming] scaremongering has its justification in the fact that it is something that generates funds." - Award-winning Paleontologist Dr. Eduardo Tonni, of the Committee for Scientific Research in Buenos Aires and head of the Paleontology Department at the University of La Plata. # #

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=2158072e-802a-23ad-45f0-274616db87e6

There is a seperate page for details of the senate committee here

*************

Mike Hulme

In the second mail Pachauri invites Hulme to a conference, initiating a relationship with Hulme that will culminate in Pachauri and Hulme working together to on UEA’s effort to win a government bid on the creation of a climate change center in England, as detailed in the third mail in the stack. That effort results in the founding of the Tyndall Centre, a center named no less than 11 times in the mails.

The interests of Hulme and Pachauri are clear. Use the science arm at CRU to drive conclusions in the IPCC that will drive funding into Tyndall and drive money into TERI, Pachauri’s organization, and CRU. The importance of funding should not be underestimated. Money works to corrupt science, not by changing the answer, but by changing the questions that get asked

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/26/mosher-the-hackers/

Mike Hulme is less than enthusiastic about the efficacy of computer models.

http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/page/195/media-gallery.htm

WSJ

Science never writes closed textbooks. It does not offer us a holy scripture, infallible and complete. This is especially the case with the science of climate, a complex system of enormous scale, at every turn influenced by human contingencies. Yes, science has clearly revealed that humans are influencing global climate and will continue to do so, but we don't know the full scale of the risks involved, nor how rapidly they will evolve, nor indeed—with clear insight—the relative roles of all the forcing agents involved at different scales.

Similarly, we endow analyses about the economics of climate change with too much scientific authority. Yes, we know there is a cascade of costs involved in mitigating, adapting to or ignoring climate change, but many of these costs are heavily influenced by ethical judgements about how we value things, now and in the future. These are judgments that science cannot prescribe..

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107104574571613215771336.html

It is also possible that the institutional innovation that has been the I.P.C.C. has run its course. Yes, there will be an AR5 but for what purpose? The I.P.C.C. itself, through its structural tendency to politicize climate change science, has perhaps helped to foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production - just at a time when a globalizing and wired cosmopolitan culture is demanding of science something much more open and inclusive.

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/27/a-climate-scientist-on-climate-skeptics/#more-11377

UEA Climate Scientist: “possible that…I.P.C.C. has run its course”

This is a surprise. Professor Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia suggests that the “I.P.C.C. has run its course”. I agree with him. We really need to remove a wholly political organization, the United Nations, from science.

Republished from New York Times Reporter Andrew Revkin’s Dot Earth:

Dot Earth: Insights from Mike Hulme at the University of East Anglia, which was the source of the disclosed files. Hulme, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia and author of “ Why We Disagree About Climate Change,” has weighed in with these thoughts about the significance of the leaked files and emails. In November 2009, Hulme was listed as “the 10th most cited author in the world in the field of climate change, between 1999 and 2009. (ScienceWatch, Nov/Dec 2009, see Table 2).

Hulme Key Excerpt:

[Upcoming UN climate conference in Copenhagen] “is about raw politics, not about the politics of science. [...] It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science. It is also possible that the institutional innovation that has been the I.P.C.C. has run its course. Yes, there will be an AR5 but for what purpose? The I.P.C.C. itself, through its structural tendency to politicize climate change science, has perhaps helped to foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production – just at a time when a globalizing and wired cosmopolitan culture is demanding of science something much more open and inclusive.

Full Hulme Statement:

The key lesson to be learned is that not only must scientific knowledge about climate change be publicly owned — the I.P.C.C. does a fairly good job of this according to its own terms — but the very practices of scientific enquiry must also be publicly owned, in the sense of being open and trusted. From outside, and even to the neutral, the attitudes revealed in the emails do not look good. To those with bigger axes to grind it is just what they wanted to find.

This will blow its course soon in the conventional media without making too much difference to Copenhagen — after all, COP15 is about raw politics, not about the politics of science. But in the Internet worlds of deliberation and in the ‘mood’ of public debate about the trustworthiness of climate science, the reverberations of this episode will live on long beyond COP15. Climate scientists will have to work harder to earn the warranted trust of the public – and maybe that is no bad thing.

But this episode might signify something more in the unfolding story of climate change. This event might signal a crack that allows for processes of re-structuring scientific knowledge about climate change. It is possible that some areas of climate science has become sclerotic. It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.

It is also possible that the institutional innovation that has been the I.P.C.C. has run its course. Yes, there will be an AR5 but for what purpose? The I.P.C.C. itself, through its structural tendency to politicize climate change science, has perhaps helped to foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production – just at a time when a globalizing and wired cosmopolitan culture is demanding of science something much more open and inclusive

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/27/uea-climate-scientist-possible-that-i-p-c-c-has-run-its-course/

Founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change: ‘Time to ditch consensus’

Moreover, says Hulme, no one is even quite sure what sort of knowledge it is that the IPCC, as a “boundary organisation” – part science, part politics - actually produces. Nor how the world at large interprets that hybrid knowledge. Even more fundamentally, he says, it is far from clear that the IPCC has actually allowed us to do “better science”:

“Or has it actually narrowed the way we frame and ask questions in climate change research?" Hulme wonders

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/06/mike_hulme_interview/print.html

We can't solve global warming says climate change professor

Can we solve climate change? No we can't, according to a leading climate change professor.

Mike Hulme professor of Climate Change at East Anglia University reckons we are heading up a "dead end" by putting climate change science at the top of the political agenda.
...
"It is rather hubristic to think we can actually control climate. Climate change is the new human condition we have to live with. Let's accept this is the new reality.

"Don't construct the problem in a way which means we cannot have a solution which is the way I think we have got it constructed at the moment."

..........

"We shouldn't be framing climate change as the problem that we have to solve above all others. If we do that we have constructed an unsolvable dilemma because of the multiple reasons why we disagree about climate change. We will never converge on a set of solutions

http://blogs.mirror.co.uk/science/2009/04/we-cant-solve-global-warming-s.html

In this BBC interview, Professor Mike Hulme of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change says in reply to the proposition that "In the worst case scenario, we'll perish". "Well yes, that's an interpretation or a judgement on the evidence; the evidence from science is very clear we are altering climate, quite what the significance is, of course a lot of other factors come into play"

"If we think we can, through some massive global effort, all converge and work on the same side to bring climate under human control then I think actually we're doomed for failure.

mp3

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/sealed/gw/humeradio4.mp3

Full interview

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8022000/8022297.stm

Mike Hulme is driven to despair by peer review idiots.

Perhaps the most surprising thing to hear from a climate scientist writing about climate change is that climate science has for too long had the monopoly in climate change debates. When we spoke to him on the phone, Hulme cited as evidence the 2007 protests against Heathrow’s third runway, where marchers made their case by waving a research paper at the TV cameras under a banner bearing the slogan “We are armed only with peer reviewed science”. [The paper wasn't actually peer-reviewed science - see Bootnote]

“To me, that's the most dispiriting position,” says Hulme. “For these people who feel so passionately about this, their ultimate authority is a report from a group of scientists, and they’re saying ‘this is where we stand, forget about our moral concerns, forget about our ethical positions, forget about whether we are Right, Left or centre, forget about whether we are Christians or Buddists, no, none of that matters.’ The only thing that matters is that they’re holding a report from peer-reviewed science that in itself justifies their position."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/06/mike_hulme_interview/

What was the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference really about?
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/what-was-the-copenhagen-climate-change-conference-really-about-5055

His book is here

http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9780521727327

Climate change is telling the story of an idea and how that idea is changing the way in which our societies think, feel, interpret and act. And therefore climate change is extending itself well beyond simply the description of change in physical properties in our world. ...

I argue that in each of seven domains, ... disagreement is embedded in our discourse about climate change. In science we disagree because we have different ways of constituting what is valid knowledge. When it comes to economics, ... we disagree about what and why we value people and things both today and in the future.

Religion as well actually leads us to see disagreement in our discourse around climate change, because we have different ways of recognizing divine authority and the relationship between different types of revelations and the way in which our morality is constructed. When it comes to risk and our perception of risk, again this is very self evident, applying across a whole variety of risk issues, how we perceive the putative risks of climate change are understood extremely differently both within and between societies. The way in which climate change is communicated, ... the reframing of climate change opens divergence rather than convergence.

Sixthly, ... we have different ways of conceptualizing or defining or measuring human wellbeing. What is the ultimate objective of development around the world — what constitutes wellbeing? And then finally ... governance ... we have different ways in which the contract between the state and the citizen is understood.

From the concluding chapter of Hulme's new book, Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity:

The function of climate change I suggest, is not as a lower-case environmental phenomenon to be solved. Solving climate change should not be the focus of our efforts any more than we should be ‘solving’ the idea of human rights or liberal democracy. It really is not about stopping climate chaos. Instead, we need to see how we can use the idea of climate change – the matrix of ecological functions, power relationships, cultural discourses and materials flows that climate change reveals – to rethink how we take forward our political, social, economic and personal projects over the decades to come.

We should use climate change both as a magnifying glass and as a mirror. … Our engagement with climate change and the disagreements that it spawns should always be a form of enlightenment.

http://www.peopleandplace.net/media_library/audio/2009/6/10/mike_hulme_why_we_disagree_about_climate_change

********

The long-term, global-mean cooling of the lower stratosphere stems from two downward steps in temperature, both of which are coincident with the cessation of transient warming after the volcanic eruptions of El Chichón and Mount Pinatubo

http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2008JCLI2482.1

The cooling inbetween volcanic events doesn't happen - it is not CO2, as shown here:

http://climatechangeskeptic.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/ls-global-edited.jpg

In fact, since 1996, the stratosphere has been warming, going directly against AGW theory:

Some important recent findings in climate studies
are the warming trend in the troposphere and the
cooling trend in the stratosphere. However, the evidence
for the cooling trend in the stratosphere may need to be
revisited.

This study presents evidence that the stratosphere
is slightly warming since 1996

http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/sola/5/0/53/_pdf

Roger Pielke Snr and Gavin Schmidt wildly differing on basic issues.

http://www.realclimate.org/?comments_popup=4284

Darrel Ince, a professor of computing at the Open University

Many climate scientists have refused to publish their computer programs. I suggest is that this is both unscientific behaviour and, equally importantly, ignores a major problem: that scientific software has got a poor reputation for error.

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2010/2/5/darrel-ince-gets-it.html

NASA temperature fiddle 1999 and 2008 graphs compared

http://zapruder.nl/images/uploads/screenhunter3qk7.gif

The Folly of ‘Magical Solutions’For Targeting Carbon Emissions

Setting unattainable emissions targets is not a policy — it’s an act of wishful thinking, argues one political scientist. Instead, governments and society should focus money and attention on workable solutions for improving energy efficiency and de-carbonizing our economies.

The U.K. targets are a perfect example of what happens when symbols become disconnected from reality. To achieve a 34 percent reduction from 1990 emissions by 2022 while maintaining modest economic growth would require that the U.K. decarbonize its economy to the level of France by about 2016. In more concrete terms, Britain would have to achieve the equivalent of deploying about 30 new nuclear power plants in the next six years, just to get part way to its target.

Roger A. Pielke, Jr. is a professor in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Colorado and a fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES).

http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2175

Nature not man responsible for recent global warming

Three Australasian researchers have shown that natural forces are the dominant influence on climate, in a study just published in the highly-regarded Journal of Geophysical Research. According to this study little or none of the late 20th century global warming and cooling can be attributed to human activity.

The research, by Chris de Freitas, a climate scientist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, John McLean (Melbourne) and Bob Carter (James Cook University), finds that the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a key indicator of global atmospheric temperatures seven months later. As an additional influence, intermittent volcanic activity injects cooling aerosols into the atmosphere and produces significant cooling.

"The surge in global temperatures since 1977 can be attributed to a 1976 climate shift in the Pacific Ocean that made warming El Niño conditions more likely than they were over the previous 30 years and cooling La Niña conditions less likely" says corresponding author de Freitas.

"We have shown that internal global climate-system variability accounts for at least 80% of the observed global climate variation over the past half-century. It may even be more if the period of influence of major volcanoes can be more clearly identified and the corresponding data excluded from the analysis.”

http://tinyurl.com/m237h6

Abstract

Influence of the Southern Oscillation on tropospheric temperature

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2008JD011637.shtml

Chris de Freitas is an Associate Professor in the School of Geography, Geology and Environmental Science at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

There is little doubt that average annual global temperature has been generally trending upwards in line with the expectations of many climate scientists. The cause, however, is debatable since the trend started before modern industrialisation began pumping millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into Earth's atmosphere.

From 1940 to 1980 during the post World War II industrial boom when carbon dioxide increased rapidly, there were 40 years of global cooling.

On the other hand, there was a distinct global warm period in mediaeval times when carbon dioxide levels were much lower than they are now.

Carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is currently higher than at any time in the past 600,000 years, yet global temperatures were much higher during all the major warm interglacial periods that occurred during this time, despite much lower levels of carbon dioxide.

From all this it is clear that warming and carbon dioxide are not well correlated.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=10569629&pnum=0

How's the weather been in Central Park for the last century? The story is one of stable temps and unstable "adjustments" by climate scientists keen to prove a point

The Climate Change Climate Change

Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as "deniers." The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S. In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country's new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country's weeks-old cap-and-trade program.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124597505076157449.html

A Layman’s Explanation of Why Global Warming Predictions by Climate Models are Wrong (Spencer)

http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/05/a-layman%e2%80%99s-explanation-of-why-global-warming-predictions-by-climate-models-are-wrong/

Examiner.com's exclusive global warming debates: Roger Pielke Sr

http://www.examiner.com/x-9111-SF-Environmental-Policy-Examiner~y2009m6d2-Examinercoms-exclusive-global-warming-debates-Roger-Pielke-Sr-part-1

Environmental Geology - Khilyuk and Chilingar

“the global warming observed during the latest 150 years is just a short episode in the geologic history. The current global warming is most likely a combined effect of increased solar and tectonic activities and cannot be attributed to the increased anthropogenic impact on the atmosphere. Humans may be responsible for less than 0.01°C (of approximately 0.56°C (1°F) total average atmospheric heating during the last century)”. Holy cow, can you imagine the letters and e-mails they must have received in response to that conclusion? They even show that over the last 3,000 years, the earth has cooled, or if you look just at the last 1,000 years, the earth has been cooling as well (the earth was in the Medieval Warm Period 1,000 years ago).

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2006/12/01/are-humans-involved-in-global-warming/#more-199

Freeman Dyson NYT

Which makes Dyson something far more formidable than just the latest peevish right-wing climate-change denier. Dyson is a scientist whose intelligence is revered by other scientists — William Press, former deputy director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and now a professor of computer science at the University of Texas, calls him “infinitely smart.” Dyson — a mathematics prodigy who came to this country at 23 and right away contributed seminal work to physics by unifying quantum and electrodynamic theory — not only did path-breaking science of his own; he also witnessed the development of modern physics, thinking alongside most of the luminous figures of the age, including Einstein, Richard Feynman, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Witten, the “high priest of string theory” whose office at the institute is just across the hall from Dyson’s. Yet instead of hewing to that fundamental field, Dyson chose to pursue broader and more unusual pursuits than most physicists — and has lived a more original life.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

Dyson - information for models incomplete

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTSxubKfTBU&feature=player_embedded

Freeman Dyson Takes On The Climate Establishment

Syukuro Manabe, right here in Princeton, was the first person who did climate models with enhanced carbon dioxide and they were excellent models. And he used to say very firmly that these models are very good tools for understanding climate, but they are not good tools for predicting climate. I think that’s absolutely right. They are models, but they don’t pretend to be the real world. They are purely fluid dynamics. You can learn a lot from them, but you cannot learn what’s going to happen 10 years from now.

What’s wrong with the models. I mean, I haven’t examined them in detail, (but) I know roughly what’s in them. And the basic problem is that in the case of climate, very small structures, like clouds, dominate. And you cannot model them in any realistic way. They are far too small and too diverse.

http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2151

Freeman Dyson Edge

My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysonf07/dysonf07_index.html

Dyson is strongly critical of Hansen

Freeman Dyson is strongly critical of Hansen's climate-change activism. "The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers... Hansen has turned his science into ideology.” Dyson "doesn’t know what he’s talking about", Hansen responded. "He should first do his homework

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hansen#Charges_of_censorship

Award-winning NASA Astronaut and Physicist Walter Cunningham of NASA’s Apollo 7 also recently chastised Hansen. “Hansen is a political activist who spreads fear even when NASA’s own data contradict him,” Cunningham wrote in an essay in the July/August 2008 issue of Launch Magazine. “NASA should be at the forefront in the collection of scientific evidence and debunking the current hysteria over human-caused, or Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). Unfortunately, it is becoming just another agency caught up in the politics of global warming, or worse, politicized science,” Cunningham wrote.

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=1A5E6E32-802A-23AD-40ED-ECD53CD3D320

The prospect of Gaian decimation

Dr Willem de Lange is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Waikato, specialising in coastal oceanography

What does this have to do with the 20^th Century? Well the observed climate change is consistent with variations in albedo and associated ocean warming and cooling, suggesting that it is just a natural cycle. This pattern of behaviour is evident in palaeoclimate data for most of the last 10,000 years. None of this is simulated in climate models. Instead they focus on the 20^th Century increase in CO₂, CH₄ and a few other greenhouse gases. The increasing concentrations correlate well with global temperature. This is taken as proof that the greenhouse effect is driving temperature.

http://www.nzcpr.com/guest147.htm

Bad data

http://surfacestations.org/

Bad Science Blog

Egged on by a rather fanciful press release from the University of Southern California media office, and a quote from a sociologist, the story was unstoppable.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/18/bad-science-cancer-jabs-daily-mail

March 16th, 2009 by Warwick Hughes

So sceptics have been correct for decades.

Yes you have to pinch yourself, the old canard so long clung to by the IPCC, that the urban influence in large area gridded data is “an order of magnitude less than the warming seen on a century timescale” is now severely compromised.

The IPCC drew that conclusion from the Jones et al 1990 Letter to Nature which examined temperature data from regions in Eastern Australia, Western USSR and Eastern China, to conclude that “In none of the three regions studied is there any indication of significant urban influence..” That has led to the IPCC claim that for decades, urban warming is less than 0.05 per century.

Now Jones et al 2008 are saying in their Abstract, “Urban-related warming over China is shown to be about 0.1 degree per decade, hey that equates to a degree per century. Huge.

http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=204

Global surface temperature trends, based on land and marine data, show warming of about 0.8°C over the last 100 years. This rate of warming is sometimes questioned because of the existence of well-known Urban Heat Islands (UHIs). We show examples of the UHIs at London and Vienna, where city center sites are warmer than surrounding rural locations. Both of these UHIs however do not contribute to warming trends over the 20th century because the influences of the cities on surface temperatures have not changed over this time. In the main part of the paper, for China, we compare a new homogenized station data set with gridded temperature products and attempt to assess possible urban influences using sea surface temperature (SST) data sets for the area east of the Chinese mainland. We show that all the land-based data sets for China agree exceptionally well and that their residual warming compared to the SST series since 1951 is relatively small compared to the large-scale warming. Urban-related warming over China is shown to be about 0.1°C decade^-1 over the period 1951–2004, with true climatic warming accounting for 0.81°C over this period.

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2008/2008JD009916.shtml

Kafka at Albany

Dr Keenan alleged that in work that has come to be widely cited in climate studies, work that included the collation of data from temperature measuring stations in China, Professor Wang made statements that "cannot be true and could not be in error by accident. The statements are fabricated." ......

But Doug Keenan is a tenacious man. In July 2008, after being refused sight of the report, he submitted a formal complaint to the Public Integrity Bureau at the Office of the Attorney General of New York State, alleging criminal fraud . In this complaint

http://freebornjohn.blogspot.com/2009/03/kafka-at-albany.html

Doug Keenan's report (which is peer reviewed)

The Fraud Allegation Against Wei-Chyung Wang

One of the main studies cited by the report to justify that conclusion substantially relies on the claims that Wang fabricated—indeed, Wang is a co-author of the study.The study is authored by Jones et al. (1990). It treats not only China (where Wangwas responsible for supplying the data), but also Russia and Australia (where Wanghad no responsibility). The regions of Russia and Australia are not considered here,but there is some evidence that they too are problematic.4

http://www.informath.org/pubs/EnE07a.pdf

Chinese climate scientists tactfully tell the IPCC that surface air temperature (SAT) trends over north China include a large component of urban warming

http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=203

Allegations of fraud at Albany - the Wang case

In the absence of any explanation to the contrary, it seems that the methodology for station selection as described in these two publications was false or at best grossly misleading.

Wang maintains that hard copy records do exist detailing the location of stations selected by himself outwith the published methodology. However the refusal to clarify "method" is inappropriate and a form of misconduct in and of itself. It does not lend credence to Wang's assertion that fraud did not take place. It would also be necessary to see records of stations that were not selected, in order to confirm that selection was indeed random, and only "on the basis of station history".

The University at Albany is in a difficult position.

If the University received such records as part of the supposed misconduct investigation, then they could easily resolve the problem by making them available to the scientific community and to readers.

If the University does not have such records then they have been complicit in misconduct and in coverup of misconduct.
If the University at Albany does have such records, but such records are not in accordance with the stated methodology of the publications, then the University has more serious difficulties.
"
Investigations" of scientific misconduct should themselves align with the usual principles of scientific discourse (open discussion, honesty, transparency of method, public disclosure of evidence, open public analysis and public discussion and reasoning underlying any conclusion). This was not the case at the University at Albany. When you see universities reluctant to investigate things properly, it provides reasonable evidence that they really don't want to investigate things properly.

http://scientific-misconduct.blogspot.com/2009/05/allegations-of-fraud-at-albany-wang.html

Stem cell experts say they believe a small group of scientists is effectively vetoing high quality science from publication in journals.

In some cases they say it might be done to deliberately stifle research that is in competition with their own.

It has also emerged that 14 leading stem cell researchers have written an open letter to journal editors in order to highlight their dissatisfaction.

The most important point to remember about Plimer is that he is Australia's most eminent geologist

Much of what we have read about climate change, he argues, is rubbish, especially the computer modelling on which much current scientific opinion is based, which he describes as "primitive". Errors and distortions in computer modelling will be exposed in time. (As if on cue, the United Nations' peak scientific body on climate change was obliged to make an embarrassing admission last week that some of its computers models were wrong.)

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/beware-the-climate-of-conformity-20090412-a3ya.html?page=-1

Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist, Dr. John S. Theon, the former supervisor of James Hansen, NASA’s vocal man-made global warming fear soothsayer, has now publicly declared himself a skeptic and declared that Hansen “embarrassed NASA” with his alarming climate claims and said Hansen was “was never muzzled.” Theon joins the rapidly growing ranks of international scientists abandoning the promotion of man-made global warming fears.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/27/james-hansens-former-nasa-supervisor-declares-himself-a-skeptic-says-hansen-embarrassed-nasa-was-never-muzzled/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/28/nasa_climate_theon/

Michael D. Griffin (head of NASA)

First of all, I don't think it's within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change, as millions of years of history have shown," he continued. "And second of all, I guess I would ask which human beings — where and when — are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that's a rather arrogant

Dr. Gavin A. Schmidt, a climate-change specialist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, was less charitable to his agency head's remarks.
"Griffin's comments seem surprisingly naive," Schmidt wrote in an e-mail to LiveScience.com. "We are not in a situation where we are shopping around for an ideal climate, but that we have adapted to the climate we have, and that therefore large changes to it are not likely to be beneficial."

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,276722,00.html

Who's afraid of global warming?

The blackboard in Prof. Nir Shaviv's office in the Department of Physics at Hebrew University is covered with equations and graphs. He's hunched over the computer, searching for another illustration, another study that will underscore the subject of our talk: the effect of cosmic rays on the earth's warming.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1063707.html

Japanese scientists have made a dramatic break with the UN and Western-backed hypothesis of climate change in a new report from its Energy Commission

Three of the five leading scientists contend that recent climate change is driven by natural cycles, not human industrial activity, as political activists argue.

Kanya Kusano is Program Director and Group Leader for the Earth Simulator at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science & Technology (JAMSTEC). He focuses on the immaturity of simulation work cited in support of the theory of anthropogenic climate change. Using undiplomatic language, Kusano compares them to ancient astrology. After listing many faults, and the IPCC's own conclusion that natural causes of climate are poorly understood, Kusano concludes:

"[The IPCC's] conclusion that from now on atmospheric temperatures are likely to show a continuous, monotonic increase, should be perceived as an unprovable hypothesis," he writes.

Shunichi Akasofu, head of the International Arctic Research Center in Alaska, has expressed criticism of the theory before. Akasofu uses historical data to challenge the claim that very recent temperatures represent an anomaly:

"We should be cautious, IPCC's theory that atmospheric temperature has risen since 2000 in correspondence with CO2 is nothing but a hypothesis. "

Akasofu calls the post-2000 warming trend hypothetical. His harshest words are reserved for advocates who give conjecture the authority of fact.

"Before anyone noticed, this hypothesis has been substituted for truth... The opinion that great disaster will really happen must be broken."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/25/jstor_climate_report_translation/

Japanese scientists cool on theories

THREE senior Japanese scientists separately engaged in climate-change research have strongly questioned the validity of the man-made global-warming model that underpins the drive by the UN and most developed-nation governments to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25182520-2703,00.html

Also in June, another high-profile UN IPCC lead author, Dr. Kevin Trenberth, echoed Renwick's sentiments about climate models by referring to them as nothing more than "story lines."

"In fact there are no predictions by IPCC at all. And there never have been. The IPCC instead proffers ‘what if' projections of future climate that correspond to certain emissions scenarios," Trenberth wrote in journal Nature's blog on June 4, 2007. He also admitted that the climate models have major shortcomings because "they do not consider many things like the recovery of the ozone layer, for instance, or observed trends in forcing agents. There is no estimate, even probabilistically, as to the likelihood of any emissions scenario and no best guess."

http://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Speeches&ContentRecord_id=dceb518c-802a-23ad-45bf-894a13435a08&Region_id=&Issue_id=

This is actually about someone from the other side

Along that line, one scientist wondered to me rhetorically, “Why is Joshua Halpern, a chemist at Howard University with connections to NASA hiding behind the [blogger] name ‘Eli Rabett’? ...........But substantive commentary is not the distinguishing characteristic of “Rabett’s” public utterances; instead, he likes to call names as much as hide his own.

The decision by “Eli Rabett” to engage in personal attacks does not come in a vacuum; he may simply not want people to know of his financial ties to NASA/GISS. That, after all, might cloud their judgment about his ceaseless cheerleading for GISS’s results (which stand out for their deviation from the three other major temperature measuring programs). NASA has a joint fellowship program alternating years with Howard University (even years) and the University of Maryland (odd years). The funding is generated by the NASA Faculty Fellowship Program, NASA’s point man at Howard is Joshua Halpern. In other words, this is significant funding for the graduate program in meteorology at Howard U. is provided by NASA through Halpern, the financial link between GISS and “Eli Rabbet’s” rabid support of the Hansen crowd, another page lists Halpern as a staff member.

http://planetgore.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZDdhZTc4OGRiNjIzNjdhYTkwNTdkNWUzZjFmNTkyOTU=

As it was put by Roger Cohen, a senior US physicist formerly involved with the IPCC process, who long accepted its orthodoxy: "I was appalled at how flimsy the case is. I was also appalled at the behaviour of many of those who helped produce the IPCC reports and by many of those who promote it.

"In particular I am referring to the arrogance, the activities aimed at shutting down debate; the outright fabrications; the mindless defense of bogus science; and the politicisation of the IPCC process and the science process itself."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/3561817/The-catastrophe-behind-climate-change.html

Illusions of Climate Science

The likely magnitude of human-caused global warming is so low that it will not be discernible against the background of natural variability in the climate record. Thus national or internationally co-ordinated efforts to impose carbon dioxide emission reduction for the purpose of preventing climate change will be a tremendous waste of resources. The real danger is that government-instigated measures to drastically downsize a wide range of fossil-fuel-dependent industries in order to achieve emission reduction targets will actually be effective. Such success will destroy jobs and will limit future development opportunities, with no discernible impact on climate. Then the government will realise that it is much easier to change the economy than to change the climate, and it will also find that the direction and impacts of change will be equally unpredictable.

William Kininmonth is the former head of Australia’s National Climate Centre.

http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2008/10/illusions-of-climate-science

When Genius Failed Stock market computer models,

By Roger Lowenstein (2001)

The story of the collapse of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) is recounted in Roger Lowenstein's compelling book.

The fund was run by geniuses with Nobel prizes in economics and PhDs from Harvard. One of them, Myron Scholes, gave his name to the formula for valuing options. Another LTCM trader had two degrees from MIT. They were scholars who thought they had invented computer models that were so clever they could predict the future. But they were wrong. Their genius failed.

............

Like all hedge funds, LTCM aimed to make money in all market weathers. However, in 1998, the global economy became stormy after the Russian government defaulted on its loan repayments. Investors panicked and sought the safety of buying US treasury bonds in huge quantities. This threw out LTCM’s trading models as bond prices diverged. LTCM lost nearly £2 billion of its equity capital.
The LTCM debacle was an example of quantitative trading strategies going wrong. The Nobel prize winners and PhDs designed computer models that were thought to be able to predict the future with absolute surety and safety. But it was similar “black box” hedge funds that blew up last year after the credit crisis.

A leading scientific skeptic, meteorologist Dr. Hendrik Tennekes, a scientific pioneer in the development of numerical weather prediction and former director of research at The Netherlands' Royal National Meteorological Institute, recently took the critique of climate computer models one step further. Tennekes said in February 2007, "I am of the opinion that most scientists engaged in the design, development, and tuning of climate models are in fact software engineers. They are unlicensed, hence unqualified to sell their products to society."

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressRoom.Facts&ContentRecord_id=E1BEFFF7-802A-23AD-4794-179EB41CF348

Over 650 Scientists Challenge Global Warming “Consensus

http://www.prisonplanet.com/over-650-scientists-challenge-global-warming-consensus.html

Stern's modelling choices overstate damages

William Nordhaus, an economist at Yale University who has done several studies on the economics of global warming, criticised the Review for its use of a very low pure rate of time preference of 0.1%.^[²⁶ ^]:

The Review’s unambiguous conclusions about the need for extreme immediate action will not survive the substitution of discounting assumptions that are consistent with today’s market place. So the central questions about global-warming policy — how much, how fast, and how costly — remain open. The Review informs but does not answer these fundamental questions.

Yale economist Robert Mendelsohn made similar criticisms in a BBC radio programme The Investigation. A number of other economists and scientists on the programme argued that the review's assumptions were far more pessimistic than those of most experts in the field, and that while claiming to be a review of current academic thinking the Stern review's conclusions were in fact at odds with the mainstream view.^[²⁷ ^]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern_Review

'Wind farms' are just the product of a dangerous green ideology - James Lovelock

There is no such thing as renewable energy; it belongs as an idea with perpetual motion and other delusions but politicians and ideologues have become skilled at using enticing words to cover essentially rotten ideas.

It is false pride and hubris to believe we can do anything to "save the planet". At most we can save the people here on these islands; wind energy will hamper, not help us achieve that end

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/29/lovelock-wind-farms?commentpage=1&showCommentBox=true

Climate Science: Is it currently designed to answer questions?

Richard S. Lindzen, Program in Atmospheres, Oceans and Climate Massachusetts Institute of Technology, September 27, 2008

http://pasta.cantbedone.org/pages/G3iorG.htm

kafka-at-albany

New Study Increases Concerns About Climate Model Reliability

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071211101623.htm

Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever, Declares Himself Dissenter: ‘I am a skeptic’

http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/1537/223/

MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen
'In brief, we have the new paradigm where simulation and [computer] programs have replaced theory and observation, where government largely determines the nature of scientific activity, and where the primary role of professional societies is the lobbying of the government for special advantage

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/uah_msu_sept2008.png

Hansen has been for 20 years the world's leading scientific advocate of global warming (and Al Gore's closest ally). But in the past year a number of expert US scientists have been conducting a public investigation, through scientific blogs, which raises large question marks over the methods used to arrive at his figures.

First they noted the increasingly glaring discrepancy between the figures given by GISS, which show temperatures continuing to race upwards, and those given by the other three main data sources, which all show temperatures having fallen since 1998, dropping dramatically in the past year to levels around the average of the past 30 years.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/07/27/do2708.xml

To state that climate change will be "catastrophic" hides a cascade of value-laden assumptions which do not emerge from empirical or theoretical science.

Mike Hulme - Director, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6115644.stm

Global Warming Debate : Real World Observation Vs Climate Models

Christy was a lead author for the 2001 report by the IPCC and the US CCSP report Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere - Understanding and Reconciling Differences

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcflZ8FO0I4

JOHN R. CHRISTY - IPCC lead author Wall street Journal

It is my turn to cringe when I hear overstated-confidence from those who describe the projected evolution of global weather patterns over the next 100 years, especially when I consider how difficult it is to accurately predict that system's behavior over the next five days.

Mother Nature simply operates at a level of complexity that is, at this point, beyond the mastery of mere mortals (such as scientists) and the tools available to us. As my high-school physics teacher admonished us in those we-shall-conquer-the-world-with-a-slide-rule days, "Begin all of your scientific pronouncements with 'At our present level of ignorance, we think we know

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119387567378878423.html

The Futile Quest for Climate Control Robert M. Carter

The science reality is that climate is a complex, dynamic, natural system that no one wholly comprehends, though many scientists understand different small parts. So far, science provides no unambiguous evidence that dangerous or even measurable human-caused global warming is occurring.

The virtual reality is that computer models predict future climate according to the assumptions that are programmed into them. There is no established Theory of Climate, and therefore the potential output of all realistic computer general circulation models (GCMs) encompasses a range of both future warmings and coolings, the outcome depending upon the way in which they are constructed. Different results can be produced at will simply by adjusting such poorly known parameters as the effects of cloud cover.

The public reality in 2008 is that, driven by strong environmental lobby groups and evangelistic scientists and journalists, there is a widespread but erroneous belief in our society that dangerous global warming is occurring and that it has human causation.

http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2008/451/the-futile-quest-for-climate-control

QUIZ

Climatologist Dr. Richard Keen is a lecturer in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Colorado, a member of the American Meteorological Society and has worked with the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Keen specializes in volcanic aerosols and climate change studies and wrote the book "Skywatch: The Western Weather Guide." Keen's Global Warming Quiz asking "Inconvenient Questions" was featured on October 14, 2008 on former Colorado State climatologist Dr. Roger Pielke's Sr. website.

According to Keen, global warming ranges between a "minor inconvenience that's overblown" or "nothing - it doesn't exist" or "a good thing." "Earth has cooled since 1998," Keen noted, "in defiance of the predictions by the UN-IPCC." According to Keen, "The global temperature for 2007 was the coldest in a decade and the coldest of the millennium." After noting the recent cooling temps, Keen wrote "which is why `global warming' is now called `climate change.'" Keen also pointed out that the most Antarctic sea ice on record was recorded in 2007 and then he rhetorically asked: "Did you see [that fact] reported in the news?" Keen's quiz also showed that 10 out of 11 "wacky weather" events occurred in the U.S. before 1957.

Wacky Weather: When did most of the following events occur?

1. Alaskan glaciers melt at the rate of 1 mile per year 1900
2. Alaska bakes at 100 degrees north of the Arctic Circle 1915
3. North Dakota bakes at 120 degrees 1936
4. Hurricane hits Boston with Category 5 winds (180 mph) 1938
5. Hurricane kills half the population of a large southern city Galveston 1900
6. Hurricane destroys most of Los Angeles 1839
7. Half a dozen hurricanes hit the East Coast of the US 1954-1955
8. A dozen tornadoes strike Los Angeles 1983
9. A major US city hit by a hurricane, tornado & earthquake Charleston 1886
10. U.S. warmest year ever; 20 states set new all time heat records 1934
11. Greenland warms - Farmers raise crops and brew beer 1000 A.D.

Keen's global warming PowerPoint also asks: "Since 1949, which [presidential] administration has overseen the smallest increase of greenhouse gas (mostly CO2) emissions?" Keen shows a chart revealing that the answer is President George W. Bush. "U.S. carbon emission growth rate has slowed to 0.2 % per year since 2000," Keen wrote.

Keen's PowerPoint asks is "Kyoto is working?" and then provides data showing the treaty is failing. "Between 1997 and 2004 (the most recent year for which we have complete statistics), carbon dioxide emissions rose as follows: Worldwide Emissions increased 18.0 % - Countries that ratified the protocol increased 21.1 % - Non-ratifiers of the protocol increased 10.0 % - U.S. (a non-ratifier) increased 6.6 %.

75 % of Kyoto signers had more CO2 growth than the U.S. - U.S. emissions have risen only 0.2 % per year since 2000." Keen concludes his PowerPoint by stating: "Enjoy the warm climate while it lasts, and please make enough CO2 to feed a tree."

http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2008/10/more-information-from-dr-richard-keen.html

Strong Negative Feedback from the Latest CERES Radiation Budget Measurements Over the Global Oceans

May 7th, 2010 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

These results suggest that the sensitivity of the real climate system is less than that exhibited by ANY of the IPCC climate models. This will end up being a serious problem for global warming predictions. You see, while modelers claim that the models do a reasonably good job of reproducing the average behavior of the climate system, it isn’t the average behavior we are interested in. It is how the average behavior will CHANGE.

And the above results show that not one of the IPCC climate models behaves like the real climate system does when it comes to feedbacks during interannual climate variations…and feedbacks are what determine how serious manmade global warming will be.

http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/05/strong-negative-feedback-from-the-latest-ceres-radiation-budget-measurements-over-the-global-oceans/

No smoking hot spot

David Evans | July 18, 2008

I DEVOTED six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian Greenhouse Office. I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia's compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector.

FullCAM models carbon flows in plants, mulch, debris, soils and agricultural products, using inputs such as climate data, plant physiology and satellite data. I've been following the global warming debate closely for years.

When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects.

The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly? Soon government and the scientific community were working together and lots of science research jobs were created. We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.

But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24036736-7583,00.html

Global Warming and Climate Change in Perspective: Truths and Myths About Carbon Dioxide, Scientific Consensus, and Climate Models

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=5441

Svensmark put it best at the recently held Geologist convention in Norway:

(my interpretation) The IPCCs' 90% confidence (in AGW) relates to the findings of computer models, which do not accurately descibe the climate forcings, for example my field of expertise - clouds is poorly represented by these models.

Webcast:

http://www.33igc.org/coco/EntryPage.aspx?guid=1&PageID=5100&ContainerID=11823&ObjectID=12520

Lindzen on negative climate feedback

The Bottom Line

The earth’s climate (in contrast to the climate in current climate GCMs) is dominated by a strong net negative feedback. Climate sensitivity is on the order of 0.3°C, and such warming as may arise from increasing greenhouse gases will be indistinguishable from the fluctuations in climate that occur naturally from processes internal to the climate system itself.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/30/lindzen-on-negative-climate-feedback/

Natural or man-made?

“I did not say if there is global warming, it would be man-made,” Mr. Goldenberg emphasized. “Not all scientists agree that the warming we’ve seen is necessarily anthropogenic. It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming.”

http://www.insurancetechguru.com/blog/2008/08/global-warming-not-linked-to-increased-hurricane-activity/

The inconvenient lies of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/4511

Consensus? What consensus? by John McLean (pdf)

IPCC process dissected

http://mclean.ch/climate/What_consensus_col.pdf

Hockey stick

We find that the proxies do not predict temperature significantly better than random series generated independently of temperature. Furthermore, various model specifications that perform similarly at predicting temperature produce extremely different historical backcasts. Finally, the proxies seem unable to forecast the high levels of and sharp run-up in temperature in the 1990s either in-sample or from contiguous holdout blocks, thus casting doubt on their ability to predict such phenomena if in fact they occurred several hundred years ago.

A Statistical Analysis of Multiple Temperature Proxies: Are Reconstructions of Surface Temperatures Over the Last 1000 Years Reliable?

http://climateaudit.org/2010/08/14/mcshane-and-wyner-2010/

Caspar and the Jesus paper

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html

Documenting the global warming fraud – “Getting Rid” of the Medieval Warming Period

The similarity to the IPCC’s 1995 graph is obvious. The world experienced a ”warm” interval in the medieval era that dwarfs 20th century changes. The present-day climate appears to be simply a recovery from the cold years of the ”Little Ice Age.”

Figure 1

Figure 2

Nevertheless, despite the publication of Huang et al’s findings in 1997, as summarized by McKitrick,

The next year, Nature published the first Mann hockey stick paper, commonly called ”MBH98.” (Mann, M.E., Bradley, R.S. and Hughes, M.K., 1998. Global-Scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcing Over the Past Six Centuries, Nature, 392, 779-787.) Mann et al. followed up in 1999 with a paper (Mann, M.E., Bradley, R.S. and Hughes, M.K., Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations, Geophysical Research Letters, 26, 759-762, 1999.) in GRL (”MBH99?) extending their results from AD1400 back to AD1000.8 In early 2000 the IPCC released the first draft of the TAR. The hockey stick was the only paleoclimate reconstruction shown in the Summary, and was the only one in the whole report to be singled out for repeated presentation. The borehole data received a brief mention in Chapter 2 but the Huang et al. graph was not shown. A small graph of borehole data taken from another study and based on a smaller sample was shown, but it only showed a post-1500 segment, which, conveniently, trended upwards.

http://uddebatt.wordpress.com/2008/12/27/documenting-the-global-warming-fraud-%E2%80%9Cgetting-rid%E2%80%9D-of-the-medieval-warming-period/

Cambridge, MA - A review of more than 200 climate studies led by researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has determined that the 20th century is neither the warmest century nor the century with the most extreme weather of the past 1000 years. The review also confirmed that the Medieval Warm Period of 800 to 1300 A.D. and the Little Ice Age of 1300 to 1900 A.D. were worldwide phenomena not limited to the European and North American continents.

While 20th century temperatures are much higher than in the Little Ice Age period, many parts of the world show the medieval warmth to be greater than that of the 20th century.

Smithsonian astronomers Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas, with co-authors Craig Idso and Sherwood Idso (Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change) and David Legates (Center for Climatic Research, University of Delaware), compiled and examined results from more than 240 research papers published by thousands of researchers over the past four decades. Their report, covering a multitude of geophysical and biological climate indicators, provides a detailed look at climate changes that occurred in different regions around the world over the last 1000 years.

http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/archive/pr0310.html

Greenland Ice Cores - past temperatures

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/09/hockey-stick-observed-in-noaa-ice-core-data/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFbUVBYIPlI&feature=player_embedded

It appears Steve McIntyre has killed the Hockey Stick a second time…

http://joannenova.com.au/2009/09/breaking-news-cherry-picking-of-historic-proportions/

Treemometers: A new scientific scandal

At least eight papers purporting to reconstruct the historical temperature record times may need to be revisited, with significant implications for contemporary climate studies, the basis of the IPCC's assessments. A number of these involve senior climatologists at the British climate research centre CRU at the University East Anglia. In every case, peer review failed to pick up the errors.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/29/yamal_scandal/

Wegman report

Based on the literature we have reviewed, there is no overarching consensus on MBH98/99. As analyzed in our social network, there is a tightly knit group of individuals who passionately believe in their thesis. However, our perception is that this group has a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism and, moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that they can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility.

http://ff.org/centers/csspp/library/co2weekly/20060906_02/20060906_11.html

Wegman report :

http://www.climateaudit.org/pdf/others/07142006_Wegman_Report.pdf

Edward Wegman is a statistics professor at George Mason University and past chair of the National Research Council’s Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics. He holds a Ph.D. in mathematical statistics and is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and a Senior Member of the IEEE.

Hockey stick controversy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy#Committee_on_Energy_and_Commerce_Report_.28Wegman_report.29

Hockey stick controversy in detail

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/

The Wegman and North Reports for Newbies

Omitted in these references are the fact that the people described as "climatologists published in a credible journal" or "professionals in the field" are none other than Wahl and Ammann, serial coauthors with Michael Mann, students of Mann, who are not independent of the controversy. Indeed, they largely use (without citation or attribution or even acknowledgment to Michael Mann) arguments originally published at realclimate (and already responded to in MM 2005b(EE). Aside from their lack of independence, neither Ammann nor Wahl qualify as statistical authorities. Ammann did his undergraduate work in geology; Wahl in divinity. While this does not exclude them from having potential insight in the matter, it is evidence that one should not necessarily expect a sure grasp of mathematical and statistical issues and that their conclusions cannot be relied upon uncritically, even if Stephen Schneider accepted their article.

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2322

Ross McKitrick:
February 28th, 2005 at 12:36 pm

Kyoto doesn't really predate the hockey stick. It was signed in Dec 1997 but it was by no means clear any countries would ratify it. The debates about ratification got going in 2001-2002 in most western countries (the US excepted). Here in Canada the government engaged in heavy promotional activity during that time, leaning on the hockey stick to sell the deal. I expect it was the same in other countries, and ratification decisions by countries facing emission reduction obligations only took place after the TAR came out in 2001

http://www.climateaudit.org/index.php?p=102

"Based on the analyses presented in the original papers by Mann et al. (1998, 1999) and this newer supporting evidence, the committee finds it plausible that the Northern Hemisphere was warmer during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period over the preceding millennium.

However, the substantial uncertainties currently present in the quantitative assessment of large-scale surface temperature changes prior to about A.D. 1600 lower our confidence in this conclusion compared to the high level of confidence we place in the Little Ice Age cooling and 20th century warming. Even less confidence can be placed in the original conclusions by Mann et al. (1999) that “the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium” because the uncertainties inherent in temperature reconstructions for individual years and decades are larger than those for longer time periods, and because not all of the available proxies record temperature information on such short timescales. We also question some of the statistical choices made in the original papers by Dr. Mann and his colleagues. However, our reservations with some aspects of the original papers by Mann et al. should not be construed as evidence that our committee does not believe that the climate is warming, and will continue to warm, as a result of human activities."

That is a devastating rejection of Mann's work. This is worse.

"One significant part of the controversy on this issue is related to data access. The collection, compilation, and calibration of paleoclimatic proxy data represent a substantial investment of time and resources, often by large teams of researchers. The committee recognizes that access to research data is a complicated, discipline-dependent issue, and that access to computer models and methods is especially challenging because intellectual property rights must be considered.

Our view is that all research benefits from full and open access to published datasets and that a clear explanation of analytical methods is mandatory. Peers should have access to the information needed to reproduce published results, so that increased confidence in the outcome of the study can be generated inside and outside the scientific community. Paleoclimate research would benefit if individual researchers, professional societies, journal editors, and funding agencies continued their efforts to ensure that existing open access practices are followed."

http://www7.nationalacademies.org/ocga/testimony/Surface_Temperature_Reconstructions.asp

Hockey Stick Temperature Distortion Posts

http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/hockey-stick-temperature-distortion-posts/

Yamal: A "Divergence" Problem

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7168

U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works Hearing Statements - Statement of Dr. David Deming

The week the article appeared, I was contacted by a reporter for National Public Radio. He offered to interview me, but only if I would state that the warming was due to human activity. When I refused to do so, he hung up on me. I had another interesting experience around the time my paper in Science was published. I received an astonishing email from a major researcher in the area of climate change. He said, "We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period."

The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was a time of unusually warm weather that began around 1000 AD and persisted until a cold period known as the "Little Ice Age" took hold in the 14th century. Warmer climate brought a remarkable flowering of prosperity, knowledge, and art to Europe during the High Middle Ages.

The existence of the MWP had been recognized in the scientific literature for decades. But now it was a major embarrassment to those maintaining that the 20th century warming was truly anomalous. It had to be "gotten rid of."

http://epw.senate.gov/hearing_statements.cfm?id=266543

Overpeck, the second author of this article, has been rumored to be the person who told David Deming about "getting rid of the MWP

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2269

When the IPCC ‘disappeared’ the Medieval Warm Period

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/10/when-the-ipcc-disappeared-the-medieval-warm-period/

*****************************************

Two results from same data

But Le Quéré's conclusion on the decline of the world's carbon sinks is not universally accepted. Wolfgang Knorr of the University of Bristol recently published a study in Geophysical Research Letters, using similar data to Le Quéré, where he argued that the natural carbon sinks had not noticeably changed. "Our apparently conflicting results demonstrate what doing cutting-edge science is really like and just how difficult it is to accurately quantify such data," said Knorr.

The amount of CO2 that natural carbon sinks can absorb varies from year to year depending on climactic and other natural conditions, and this means that overall trends can be difficult to detect. Le Quéré said her team's analysis had been able to remove more of the noise in the data that is associated with the natural annual variability of CO2 levels due to, for example, El Niño or volcanic eruptions. "Our methods are different – Knorr uses annual data, we use monthly data and I think we can remove more of the variability."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/17/global-temperature-rise

Many climate models also assume that the airborne fraction will increase. Because understanding of the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide is important for predicting future climate change, it is essential to have accurate knowledge of whether that fraction is changing or will change as emissions increase.To assess whether the airborne fraction is indeed increasing, Wolfgang Knorr of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol reanalyzed available atmospheric carbon dioxide and emissions data since 1850 and considers the uncertainties in the data.In contradiction to some recent studies, he finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091230184221.htm

Roy Spencer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Spencer

mp3 http://www.heartland.org/newyork08/audio/Tuesday/spencer.mp3

Roy Spencer got a serious airing on a Newsnight recently.

Climate modelling uncertainty

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/7386987.stm

Roy Spencer

http://aqua.nasa.gov/about/team_spencer.php

Global Trend: More Science, More Fraud

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/20/science/20rese.html

The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science

Horace Freeland Judson, author of The Eighth Day of Creation, eloquently examines the nature and causes of scientific fraud in The Great Betrayal. Although the process of science has built-in checks and balances such as peer review and paper refereeing, Judson calls these "moribund" and asks "whether in fact and to what extent science really is self-correcting." After all, success and good results are sometimes valued above all in science, especially by the agencies or corporations that provide the funding for research. Upon examining hundreds of cases of suspected scientific fraud, Judson answers blind praise of science's self-policing with the terse statement, "Their claims about science are unscientific

To make his case, Judson begins with some of the giants of science: Mendel, Darwin, Pasteur, Freud. It turns out that each of these men fudged their data in one way or another, whether by omitting numbers that didn't fit desired results, or manipulating photographs, or not using experimental controls. Judson recognizes that there are difficulties in examining historical scientists' behavior through a modern lens, and he deals with the associated complexities by asking tough questions: What if their cheating led to a correct answer? Where is the line between intuition and lying?

http://www.amazon.com/Great-Betrayal-Fraud-Science/dp/0151008779

Questioning Climate

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jdrake/Questioning_Climate/_sgg/f10000.htm

James Lovelock in the Guardian

on CRU scientists

on sceptics

there are some sceptics that I fully respect. Nigel Lawson is one. He writes sensibly and well.

on predicting temperatures

on scientists

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/mar/29/james-lovelock

Lovelock: 'We can't save the planet' - BBC - some quotes

What is more, he predicts, the earth's climate will not conveniently comply with the models of modern climate scientists.

As the record winter cold testifies, he says, global temperatures move in "jerks and jumps", and we cannot confidently predict what the future holds.

Scientists, he says, have moved from investigating nature as a vocation, to being caught in a career path where it makes sense to "fudge the data".

And while renewable energy technology may make good business sense, he says, it is not based on "good practical engineering".

Renewable technology 'doesn't really work'

Trying to save the planet 'is a lot of nonsense'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8594000/8594561.stm

Czech President Vaclav Klaus

We have to repeatedly deal with the simple questions that have been many times discussed here and elsewhere:

1) Is there a statistically significant global warming?

2) If so, is it man-made?

3) If we decide to stop it, is there anything a man can do about it?

4) Should an eventual moderate temperature increase bother us?

We have our answers to these questions and are fortunate to have many well-known and respected experts here who have made important contributions in answering them. Yet, I am not sure this is enough. People tend to blindly believe in the IPCC’s conclusions (especially in the easier to understand formulations presented in the “Summaries for Policymakers”) despite the fact that from the very beginning, the IPCC has been a political rather than a scientific undertaking.

http://www.klaus.cz/klaus2/asp/clanek.asp?id=XpAV39wT4A32

Spain’s ex-prime minister blasts ‘new religion’ of climate change

Former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar Wednesday dismissed climate change as a “new religion” that is drawing hundreds of billions of euros at a time of economic crisis.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/spains-ex-prime-minister-blasts-new-religion-of-climate-change.html

100 scientists against the IPCC.

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/reprint/open_letter_to_un.html

Jasper Kirkby

Message in the CLOUD for Warmists: The end is near?

You’ve probably all heard of Svensmark and the Galactic Cosmic Ray (GCR) to cloud cover modulation theory by now. Lot’s of warmists say it is “discredited”. However, CERN in Switzerland isn’t following that thinking, and after getting some encouraging results in the CLOUD06 experiment, they have funded a much larger and more comprehensive CLOUD09 experiment. I figure if it is “discredited”, a bunch of smart guys and gals like CERN wouldn’t be ramping up the investigation. There’s also word now of a new correlation:

Correlation recently reported between solar/GCR variability and temperature in Siberia from glacial ice core, 30 yr lag (ie. ocean currents may be part of response)

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/01/message-in-the-cloud-for-warmists-the-end-is-near/

On CERN: Jasper Kirkby of CERN and a lecture in June 2009. He concludes that cloud cover is not understood and therefore the climate is still not properly understood. Furthermore, he opines on the relationship between reduced solar activity, reduced cloud cover and global cooling that would cause us to revise our thinking on the impact of anthropogenic factors on climate. Lecture link here:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/175641-climategate-revolt-of-the-physicists

Jasper Kirkby, a British experimental particle physicist currently with CERN, Switzerland presents a lecture in which cosmic rays show a strong correlation with global temperature over short and long time periods. He is currently involved in research on their effects on clouds at CERN..

The current understanding of climate change in the industrial age is that it is predominantly caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gases, with relatively small natural contributions due to solar irradiance and volcanoes. However, palaeoclimatic reconstructions show that the climate has frequently varied on 100-year time scales during the Holocene (last 10 kyr) by amounts comparable to the present warming - and yet the mechanism or mechanisms are not understood.

Some of these reconstructions show clear associations with solar variability, which is recorded in the light radio-isotope archives that measure past variations of cosmic ray intensity. However, despite the increasing evidence of its importance, solar-climate variability is likely to remain controversial until a physical mechanism is established.

Estimated changes of solar irradiance on these time scales appear to be too small to account for the climate observations. This raises the question of whether cosmic rays may directly affect the climate, providing an effective indirect solar forcing mechanism. Indeed recent satellite observations - although disputed - suggest that cosmic rays may affect clouds. This talk presents an overview of the palaeoclimatic evidence for solar/cosmic ray forcing of the climate, and reviews the possible physical mechanisms. These will be investigated in the CLOUD experiment which begins to take data at the CERN PS later this year

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1181073

Jasper Kirkby is a British experimental particle physicist currently with CERN, Switzerland. He originated the idea for the Tau-Charm Factory, an accelerator now under construction as BEPC II in Beijing. He has led several large particle accelerator experiments at SPEAR; the Paul Scherrer Institute; and most recently, the CLOUD experiment at CERN.

The CLOUD experiment is investigating possible physical mechanisms for solar/cosmic ray forcing - a theory whereby climate change is in part a function of lower atmosphere cloud cover, the clouds are affected by cosmic rays and the cosmic rays are affected by solar activity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasper_Kirkby

In the conclusions of his slide show, Kirkby outlines the state of knowledge and areas of investigation:

• Climate has continually varied in the past, and the causes are not well understood – especially on the 100 year timescalerelevant for today’s climate change
• Strong evidence for solar-climate variability, but no established mechanism. A cosmic ray influence on clouds is a leading candidate
• CLOUD at CERN aims to study and quantify the cosmic raycloud mechanism in a controlled laboratory experiment
• The question of whether – and to what extent – the climate is influenced by solar/cosmic ray variability remains central to our understanding of anthropogenic climate change

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/01/message-in-the-cloud-for-warmists-the-end-is-near/

The Great Global Warming Swindle

http://www.greatglobalwarmingswindle.co.uk/index.html#

'To greens, I was worse than a child abuser'

I'll tell you why. Because the theory of global warming is crumbling round their ears. For the past decade now, world temperatures have been static or slightly declining – and that's according to the IPCC. I don't remember their silly models predicting that 10 years ago.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/to-greens-i-was-worse-than-a-child-abuser-889524.html

Put oil firm chiefs on trial, says leading climate change scientist

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jun/23/fossilfuels.climatechange

Stanley Milgram

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

According to their most detailed measurements yet, scientists admitted to have grossly underestimated the mass of the Milky Way, and so the gravitational pull it exerts on our cosmic neighbours, including the giant Andromeda galaxy.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/jan/05/galaxy-collision-space-milky-way

Jeffrey Marque

Senior Staff Physicist at Beckman Coulter, Inc

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/5/079/16B

APS Reaffirms Position on Climate Change

http://www.aps.org/about/pressreleases/climatechange08.cfm

Computers show how wind could have parted Red Sea

New computer simulations have shown how the parting of the Red Sea, as described in the Bible, could have been a phenomenon caused by strong winds. The account in the Book of Exodus describes how the waters of the sea parted, allowing the Israelites to flee their Egyptian pursuers. Simulations by US scientists show how the movement of wind could have opened up a land bridge at one location.

This would have enabled people to walk across exposed mud flats to safety.The results are published in the open-access journal Plos One.The researchers show that a strong east wind, blowing overnight, could have pushed water back at a bend where an ancient river is believed to have merged with a coastal lagoon

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11383620

Dangerous Emissions

Wall Street Journal Commentary
April 2, 2001
By Philip Stott, a professor of biogeography at the University of London and
co-author of "Political Ecology: Science, Myth and Power"
(Oxford University Press, 2000).

Initially, in Europe, the new myth was embraced by both right and left. The
right was concerned with breaking the power of traditional trade unions,
such as the coal miners -- the labor force behind a major source of
carbon-dioxide emissions -- and promoting the development of nuclear power.
Britain's Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research was established
at the personal instigation of none other than Margaret Thatcher.

http://www.webcitation.org/5Y1uk2YIZ

Addressing the Washington Policymakers in Seattle, WA, Dr. Don Easterbrook said that shifting of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) from its warm mode to its cool mode virtually assures global cooling for the next 25-30 years and means that the global warming of the past 30 years is over. The announcement by NASA that the (PDO) had shifted from its warm mode to its cool mode (Fig. 1) is right on schedule as predicted by past climate and PDO changes (Easterbrook, 2001, 2006, 2007) and is not an oddity superimposed upon and masking the predicted severe warming by the IPCC. This has significant implications for the future and indicates that the IPCC climate models were wrong in their prediction of global temperatures soaring 1°F per decade for the rest of the century.

http://icecap.us/images/uploads/WashingtonPolicymakersaddress.pdf

New Study Increases Concerns About Climate Model Reliability

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071211101623.htm

Editorial: The Great Global Warming Hoax

http://www.middlebury.net/op-ed/global-warming-01.html

Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever, Declares Himself Dissenter: ‘I am a skeptic’

http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/1537/223/

Rise of the Natural Climate Cycle Deniers

http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/07/rise-of-the-natural-climate-cycle-deniers/

Publish and be wrong

Oct 9th 2008
From The Economist print edition

One group of researchers thinks headline-grabbing scientific reports are the most likely to turn out to be wrong

http://www.economist.co.uk/science/displayStory.cfm?source=hptextfeature&story_id=12376658

So the ClinPsyc blog (clinpsyc.blogspot.com) has spotted that the drug company Lilly has published identical data on duloxetine - a newish antidepressant drug - twice over, in two entirely separate scientific papers.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/25/medical-research-science-health

Do global temperature trends over the last decade falsify climate predictions?— UK Met Office scientists

J. Knightht, J. J. Kennededy, C. Folllland, G. Harris, G. S. Joneses, M. Palmelmelmer, D. Parkeker, A. Scaifefe, and P. Stotttt

Observations indicate that global temperature rise has slowed in the last decade (Fig. 2.8a). The least squares trend for January 1999 to December 2008 calculated from the HadCRUT3 dataset (Brohan et al. 2006) is +0.07±0.07°C decade–1—much less than the 0.18°C decade–1 recorded between 1979 and 2005 and the 0.2°C decade–1 expected in the next decade (IPCC; Solomon et al. 2007). This is despite a steady increase in radiative forcing as a result of human activities and has led some to question climate predictions of substantial twenty-first century warming (Lawson 2008; Carter 2008).

Given the likelihood that internal variability contributed to the slowing of global temperature rise in the last decade, we expect that warming will resume in the next few years.

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2009/global_temperatures_09.pdf

Gavin Schmidt debated Richard Linzen in front of a highly educated audience.

The corporate / alarmist side lost massively.

In this debate, the proposition was: "Global Warming Is Not a Crisis." In a vote before the debate, about 30 percent of the audience agreed with the motion, while 57 percent were against and 13 percent undecided. The debate seemed to affect a number of people: Afterward, about 46 percent agreed with the motion, roughly 42 percent were opposed and about 12 percent were undecided.

http://freedomchannel.blogspot.com/2007/07/iq-squared-global-warming-debate.html

The Thermometer Great Dying

One final note: There has been A Great Dying lately for thermometers. Since about 1990, there has been a reduction in thermometer counts globally. In the USA, the number has dropped from 1850 at peak (in the year 1968) to 136 now (in the year 2009). As you might guess, this has presented some “issues” for our thermal quilt. But do not fear, GIStemp will fill in what it needs, guessing as needed, stretching and fabricating until it has a result.

In Japan, no thermometers now record above 300 meters. Japan has no mountains now. For California, where we once had thermometers in the mountain snow and in the far north near Oregon; there are now 4 surviving thermometers near the beach and in the warm south. But GIStemp is sure we can use them as a fine proxy for Mount Shasta with it’s glaciers and for the snows and ice of Yosemite winters

http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/11/09/gistemp-a-human-view/

More from the archives: this is a clipping from the Deseret News of Salt Lake City - the edition of 8th September 1972. It carries details of an interview with Hubert Lamb, the founder of the Climatic Research Unit, in which the great man discusses the impending ice age.

We are on a definite downhill course for the next two centuries

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=336&dat=19720908&id=AiwcAAAAIBAJ&sjid=0VsEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5244,2536610

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2010/4/26/hubert-lamb-on-ice-ages.html

Researcher: NASA hiding climate data

The fight over global warming science is about to cross the Atlantic with a U.S. researcher poised to sue NASA, demanding release of the same kind of climate data that has landed a leading British center in hot water over charges it skewed its data.

Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said NASA has refused for two years to provide information under the Freedom of Information Act that would show how the agency has shaped its climate data and would explain why the agency has repeatedly had to correct its data going as far back as the 1930s.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/03/researcher-says-nasa-hiding-climate-data/

CRU's programming 'way below expected standards'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/8395514.stm

Reading through the code and then through his HARRY_READ_ME.TXT you can see a man up against something that was slightly outside his ability. I don't mean that in a nasty way; what was needed was a professional programmer and not a professional scientist.

In the midst of the file we find the following plaintive exclamations:

Something is very poorly. It's my programming skills, isn't it.

and

So, once again I don't understand statistics. Quel surprise, given that 
I haven't had any training in stats in my entire life, unless you count 
A-level maths.

and

and.. yup, my awful programming strikes again.

and

So, good news - but only in the sense that I've found the error. 
Bad news in that it's a further confirmation that my abilities are 
short of what's required here.

http://www.jgc.org/blog/

Global Warming Skepticism 101

http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/12/global-warming-skepticism-101/

Freeman Dyson

Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. And the ethics of environmentalism are fundamentally sound. Scientists and economists can agree with Buddhist monks and Christian activists that ruthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and careful preservation of birds and butterflies is good. The worldwide community of environmentalists—most of whom are not scientists—holds the moral high ground, and is guiding human societies toward a hopeful future. Environmentalism, as a religion of hope and respect for nature, is here to stay. This is a religion that we can all share, whether or not we believe that global warming is harmful.

Unfortunately, some members of the environmental movement have also adopted as an article of faith the belief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet. That is one reason why the arguments about global warming have become bitter and passionate. Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment. The skeptics now have the difficult task of convincing the public that the opposite is true. Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Whether they turn out to be right or wrong, their arguments on these issues deserve to be heard.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/jun/12/the-question-of-global-warming/?pagination=false

The Medieval Warm Period in Greenland

Reference
Vinther, B.M., Jones, P.D., Briffa, K.R., Clausen, H.B., Andersen, K.K., Dahl-Jensen, D. and Johnsen, S.J. 2010. Climatic signals in multiple highly resolved stable isotope records from Greenland. Quaternary Science Reviews 29: 522-538.

Background
The authors introduce the report of their new study by writing that "during the past 10 years studies of seasonal ice core d¹⁸O records from the Greenland ice sheet have indicated, that in order to gain a firm understanding of the relationships between Greenland d¹⁸O and climatic conditions in the North Atlantic region, it is important to have not only annually resolved, but seasonally resolved ice core d¹⁸O data."

What was done
Working with 20 ice core records from 14 different sites, all of which stretched at least 200 years back in time, as well as near-surface air temperature data from 13 locations along the southern and western coasts of Greenland that covered approximately the same time interval (1784-2005), plus a similar temperature data set from northwest Iceland (said by the authors to be employed "in order to have some data indicative of climate east of the Greenland ice sheet"), Vinther et al. proceeded to demonstrate that winter d¹⁸O was "the best proxy for Greenland temperatures." Then, based on that determination and working with three longer ice core d¹⁸O records (DYE-3, Crete and GRIP), they developed a temperature history that extended more than 1400 years back in time.

What was learned
In the words of the seven scientists, "temperatures during the warmest intervals of the Medieval Warm Period," which they defined as occurring "some 900 to 1300 years ago, "were as warm as or slightly warmer than present day Greenland temperatures [italics added]."

What it means
As for what this result implies, the researchers conditionally -- and rather amusingly -- state that further warming of present day Greenland climate "will result in temperature conditions that are warmer than anything seen in the past 1400 years." But, of course, their work more directly and unconditionally implies that late 20th-century and early 21st-century weather has not yet been warm enough to confer "unprecedented" status upon Greenland air temperatures. What is more, Vinther et al. readily admit that the independent "GRIP borehole temperature inversion suggests that central Greenland temperatures are still somewhat below the high temperatures that existed during the Medieval Warm Period."

http://www.co2science.org/articles/V13/N16/C2.php

Five Reasons Why Water Vapor Feedback Might Not Be Positive

September 14th, 2010 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

Pollution not to blame for rapid ocean cooling, says Phil Jones paper

Research from UEA finds drop in temperature is too quick to be caused by the build-up of sulphur aerosols from fossil fuels

Scientists studying a rapid cooling of the oceans around four decades ago have found that the traditional explanation for the phenomenon, which involved pollution in the atmosphere, does not stack up.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/sep/22/climate-science-ocean-temperatures-phil-jones

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/22/ocean-cooling-contributed-to-mid-20th-century-global-warming-hiatus/

Official: Satellite Failure Means Decade of Global Warming Data Doubtful

But the spokesman for the Michigan Sea Grant Extension, a ‘Coastwatch’ partner with NOAA screening the offending data, then confessed that its hastily hidden web pages had, indeed, showed dozens of temperature recordings three or four times higher than seasonal norms. NOAA declined to make any comment as to whether such a glitch could have ramped up the averages for the entire northeastern United States by an average of 10-15 degrees Fahrenheit by going undetected over a longer time scale.

http://www.climatechangefraud.com/climate-reports/7491-official-satellite-failure-means-decade-of-global-warming-data-doubtful

The Hartwell Paper: a new direction for climate policy after the crash of 2009

Prins, Gwyn and Galiana, Isabel and Green, Christopher and Grundmann, Reiner and Korhola, Atte and Laird, Frank and Nordhaus, Ted and Pielke Jnr, Roger and Rayner, Steve and Sarewitz, Daniel and Shellenberger, Michael and Stehr, Nico and Tezuko, Hiroyuki (2010) The Hartwell Paper: a new direction for climate policy after the crash of 2009. Institute for Science, Innovation & Society, University of Oxford; LSE Mackinder Programme, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK.

It says

The … problem is epistemological. It is a
characteristic of open systems of high complexity and
with many ill-understood feed-back effects, such as
the global climate classically is, that there are no self declaring
indicators which tell the policy maker
when enough knowledge has been accumulated to
make it sensible to move into action. Nor, it might be
argued, can a policy-maker ever possess the type of
knowledge – distributed, fragmented, private; and
certainly not in sufficient coherence or quantity – to
make accurate ‘top down’ directions. Hence, the
frequency of failure and of unintended
consequences

http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/27939/1/HartwellPaper_English_version.pdf

Der Speigel rips climate science into little pieces.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,686697,00.html

plus

http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/04/der-spiegel-on-climate-science.html

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100032460/when-the-germans-give-up-on-agw-you-really-do-know-its-all-over/

****************

Bird flu pandemic 'could kill 150m'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/sep/30/birdflu.jamessturcke

CNN Meteorologist: Manmade Global Warming Theory 'Arrogant'

http://businessandmedia.org/articles/2008/20081218205953.aspx

Dark energy may not exist in space, scientists claim

Dark matter and energy, the mysterious forces thought to make up 96 per cent of the universe, may not exist according to a groundbreaking study.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/7827674/Dark-energy-may-not-exist-in-space-scientists-claim.html

The 'God particle' may exist in five forms, Large Hadron Collider's rival project finds The elusive "God particle" - or Higgs boson - being sought in the Large Hadron Collider may exist in multiple forms, according to a new study.

The Higgs boson is thought to mediate the force through which all the other particles acquire mass. But scientists overseeing the DZero experiment at the Tevatron particle accelerator in Illinois said the suggestion that five different particles could be responsible for this transaction may point to new laws of physics beyond the Standard Model.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/large-hadron-collider/7829090/The-God-particle-may-exist-in-five-forms-Large-Hadron-Colliders-rival-project-finds.html

In an address to the Royal Society in May, Professor Jack Steinberger, a Nobel prize-winning director of the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva, said that wind power was an uneconomic waste of resources. His is not a lone voice.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/article6695213.ece

Peer-review

While passing the peer-review process is often considered in the scientific community to be a certification of validity, it is not without its problems. Drummond Rennie, deputy editor of Journal of the American Medical Association is an organizer of the International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication, which has been held every four years since 1986.^[⁷ ^]He remarks, "There seems to be no study too fragmented, no hypothesis too trivial, no literature too biased or too egotistical, no design too warped, no methodology too bungled, no presentation of results too inaccurate, too obscure, and too contradictory, no analysis too self-serving, no argument too circular, no conclusions too trifling or too unjustified, and no grammar and syntax too offensive for a paper to end up in print."^[⁸ ^]

Richard Horton, editor of the British medical journal The Lancet, has said that "The mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than a crude means of discovering the acceptability — not the validity — of a new finding. Editors and scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance of peer review. We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_review#Criticisms_of_peer_review

Lancet urges China to tackle scientific fraud

The British medical journal the Lancet has urged China's authorities to do more to tackle scientific fraud.

Recently, dozens of papers were found to be faked. "China's government must assume stronger leadership in scientific integrity," the Lancet says.

China ranks second behind the United States in the number of academic papers published every year.

Following a wave of scandals in 2006, China's government announced reforms aimed at preventing misconduct.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8448731.stm

A salutary lesson in academic hubris comes from LTCM, a company based on computer models of the derivatives market. Two of the employees were nobel prize winners. It lost $4.6 billion in four months and had to be bailed out by the federal reserve to prevent the collapse of the entire United States financial system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management

AGW Sceptics

CERN 'gags' physicists in cosmic ray climate experiment

Africagate: top British scientist says UN panel is losing credibility

Chris Landsea (Resignation Letter of Chris Landsea from IPCC)

Dr. Andrew A. Lacis

UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters

Steig's method massacred

Reversing the direction of the positive feedback loop

NASA GISS Inaccurate Press Release On The Surface Temperature Trend Data

Recommended Reading – The Crutape Letters by Steven Mosher and Thomas W. Fuller

Central England Temperatures: Do They Provide Evidence That Current Global Warming Scare Is Totally Blown Out of Proportion?

More evidence of gatekeeping

Top scientists rally to the defence of the Met Office

Climate change data dumped

Five Reasons Why Water Vapor Feedback Might Not Be Positive

Nature vs humans

Cold Atlantic

What happened to global warming - BBC?

Why the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets are Not Collapsing

Resisting climate hysteria

Petitioning for a revised statement on climate change

UEA Climate Scientist: “possible that…I.P.C.C. has run its course”

The Climate Change Climate Change

Japanese scientists have made a dramatic break with the UN and Western-backed hypothesis of climate change in a new report from its Energy Commission

Stern's modelling choices overstate damages

Strong Negative Feedback from the Latest CERES Radiation Budget Measurements Over the Global Oceans

No smoking hot spot

The inconvenient lies of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Documenting the global warming fraud – “Getting Rid” of the Medieval Warming Period

Treemometers: A new scientific scandal

The Great Global Warming Swindle

Put oil firm chiefs on trial, says leading climate change scientist http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jun/23/fossilfuels.climatechange

Stanley Milgram http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

Jeffrey Marque

Publish and be wrong

One group of researchers thinks headline-grabbing scientific reports are the most likely to turn out to be wrong

The Thermometer Great Dying

Five Reasons Why Water Vapor Feedback Might Not Be Positive

Pollution not to blame for rapid ocean cooling, says Phil Jones paper

The Hartwell Paper: a new direction for climate policy after the crash of 2009

Lancet urges China to tackle scientific fraud

Put oil firm chiefs on trial, says leading climate change scientist

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jun/23/fossilfuels.climatechange

Stanley Milgram

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment