By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
The IPCC, having spent almost two months working out how to respond to my complaint about a notoriously bogus graph in its Fourth Assessment Report, has found itself not guilty. In doing so, it is wilfully perpetuating a fraud, which will now be reported to the prosecuting authorities.
My complaint was as follows:
“The graph purports to show, but does not show, that the rate of global warming has been accelerating and that the accelerated global warming is anthropogenic.”
The conclusion the IPCC draws by superimposing multiple trend-lines on the HadCRUt curve of global mean surface temperature anomalies since 1850 is that because the trend-lines starting more recently are steepest the world is warming ever faster and we are to blame. The caption to the graph makes this clear:
“Note that for shorter recent periods, the slope is greater, indicating accelerated warming. … increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases dominate the observed warming after the mid-1970s …”.
Dr. Pachauri, the IPCC’s climate-science chairman, drew the same two bogus conclusions from this graph in a lecture in New South Wales some years ago:
“… In recent years this graph has become much steeper. If you draw a line through the last 100 years, the slope is a 0.74 C° line. But if you look at the last 50 years, [it is] almost twice as steep as the total 100-year period. So it would be appropriate to conclude that … warming is taking place at a much faster rate, and clearly if we don’t bring about some changes we’d have much faster changes in future.”
I had invited the IPCC to reconsider its use of a technique so bogus that if one applies multiple trend-lines to a sine-wave (which has a zero trend) one can demonstrate either that the trend is ever more rapidly declining or that it is ever more rapidly increasing.
In fact, the global temperature trend is not increasing. In the 101 months since January 2005, the benchmark date for the IPCC’s forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), there has been no global warming.
The bright blue trend-line on the HadCRUt dataset shows cooling. Yet the bright red line showing the AR5 projections suggests that a rapid warming should be taking place. In little more than eight years the IPCC’s projection is already more than a quarter of a Celsius degree (or half a Fahrenheit degree) above observed reality:
The IPCC knows perfectly well that the two conclusions it invited readers to draw in the caption from the slopes of the multiple trend-lines in the graph are indefensible, misleading, and – let us not mince words – fraudulent. It avoids admitting its error by breaking down my complaint into five parts, of which only the first two go to the substance of my complaint. And, even with these two, the IPCC carefully avoids addressing the substance of my complaint:
1. M of B complaint: the graph “purports to show that the rate of global warming has been accelerating”.
IPCC response: “The indicated trends on the two figures are factually correct. They are correctly determined and clearly indicated on the legend accompanying these figures. … Therefore, the claim is not warranted.”
But I had not complained that the trend-lines had been incorrectly determined. Indeed, I had demonstrated that correctly-calculated trend-lines applied to a sine-wave could produce false conclusions very similar to that of the IPCC. The inaccuracy about which I had complained lay in the drawing of improper conclusions from the trend-lines.
2. M of B: the graph “purports to show that the accelerated global warming is anthropogenic”.
IPCC: “The figures were not used to make a statement on the causes of a possible increase in trend. … Detection and attribution assessments are based on a comprehensive evaluation of detection and attribution research that is presented in AR4 Chapter 9. That chapter’s assessments are not based on evidence of differences in linear trends between different periods. Therefore, the claim is not warranted.”
But the IPCC’s caption plainly attributes the rapid warming from the 1970s onward to Man. So the graphs were used, and explicitly used, “to make a statement on the causes of a possible increase in trend”. Besides, if Chapter 9 had already reached its assessment by other means, what was the purpose of the bogus graph, except to mislead?
3. M of B (subsidiary point): I had understood that the graph was and altered version of what had appeared in the scientists final draft.
IPCC: “The figures in question appeared in the Final Drafts of Chapter 3 and of the Technical Summary with the same numbering as in the published versions. The trends, including the detailed legend with the numerical values and the uncertainties were included in the Final Draft as in the published version, except for copy-editing changes. Trends were added in the Final Draft versions of these figures in response to comments on the Second Order Draft … Therefore, the claim is not warranted.”
Score half a point for the IPCC here. The graph with the bogus trend-lines had appeared in the final draft. However, it had appeared without the trend-lines in all versions that preceded the final draft. Someone had added the trend-lines, but should not have done so.
4. M of B (subsidiary point): The text accompanying the defective graph says: “An increasing rate of warming has taken place over the last 25 years, …”.
IPCC: From the context it is clear that the authors emphasize that the global mean is not the complete picture (“ … with important regional variations”) and that trends are not smooth (“… has occurred in two phases …”, and “… more strongly from the 1970s …”), and that all these statements are factually correct and discuss in words what is visible in the graph. “Therefore, the claim is not warranted.”
But my complaint is not about what may have been said elsewhere in the report, nor about whether what was said elsewhere in the report was factually correct. It is about the bogus graph, whose accompanying text must be read first and foremost in the context of the graph that it accompanies. The fact that “the global mean is not the complete picture” has nothing whatever to do with whether or not it is appropriate to draw inaccurate conclusions from the relative slopes of multiple arbitrarily-chosen trend-lines.
5. M of B (subsidiary point): the text accompanying the graph says, “The rate of warming averaged over the last 50 years (0.13°C ± 0.03°C per decade) is nearly twice that for the last 100 years.”
IPCC: The quoted words “are factually correct. Therefore the claim is not warranted. In conclusion, the Co-Chairs of WGI and the WGI Bureau find that no action is warranted in response to this claim.”
But I had nowhere asserted that the quoted words were not factually correct. I had stated that it was not appropriate for the IPCC to draw from the relative slopes of the various trend lines the unjustifiable conclusion that the rate of global warming was accelerating and that we were to blame.
It would not be difficult to persuade a jury that the IPCC’s assertion that various data were “factually correct”, when I had at no point challenged the factual correctness, merely the inappropriate conclusions that had been drawn, was evidence of its continuing attempt to mislead the public.
I have shown the bogus graph to hundreds of audiences all around the world. Recently I have been asking them to imagine that they were a fraud jury. All have voted to convict – and, on almost every occasion, the votes have been unanimous.
The difficulty, though, is that the IPCC, as one of a proliferating number of supranational agencies, is not answerable to any jurisdiction, except possibly that of Switzerland, where it is headquartered.
If the IPCC were answerable to the British courts, I should invite the police to prosecute and then, if they did not act, I should go before the magistrates myself. I have done it before. If the case is sound, a summons will be issued against the accused. I once hauled the British Secret Police (delicately called the “Crime Agency”) before the beaks, got a summons, and forced these thugs into a humiliating climbdown. But that is another story.
The Swiss authorities have established a specialist bureau to investigate frauds, the Bureau de l’Escroquerie. Its expertise is considerable, and it is well used to dealing with frauds a great deal more complex than those of the IPCC.
Whether the Swiss authorities will act on my complaint to them remains to be seen. Don’t hold your breath. However, now that the IPCC knows that a formal complaint has been submitted, it had better tread more carefully. If the Swiss police were to receive multiple complaints about different aspects of the IPCC’s misconduct – the Himalayan glaciers affair, for instance – they would not be able to look the other way indefinitely.
So, if the IPCC wishes to survive (and, frankly, it has had its day), it will have to be a great deal more careful in future to comply with the scientific method – and with the criminal law.
Brilliant, keep up the pressure.
Steve T
I assume IPCC will update in their next report the first graph with the obvious missing slope of the last 12.5 years?
We need to keep exposing every aspect of this fraud until the obvious inaction against it is making a mockery of law and justice that all can see.
Play on, you clown!
It is unfortunate that IPCC headquarters are not located in Italy, where seismologists were prosecuted and found guilty of manslaughter for not predicting of L’Aquila earthquake.
Mankind will thank you.
Demanding that other nations change their cultures and behaviors under threat of violence and wrath of God. There’s a word for that.
For a possible venue, perhaps Nuremberg would do.
Sir:
I get just a bit lost. Is Climate Change on a sine curve?
Surely you are not saying that.
Sincerely,
That’s what I like to see.
A bit of MoB justice!
Secrets and Lies
by Golem XIV on JUNE 27, 2013 in LATEST
Every credit has its debit, every positive its negative. So for every secret there must be a lie, and every lie must be kept secret.
This is the currency of power today. Fiat truth.
We are not allowed to have any secrets any more. And yet those who insist they must know the truth about us, who spy upon us to extract our secrets, tell us. in return, only lies.
It is a dangerous, corroding imbalance of power, because lies, like debts, compound.
Living the lie
We all know the famous Goebbels quote,
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.
From Sadam’s weapons of mass destruction and missiles that could hit us in just 40 minutes of sexed up bullshit, to the stress tests that show us every bank is perfectly solvent and however many billions they launder they are never guilty and no one goes to goal because they are too big to fail and too connected to even question.
The eye of providence looks out and approves of what is done – Annuit cœptis.
But who does the all seeing eye, that sits atop the pyramid of power on the mighty dollar bill, work for now? Is it really you and me? That is what we are told to believe. But is it true? I think there are too many secrets but few of them are yours and mine.
The private dealings of the ordinary citizen are considered suspect and must, we are told, be rooted out. The secrets and outright lies of the corporate and governmental worlds, however – they are confidential. They are protected – behind razor-wire threats of legal action and closed door tribunals of hand picked experts.
A few weeks ago I sat and listened to the former leader of the Conservative party, now an elder statesman of British politics, Michael Howard, tell an audience that governments need to lie. He is a clever man. He quoted Goebbels and then gave this carefully chosen example.
Imagine, he said, that a Chancellor knew that he was going to have to devalue the currency. The evening before the appointed hour, he is asked by a journalist if he is going to devalue. If he tells the truth and says yes, there will be a run on the currency and great damage will be done. So he lies. “No”, he says, “I have absolutely no plans to devalue at all.” And then next morning he devalues as he had planned.
“Was this not”, Mr Howard asked, “the right thing, the only thing to do?” And all agreed it was. The unspoken lesson that everyone seemed to accept was stability is more important than the truth.
I find this a very frightening notion.
But Mr Howard presented his lie well. He went on to quote the next, less well known line from the Goebbels quote.
The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie.
And this, he said smiling at us, is what protects you. The chancellor’s lie only needed to last a few hours. The nation only lived inside his lie overnight.
But now think of the lies we have been told since 2008. Our banking system and the banks in it, we were told, were basically sound just suffering from a shortage of liquidity. And yet, in reality, it was not a problem of liquidity, it was insolvency.
The liquidity lie had to be rolled over and the interest on it, paid. So another lie, that bank assets were not worthless just ‘impaired’, had to be told and maintained. And to do that the truth had to be hidden, off balance sheet, in mark to model and offshore.
Our governments have spent trillions maintaining their lies and have forced us to live those lies for five years now. But there are costs. Living a lie is morally and politically corrosive, not to mention expensive. Just this week, as reported in the FT, the Italian Treasury ‘uncovered’ a nest of lies. It appears that the Italian government, in the run up to joining the euro, paid at least one of the big banks to help it hide the true extent of its debts by agreeing derivative swaps. Greece used similar swaps to massage its debts. The now infamous Titlos agreement with Goldman Sachs being the best known.
The Italian agreements – there were several amounting to around €36 billion in value – would have been known to Mario Draghi who was at the time of some of the agreements at least (1998-9) Secretary of the Treasury. Shortly after this (2002) he left the government and joined Goldman.
It now turns out the terms of the agreements were such that the Italian tax payer could face billions in losses. Of course those who will be forced to pay, were never consulted, not even told of the agreements. They were …confidential of course. Commercially sensitive and politically secret – so often bedfellows aren’t they? Kept secret from those who would be required to pay the bill when it came due.
Our leaders, our liars, haven’t bothered to protect us from the consequences of the lies at all. Too expensive. So austerity, disparity and stagnation are everywhere around us. Forced on us by those who suffer none of them, insulated as they are by wealth and power and privilege. Consequences are for little people, not their Betters.
Our ‘Betters’ have found Goebbels was wrong. You don’t have to protect the people from the consequences of the lies you tell them, as long as you can blame those consequences on someone else. On unforeseen global economic forces, on conniving foreigners who devalue their currency, or terrorists or whistleblowers. Or even the people themselves for taking on debts they couldn’t afford or on ‘necessity’ and ‘precedent’ – the bond holders cannot be made to pay – it goes against international precedent.
We, the people, need to strike back at the secret deals done between the elites of the political and financial revolving door, and make it clear that we will not pay for anything about which we were not told.
Once the cry was, “No taxation without representation”. Today the cry must be, “No debt without consultation.”
Suppressing the Truth
What Mr Howard did not quote is the next line from Goebbels.
It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
But again Goebbels has been superceded. Repression is so last century. Why repress when you can simply drown it out. All it takes is for the media outlets to be owned by a few powerful and like- minded friends. A few media moguls and corporate giants, whose plastic pundits raise their voices while the dolly bird presenters flash their thighs. It’s all so full throttle and frantic, and charged with desire and greed.
Anyone who disagrees is a conspiracy theorist. Anyone who breaks ranks is a whistleblower and whistleblowers are domestic terrorists, dysfunctional loners with personality problems and axes to grind.
When the truth is vilified, hunted, gagged and goaled, then the State has chosen to go to war with the nation.
We are at war.
From: http://www.golemxiv.co.uk/2013/06/secrets-and-lies/
MiLord, Thank you, thank you, thank you. The time is running out on the global warming fools. Every day that passes makes it one day sooner to when you, Anthony, JoNova, and Bishop Hill are recognized as the heroes you are.
Absolutely brilliant, but what gave me a chuckle was the recollection of a rather recent suggestion by one Lord Monckton of Brenchley that we should not be driving the crooks into a corner. Instead, we were advised to do everything possible to help them discover the error of their ways, and to modestly turn away while they are busy saving face.
The idea of prosecution can’t possibly come from the same Lord Monckton, can it?
[snip – usual off-topic hater stuff – mod]
Sir:
Let’s put the question slightly differently.
We’re at the top of a sine curve, about to head down.
Not a perfect curve…could be true.
Sincerely,
I suggest getting copies of the books from the 90s published in the UK as part of the Global Environmental Change Series. They are quite graphic that the science being used is in fact sociology with a hope of restructuring all aspects of society.
To quote GECS “emphasizes the way human aspirations, choices and everyday behaviour influences changes in the global environment. In the aftermath of UNCED and Agenda 21, this series helps crystallize the contribution of social science thinking to global change.”
The IPCC is just the old “nothing as practical as a good [social science] theory.” In the case of the IPCC, it gains global redistribution, political power, and lots of insider sweet crony contracts. The book Social Theory and the Global Environment even concedes that Limits to Growth would have required central planning of the economy, but that was not the aspect focused on. No people treated it as flawed physical science, not as aspirational social science.
That’s still the point but Sustainability sounds better. The UN really does want to treat us all as 21st century serfs. With beliefs and attitudes and values they plan to dictate until we all believe in a common good purpose that Mao would have envied.
Comparing the short-term trend that concides with the warming phase of the multidecadal oscillation to the long-term trends that smoothes out the multidecadal oscillation is comparing apples to oranges. Therefore, the conclusion derived from such comparison is flowed. The proper method is to compare the warming rates for equal trend period of say 5-years for the last 100 years. This result after detrending clearly shows the multidecdal oscillation as shown:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4nh/mean:60/from:1871/detrend:0.74
Why are democracies and democratic republics subjecting themselves to will of other primarily totalitarian governments?
History has many examples of science being twisted to promote a political agenda.
Whether the IPCC is prosecuted or not, the authority given them via the UN should be revoked and/or ignored by free nations. (And their cash cut off.)
But you all must think of the cheeeldren < Yep, free Duffle coats all round to combat warbal gloaming – Simples really 🙂
PS I don’t mean to “derail” the post. I’ll refrain from rebuttals to comments outside the context of the post.
I wonder what period they’re smoothing over. It seems to be deliberately selected to hide the cooling over the last number of years. It looks like it ends about 2007. It looks to me like the smoothing itself may be bogus.
The thing that stands out even with their doctored graph is that the slope from 1910 to 1940 is the same as what they purport to be the current trend.
It’s a condition of joining the UN that employees of the UN and its agencies are exempt from all of a country’s laws. The UN itself has no laws. Thus fraud (and everything else we consider a crime) is perfectly legal if you are a United Nations employee.
@Vern
The sine curve was just an ad absurdem example to show how you can mislead! No one is suggesting a sine wave pattern in the climate.
Christopher: Best wishes for your pursuit of the IPCC.
I don’t think there’s any court in the Western World that would hold them responsible. They serve the interest of the state.
What drove most of the warming up to 2003? Carbon dioxide? Let’s ask Dr. James Hansen, formerly of NASA and see what his take was on the matter.
The past 10 years has been flat. What should I conclude, based on the findings of Dr. James Hansen, about co2 causing most of the ‘warming‘ since 2003 and before 2003?
As the science was settled, the world of climate stopped in the year 2000.
NASA pulled the same stunt as discovered by:
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/nasa-data-shows-arctic-was-warmer-in.html
and I clarified here:
http://www.sustainableoregon.com/nasa_graph_omission.html
thanks
JK
So, if we wanted to start a ground swell of complaints about fraud to the Swiss fraud unit, where would we send it and what kind of language and charges would we use? A boilerplate with pointers would be extremely useful for people to take and rewrite to their style of writing and send.
Would we send via email, or would a hardcopy with postage be better?
During the last 4 decades HadCRUT shows a deceleration of -3.7 K/cy². That’s a fact.
Dr. Fred Singer has said that in his opinion, the earth will continue to warm for another 200 to 300 years until a temperature matching that which existed at the height of the Medievel Warm Period has been reached.
This means that the IPCC will be in business for a long time to come; and unless there is a statistically significant decline in GMT which lasts continuously for a period of fifty years or more, the AGW alarmists will still be pushing their agenda a hundred years from now.
If Australia can take Japan to the International Court of Justice over the scientific killing of whales
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/26/whaling-australia-japan
then surely the same case can be demonstrated for the fraud of AGW………
It’s long been time for their prosecution Christopher. It’s blatant fraud. The fact they already use a graph of “upwardly adjusted” temps and then draw their scare-lines on it, is obviously misleading.
Besides, when the chart is normalised to show whole degrees – something we can actually feel – rather than inane fractions, it becomes a straight line:
http://suyts.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/image266.png
They MUST be prosecuted, since some families have been reported as committing suicide due to the “scare”. The IPCC and their cohorts, the infamous CRU and all connected, are fully responsible for this fraud as evidenced in the Climategate emails.
Punishment should include taking them to a desert on a clear night, where their precious CO2 won’t stop IR leaving Earth and they’ll likely learn the error of their ways.
It is stunning that the IPCC is trying to get away with this. Do they not see that the increase from 1910 to 1940ish was steeper than the current one? And yes, the sine wave example is perfect. But I’ve read the IPCC reports, and had already concluded they are more like comic books than any scientific text. They explain nothing in depth, and they are filled with misleading sciency-speak crap. For example, the terms used to describe what are, I guess, confidence intervals about certain conclusions: Very likely, extremely likely, super-duper-whooper likely? I mean, come on.
Redress, no country can take the UN to the ICJ. The UN can refer itself to the ICJ, but my understanding is that any ruling by the ICJ is just advisory and not binding.
Anyway, there is zero chance of the UN referring the IPCC to the ICJ.
It’s remarkable how few people understand the complete legal immunity enjoyed by the UN and its agencies.
Is it time to prosecute the IPCC for fraud?
YES!
@Philip Bradley: You’re right, the IPCC per se is almost certainly immune (and even if it were not, the people at the UN who would have to prosecute them are foxes guarding the henhouse).
But many of the individuals who wrote the report, and the sponsors who keep them going with grant money, are in the US and/or UK and can and should be open to prosecution or lawsuit for fraud. Perhaps a class action suit on behalf of the taxpayers is the way to go. Let’s see how far Mickey Mann and his friends can drag out a case when they’re paying for it out of pocket.
Yes, it is time to prosecute “green” agenda fraud – otherwise it will never stop…
It depends on what the definition of “is” is.
My iinterpretation of the IPCC graph is that the trend lines are correct, but merely suffer from the old assumption of future trends following existing trends, like any stockmarket trader following a rising price- the ‘trend following’ mistake, or for that matter, the housing bubble and inappropriate lending in the US which led to the GFC (along with financial derivitives). Assuming trends will continue is a very common mistake for humans to make.
But if the trend lines are actually correct, if might be very difficult to get any real traction in court about what conclusions one draws, i.e. whether these conclusions are fraudulent or not. You could say the same about the GFC and bad loans based on trends, its sloppy, irresponsible, self-serving, inappropriate, but not factually incorrect at the time.
I’m sure that is what the IPCC would say, the graph is ultimately separate from any conclusions drawn, even in a caption. Irresponsible, but not ‘incorrect’ or ‘fraudulent’.
The Swiss won’t prosecute- as long as the government gets its cut- nothing happens- They financed the Second War – its a war crime and no one has ever been prosecuted. Their banks were only prosecuted for their tax haven dodgy dealings due to outside pressure.
MoB, first, you must make the complaint to the Kantonal Rectanwalt (Prosecutor) of the Kanton where the IPCC hauptsitz is, which can be disambiguated through the HandelsRegister.
Remember D, F, I but not EN are official languages of Switzerland, and the complaint can be drafted in any of them, whatever the Kanton. Consider getting Swiss Legal advice possibly from a sympathetic Professor in Basle, You may also have to have a Swiss national to have standing in Swiss Courts. The Rechter will advise.
Viel grüss, und ‘keep up the good work’ aus Züri, omb
I strongly resent the unsubstantiated lies you ‘Cloa….’ make of me and my country. These slurs are the result of the lies of a self hating American Jew, Henry Morgenthal in 1947. Swiss Banking law dated from 1934 before Hitler had risen in Deutschland.
Switzerland was not invaded because the NAZIs knew we would fight to the last man, woman and child and because all the tunnels to France and Italy would be blown. In addition General Grussian provided safe haven for MI6, Allan Dulles of the OSS and prevented Hitler from re-inforcing Italy.
So take your slurs and shove them up your ignorant rectum!
Could the IPCC AGW campaign have its genesis in a military program for WWIII?
http://www.amazon.com/Arming-Mother-Nature-Catastrophic-Environmentalism/dp/0199740054/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1372458445&sr=8-1&keywords=arming+mother+nature
The darn solar magnetic cycle changes have started to bring cold and wet weather and crop failures. …. ….The warmists are still trying to prop up their disproved, dead, not on life support AGW warming hypothesis. Guys (John Cook, Grant Foster, Gavin Schmidt, Kevin Trenberth, Michael Mann, lead IPCC authors and so on.) give it up, you guys have lost. The climate change problem is cold wet weather and crop failure. What do you suggest we should do to address cold climate change? Based on what has happened before the solar magnetic cycle deep minimum (Solar cycle 24 is the weakest solar magnetic cycle in 150 years, based on what has happened before solar cycle 24 will be will be followed by 100 to 150 years of very, very weak solar magnetic cycles) will bring cold, wet weather for roughly 100 to 150 years. Any suggestions? Come on guys think out of the box!!!
http://www.solen.info/solar/images/comparison_recent_cycles.png
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/jun/12/farmers-fail-weather-wheat-crop
The wettest autumn since records began, followed by the coldest spring in 50 years, has devastated British wheat, forcing food manufacturers to import nearly 2.5m tonnes of the crop. … ….Britain is usually the EU’s third biggest wheat grower but it will be a net importer for the first time in 11 years. “Our poll is a snapshot but it is extremely worrying. If this plays out nationally, we will be below average production for the second year in a row,” said NFU crops chair Andrew Watts. “If the experts are to be believed and extreme weather is to become more frequent, we must look at ways of supporting the industry.” … ….The diminished wheat harvest will add to growing concerns about the amount of food that British farmers can grow per hectare. According to a new analysis by the development board, UK wheat and oilseed rape yields have barely improved since the 1980s, despite genetic developments and better fertilisers. No one reason is given but severe and fluctuating weather is thought to have played a part.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/typical-british-weather-rain-cold-and-high-winds-set-to-return-as-uk-summer-fizzles-out-8655945.html
‘Typical British weather’: Rain, cold and high winds set to return, as UK summer fizzles out
Britain’s brief period of fine weather is over, as forecasters predict unsettled, wet and windy conditions for at least the next four weeks. … …. http://www.thelocal.fr/20130521/weather-men-bring-more-bad-news-for-france
According to Météo France, the national weather agency, the heavy rain that kept most people trapped in doors over last weekend’s Pentecost holiday is to continue until the end of the month, meaning that Spring 2013 is set to be one of the coldest in the last 20 years.
According to Météo France, temperatures in northern France for the first half of May 2013 were two degrees below average temperatures recorded for this time of year.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/31/italy-shivers-cursed-spring-relentless-rain
Italy shivers through ‘cursed spring’ of relentless rain …. …..Italian springs are often strange, but this one will perhaps be remembered as particularly capricious. As with much of northern Europe, the country has shivered its way through a good deal of the year. In the north-west, according to the Italian meteorological society, residents have had the coldest May since 1991. In much of the north-east, the spring has been the wettest for at least 150 years. A mountain stage of the Giro d’Italia bike race was called off due to snow and ice. Beach resorts in Tuscany have been flooded. Many farmers have suffered huge damage to their crops. …. ….Now, as June arrives, it should technically be summer. But it certainly doesn’t feel like it. “Last year, by this point, we were going to the sea. At the beginning of June we went down to the Fori Imperiali and sunbathed,” said Mario Ramelli, a street-corner florist in central Rome. This spring’s brutto tempo has been a topic of conversation with many of his customers – that is, those who stop to buy a pot of pansies or, optimistically, some sunflowers. “When it’s horrid and wet, people hurry by,” said Ramelli. “It’s not good for work.”
https://www.wmo.int/pages/mediacentre/news_members/documents/2013-05-29DeutschlandwetterimFruhling2013en.pdf
… Coldest spring since 1987 Spring 2013 was the coldest in Germany since 1987. The average temperature of 6.7 degrees Celsius (°C) was 1.0 degree lower than the reference values for 1961 to 1990 and as much as 1.8 degrees below the figure for the comparative period from 1981 to 2010. A major factor here was the unusually cold March. From the middle of the month onwards, the temperatures were extremely low, such as on 16 March at Deutschneudorf – Brüderwiese in the mid- range Ore Mountains where a temperature of – 21.3°C was measured and on 24 March in Coschen, to the south of Eisenhüttenstadt, where – 18.9°C was recorded ….
http://www.euronews.com/2013/05/24/wintry-spring-costs-western-europe/
A tourist who found it bewildering said: “It is very strange, but I think the whole of Europe had a very long winter, but I didn’t expect snow in the Serra de Estrela in May.”
The northern Spanish city of Burgos felt temperatures drop to 3ºC on May 15.
In the French interior they’ve been averaging 4-5 degrees below normal, so people have kept the heating going. An extra tank of fuel for that cost an ordinary family household 445 euros – at 90 cents a litre. .. …This has meant a 5-10 percent rise in electricity consumption, compared to previous years – similarly for combustible pellets.
I’m not comfortable with this line of attack. Even really, really bad science shouldn’t be criminalized.
Cut their budgets to zero, but don’t charge them with a criminal act. That’s James Hansen talk.
The IPCC, having spent almost two months working out how to respond to my complaint about a notoriously bogus graph in its Fourth Assessment Report, has found itself not guilty.
That’s ok, m’Lord–the IRS just announced they’re not guilty of misconduct, too! Amazing!
Seems all these self-inspecting, self-emancipating (yet criminally-inclined) assemblies doth make a mockery out of truth and justice.
Much to their own lack of dismay.
They’re targets ripe for prosection. Bombs away.
If you update the graph and slightly alter the times, you actually get a deceleration in warming or cooling. See what the slopes look like for the last 48 years, 24 years and 12 years.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/last:576/plot/hadcrut4gl/last:576/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/last:288/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/last:144/trend
The answer is “Yes”.
Beta Blocker says:
June 28, 2013 at 4:06 pm
Dr. Fred Singer has said that in his opinion, the earth will continue to warm for another 200 to 300 years until a temperature matching that which existed at the height of the Medievel Warm Period has been reached…..
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I doubt it.
Greenland Ice Core: Graph last 10,000 years (From Jo Nova)
Lead time of insolation energy vs temperature
This graph says, the earth has no business being as warm as it is right now.
“.. Minimum glacier input is indicated between 6700-5700 cal yr BP, probably reflecting a situation when most glaciers in the catchment had melted away, whereas the highest glacier activity [glaciers increasing in size] is observed around 600 and 200 cal yr BP….” link
Alley in his study of abrupt climate change found
And no one knows what causes Dansgaard-Oeschger oscillations and terminations.
“When you surround an army, leave an outlet free.”
Sun Tzu
——-
Trying really hard, few takers of the outlet.
A deliberate attempt to deceive is criminal. The problem something like nobel cause corruption. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_corruption#.22Noble_Cause_Corruption.22_and_Police These jokers believe so much in their cause that they think any lie or dirty trick is justified.
Go get ’em, milord. As one punishment, perhaps make them draw the trend line for the last 12.5 years on the AR5 chart – since they start with 150, go to 100, then 50 and finally 25 years in their trend-drawing exercise – and have them explain that (what, we took a nap? The heat has wiggled into the cold ocean depths, awaiting a dark, moonless night to reappear? Obama’s magic has actually cooled the skies and caused the tides to recede?). As another punishment, throw as many of these bums into jail for a long as possible.
First, the entire graph is worthless because it artificially excludes accurately known temperature trends and throws in imaginary outliers. That said, they have no idea how to represent a graph of temperature history without destroying information. The correct way to represent a temperature graph is to overlay a semi-transparent band that does not destroy the underlying temperature changes. It should be broad enough to cover most of the fuzz that looks random. It is caused by cloudiness variations. This also limits the amplitude of the fuzz and if there are unexplained peaks that exceed the average they are most likely of anthropogenic origin. Once you have this broad transparent band in place put a dot in the center of every line joining an El Nino peak with its adjacent La Nina valley. Connecting these dots gives you the best estimate of how the mean temperature for that section behaves. All this must be done by hand, forget computer manipulation entirely. I did this for the satellite era in my book “What Warming?” in 2010. Connecting the dots immediately showed me that global temperature in the eighties and nineties did not increase until the super El Nino of 1998 showed up (see Figure 15 in the book). That means that we had an eighteen year temperature standstill in the eighties and nineties. Add this to the current standstill that is supposed to have lasted either 15 or 17 or 13 years according to different sources and you have very little of the satellite era left to show any warming. It is a window just wide enough to accommodate the super El Nino of 1998 and its associated step warming. This means that there has been no greenhouse warming at all since the beginning of the satellite era in 1979. That is 34 greenhouse-free years. Knowing this fact, what is the likelihood that any earlier warming was greenhouse warming? Answer: zero. But now comes the really crazy part. It turns out that the eighties and nineties where satellites report no warming is shown as a steady warming called “the late twentieth century warming.” That warming is phony and this is how I said it in the book: ‘The conclusion that temperature curves showing the “late twentieth century warming” are faked and cannot be trusted is strongly reiterated and an investigation into the origin of that fake warming is suggested.’ This is putting it as strongly as I could but nothing happened for two years. None of their people even admitted seeing the book. But suddenly, last fall, three big name temperature databases – GISTEMP, HadCRUT, and NCDC – all suddenly dropped showing that fake warming and aligned their eighties and nineties values with satellite data. It was done secretly and no explanation was offered. I regard this joint action as tantamount to an admission that they all knew it was fake. Checking the miserable excuse for temperature curve in AR4 reveals that this bogus warming is shown as part of the data for the yellow inclined line alleged to show warming. There are probably numerous other articles using that same graph as confirmation of AGW. They should all be withdrawn.
So the IPCC contention is that CO2 and the human generated element of atmospheric CO2 is causing this accelerating global temperature rise.
Why then does not global temperature track the CO2 rise? Why does it diverge? If the IPCC can not answer this question the the science is NOT settled, and as Lord Monckton of Brenchley says the IPCC is fraudulent in their claim.
The UN/IPCC is 100 percent politics. Therefore anything the IPCC claims is 100 percent false.
Why anyone wastes their time listening to political raving is beyond me.
If you don’t like what the IPCC is doing, stop feeding it money.
[I am sure I’m not the only one who would like to be informed of what slurs you are referring to. — mod.]
Well since you asked there are three (1) that the Swiss were, in any way complicit with the NAZIs, we hated them and mostly dislike Chermans, (2) that we sheltered the NAZI confiscated funds, try much harder and you are led to Juan Domingo Peron and the German influence in Argentina and Uraguray aka Operation Phoenix, which still exists today [snip], (3) that we host a shit-load of phony NGOs, UNXXX, and private entities … no we have the now OLD FASHIONED idea that if you want a place, and behave, obeying our law, you should be free.
Nowhere ARE YOU OUT OF BUSINESS AND EXPELLED FASTER THAN SWITZERLAND even \after you have paid your CHF 20,0 fee to register your scam.
MFG, omb
Sorry dude, I must disagree. If no harm is to come to a person’s life, liberty or property and, the IPCC has already affected all 3, then they’re guilty and fully accountable.
For several years, I have recommended that we mount an effort to sue the EPA for fraud in its declaration that CO2 is a pollutant. Additionally I recommended that we mount an effort to get the Supreme Court to rescind its ruling that the EPA has the authority to issue regulations on CO2, when there is no sound evidence that CO2 concentration from human activity is having a measurable effect on climate. Also there were politics within the EPA, which suppressed an internal report recommending that the EPA do its own research instead of parroting the IPCC.
Finally, some in Congress say they have no control over the EPA, which is issuing all of these needless regulations. Hog Wash! Congress funds the EPA. Shut off the money and activity ends. Where does President Obama get the authority to issue executive orders to the EPA, shutting out Congress?
TallDave says:
June 28, 2013 at 7:07 pm
I’m not comfortable with this line of attack. Even really, really bad science shouldn’t be criminalized.
Cut their budgets to zero, but don’t charge them with a criminal act. That’s James Hansen talk.
===========================
The scientists that are guilty of supporting this scientific fraud should be made well aware that in future administrations, charges will be likely and at the very least they will be involved in depositions regarding why they went along with the Trenberth, Mann, Hansen, Marcott Lysenkoism and, have they too caused monetary damages for which they are liable in civil litigation.
I hope the IPCC authors are reading this, because if they think that Big Brother can save them from civil litigation, they need to guess again. When US Law Firms smell a good Class Action suit it’s gonna get ugly ….
… or fun, depending on your POV.
Whether the cause of action succeeds or not, it is definitely worth trying — even if only for the attention it draws to the underlying facts of the matter.
However…. the elements of Fraud in Swiss law may differ from those in the U.S., but, here, at least (inter alia):
1. intent to deceive must be proven by the plaintiff. The IPCC may successfully argue that it was merely mistaken and had no intention to deceive;
2. the victim-plaintiff must be held to have not “known or reasonably should have known” of the falsity of the defendant’s claims; and
3. damages must be proven — must be an “injured party” who has standing to sue (i.e., to be the Plaintiff) and what the damages were must be specifically shown. The mere fact that one told a lie is evil, but not actionable absent a special statutory requirement (e.g., Martha Stewart while not convicted of the underlying crime was convicted of having lied to a federal agent because there is a law that makes such a lie a crime.).
That is to say, DO TRY, but, if the Fraud statute in Switzerland is like that in the U.S., expect the IPCC to find at least one element of Fraud unmet.
Good for you, Christopher Monckton!
And, you ARE a hero — whether the world acknowledges that fact or not.
Thank you.
I believe the 25-year line is now shallower than the 50-year line. Someone should draw a graph showing this and hoist them on their own petard.
Well done, Lord Monckton. I so hope others in a position to do so will follow your lead and bring forward more complaints against the IPCC. The IPCC is doing nothing but damage, serious damage now, and costing the world billions in faulty policy that continues to make the situation worse. If authorities don’t take control, sooner or later the people will, and that will not be pleasant for anybody.
Here is their analysis updated with data up to 2012 – see graph here.
Would the IPCC agree that their “analysis” now shows that global warming is decelerating ?
WWF is behind this?
The IPCC seems to cling on to the good old times when global warming was a fact: 15 years ago. They are clearly not up to date any more.
Capitulation: The end of the climate wars. We are in the championship rounds in the climate wars. There is the first observational evidence of physical cooling of the planet. It appears the sun will be anomalous spotless by the end of the year.
The regions that experienced the most warming in the last 70 years (the Northern Hemisphere, particularly high latitude Northern Hemisphere) will experience the most cooling, due to the sudden solar magnetic cycle change. Unequivocal planetary cooling will bring climate `science` into crisis, which is acknowledgement that a field of science`s paradigms cannot explain what is observed. The warmists have admirably given their best effort to come up with a logical explanation for a period of no warming of 16 years. There is no need however to dwell on how to explain the lack of warming phase as the planet is starting to cool. A cooling planet is a game change for the climate wars.
The CO2 forcing, if the mechanism was not saturated, should always be on. CO2 forcing, if it worked in accordance with the theory, does not turn on for a couple of years and then hideaway for 16 years. If the CO2 forcing mechanism was not saturated what we would expect to observe due to the increase in atmospheric CO2 is a wiggly increase in planetary temperature. The wiggles, being caused by internal forcings and changes of the climate system and the gradual increase in planetary temperature, being caused by the increase in atmospheric CO2.
There were observational indications the CO2 mechanism does not work, that the CO2 mechanism is saturated. The warmists of course ignored observational evidence that their theory was incorrect such as the fact that there was no observed tropical tropospheric hot spot. The warmists also ignored the fact that the latitudinal pattern of warming in the last 70 years matched the past cycles of warming and cooling that correlate with solar magnetic cycle changes. There has been nine periods of cyclic warming and cooling during the current interglacial period all of the past warming periods correlate with an increase in the solar magnetic cycle followed by a Maunder like minimum at which time the planet cools for 100 to 150 years. As the sun is abruptly moving towards a Maunder minimum it is not surprise the planet is now starting to cool.
Greenland ice temperature, last 11,000 years determined from ice core analysis, Richard Alley’s paper.
http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif
If the warming majority of the warming was caused by solar magnetic cycle changes rather than the increase in atmospheric CO2 the warming could be reversed, the planet could cool.
Comments:
Hansen’s proposal that Chinese aerosols could be the cause of the lack of warming has one of the first valiant attempts, until some scaly wag pointed out the Northern Hemisphere has warmed four times more than the tropics and twice as much as the world as whole. The problem is atmospheric CO2 varies only roughly 4% by latitude so the potential for a CO2 forcing change should be roughly the same throughout the planet. Aerosols emitted in the Northern Hemisphere would cause cooling in the Northern hemisphere yet the Northern hemisphere has warmed the most. The problem is explaining the lack of warming in the tropics where there is the most amount of radiation being emitted off to space. The latest attempt to explain the lack of warming is the `heat hiding in the ocean mistruth` which is helped along by the GRACE measurement error. One of physical consequences of the solar magnetic cycle change is charge unbalance on the surface of the planet as the ice sheets are insulators, the oceans conductive, and the continents slightly conductive. The change in charge on the vicinity of the earth is the physical explanation for why the ionosphere abruptly dropped in height and why there is observed gamma radiation at the top of some clouds. This is also the explanation as to why the solar wind continues to drop in speed as the anomalous solar cycle 24 precedes.
http://phys.org/news/2010-11-satellites-reveal-differences-sea.html#jCp
According to the new results, the annual world average sea level rise is about 1 millimeter, or about 0.04 of an inch. In some areas, such as the Pacific Ocean near the equator and the waters offshore from India and north of the Amazon River, the rise is larger. In some areas, such as the east coast of the United States, the sea level has actually dropped a bit over the past decade.
GRACE
The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE for short, consists of a pair of satellites moving in an orbit that takes them over the South and North Poles. The two craft, nicknamed Tom and Jerry after the television cartoon characters, send constant signals to each other to determine their relative spacing to about 10 microns — one-tenth the width of a human hair — over a distance of 130 miles. If the first craft flies above a slightly more weighty area of the Earths’ surface — like a mountain range — it will be tugged a bit out of place, an effect picked up by a change in the relative spacing of the craft.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/30/finally-jpl-intends-to-get-a-grasp-on-accurate-sea-level-and-ice-measurements/
We are now observing the start of capitulation of the climate wars as climate `science` moves towards the crisis phase.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/20/if-things-continue-as-they-have-been-in-five-years-at-the-latest-we-will-need-to-acknowledge-that-something-is-fundamentally-wrong-with-our-climate-models/
J Bryan Kramer writes of this interview with IPCC lead author Hans Van Storch in SPIEGEL.
SPIEGEL: Just since the turn of the millennium, humanity has emitted another 400 billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, yet temperatures haven’t risen in nearly 15 years. What can explain this?
Storch: So far, no one has been able to provide a compelling answer to why climate change seems to be taking a break. We’re facing a puzzle. Recent CO2 emissions have actually risen even more steeply than we feared. As a result, according to most climate models, we should have seen temperatures rise by around 0.25 degrees Celsius (0.45 degrees Fahrenheit) over the past 10 years. That hasn’t happened. In fact, the increase over the last 15 years was just 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.11 degrees Fahrenheit) — a value very close to zero. This is a serious scientific problem that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will have to confront when it presents its next Assessment Report late next year.
SPIEGEL: Despite all these problem areas, do you still believe global warming will continue?
William: We do not need to ask IPCC lead authors what their instinct is. The IPCC ignored obvious observational evidence that indicated the CO2 mechanism saturates, that the majority of the warming in the last 70 years has caused by the sun. The surprise will be global cooling.
Storch: Yes, we are certainly going to see an increase of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) or more — and by the end of this century, mind you. That’s what my instinct tells me, since I don’t know exactly how emission levels will develop. Other climate researchers might have a different instinct. Our models certainly include a great number of highly subjective assumptions. Natural science is also a social process, and one far more influenced by the spirit of the times than non-scientists can imagine. You can expect many more surprises.
Mahatma Gandhi: An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.
Arthur Schopenhauer: All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Buddha: There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.
Go for it Lord MoB. The impact of this fraud, deliberate of not, is so wide reaching and damaging it must be stopped. The trillion dollars spent on ridiculous water melon schemes could easily have been used to house the homeless, feed the starving, provide cheap power to those that need it, and fund the development of improved gas and coal power station efficiency, with a stack left over to fund medical research into improving our quality of life.
Take the legal action whilst at the same time creating a community of like minded individuals to demonstrate the support you have. Why not start an e-petition in the UK with the aim of getting this firmly on the agenda in government? I know this is a soft action, but it is legitimate and it is measured.
Great work sir, keep it up please.
Lord Monckton I hope you succeed. Given that 7,800 people die during winter because they can’t afford to heat their homes properly according to the Independent.
ALSO SEE: Fuel poverty and human health: A review of recent evidence. and Academics wrangle over fuel poverty and winter deaths “Professor John Hills of the London School of Economics in his review of fuel poverty for the Government. His final report is not yet published, but his interim report which came out in October 2011 concludes that 2,700 deaths a year are related to fuel poverty.” There is also a letter allegedly from Christine Liddell and John Hills published in the Independent that says the Independent misrepresented Christine Liddell’s statement to them. (If they can not agree on or can not figure out how many people died from the cold, how can they figure out the climate?)
Which ever numbers you use you have at least 2,700 ‘excess’ deaths a year so “#3. damages must be proven” can certainly be proven.
“#1. intent to deceive must be proven “
The IPCC’s own words show their intentions were not to determine what causes ‘Climate Change’ but to provide evidence that ‘It’s the humans wot done it’ and to come up with potential impacts and options for mitigation and adaptation.
To me that reads the IPCC had a completely political and not scientific objective from the very start and goes towards ‘Intent to decieve’ Then add in the Climategate e-mails. The gate keeping in journals and I think you have a pretty good case.
#2. the victim-plaintiff must be held to have not “known or reasonably should have known” of the falsity of the defendant’s claims
Again the Climategate e-mails.
“…I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow, even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” — Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, July 8, 2004
“I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is no quite so simple.” — Dr. Keith Briffa, Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Sep. 22, 1999
“…it would be nice to try to ‘contain’ the putative ‘MWP’ [Medieval Warm Period]…” — Dr. Michael Mann, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, June 4, 2003
“By the way, when is Tom C [Crowley] going to formally publish his roughly 1500 year reconstruction??? It would help the cause to be able to refer to that reconstruction as confirming Mann and Jones, etc.”
—Dr. Michael Mann, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Aug. 3, 2004
“Also we have applied a completely artificial adjustment to the data after 1960, so they look closer to observed temperatures than the tree-ring data actually were…” — Dr. Tim Osborn, Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Dec. 20, 2006
“…If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s warming blip (as I’m sure you know). So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say 0.15 deg C, then this would be significant for the global mean—but we’d still have to explain the land blip…” — Dr. Tom Wigley, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, on adjusting global temperature data, disclosed Climategate e-mail to Phil Jones, Sep. 28, 2008
In response to FOIA requests:
“You might want to check with the IPCC Bureau. I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 [the upcoming IPCC Fifth Assessment Report] would be to delete all e-mails at the end of the process. Hard to do, as not everybody will remember it.” — Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, on avoiding Freedom of Information requirements, disclosed Climategate e-mail, May 12, 2009
“Mike [Mann], can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith [Trenberth] re AR4? Keith will do likewise…Can you also e-mail Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his e-mail address…We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.” — Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, May 29, 2008
Quotes stolen from HERE (Many thanks to FOIA who threw a large road bump into the path of the IPCC.)
There are also the scientists who resigned from the IPCC over the misuse of science.
My 1995 Resignation Letter From The IPCC (Roger Pielke sr.)
Chris Landsea’s Resignation From The IPCC (2005)
A collection of resignations HERE
That is just from a quicky look around the internet. I think Lord Monckton can build a much better case if he can find a venue for a trial.
Even if a real trial can not be done, It might be worth it to hold a ‘Mock Trial’ on TV Invite the Climate Scientists even pay their way. If Jones, Mann et al will not show up to defend their actions and science that is an admission of guilt is it not?
As ever m’lord to the point and precise.
Dear Lord Monckton,
Attempting to “criminalise” this disagreement makes you sound bitter, nasty, and quite a lot crazy. Anthony Watts’ decision to publish this does similar things to himself and to his blog. It’s just the same as those trying to criminalise the Heartland Institute, and in the realm of Michael Mann craziness.
I hope the post is removed & apologised for.
Best regards,
Alex
Why not add to the legal complaint the abuse of statistical methodology clearly evident in the formation of means and standard deviations formed (averaged over) various climate models as if they were independent and identically distributed exemplars drawn from a fixed distribution and then using the result as if it has predictive force in its fraudulent statements of probability (if CO_2 does this or that, it is thus and such likely that global average temperatures will increase by so and so amount) made directly to policy makers? See if they can defend these probabilities using anything like honest statistics. They cannot. In the end, the numbers they have policy makers are just made up — they have no defensible numerical justification.
A correct application of statistics to the GCMs would be to formulate the null hypothesis “this model is correct” (one at a time!), generate a Monte Carlo spread of results for that model to sample the effect of chaos, generate the mean (per model!) and deciles away from the mean (per model!) and note that reality is in every single case in the last decile (or worse) of the model envelopes, and that the models without exception (one at a time!) exaggerate the warming. One would then systematically reject the null hypothesis “this model is correct”, one at a time, for all of the models that contributed to AR4, and conclude that we have very little idea what is going to happen to the climate in 100 years because we do not understand and cannot predict what the climate is doing right now.
rgb
I’m not comfortable with this line of attack. Even really, really bad science shouldn’t be criminalized.
Cut their budgets to zero, but don’t charge them with a criminal act. That’s James Hansen talk.
I tend to agree, but bear in mind that the AR Summary to Policy Makers are not science, it is an abomination. They are politics dressed up in the guise of science, being presented to an audience that a) will use the summary to make policy decisions that can benefit or damage the entire population of the world according to how well or poorly those decisions are made; and b) who are utterly incapable of detecting statistical fraud, that is, lying with statistics, and who are not terribly capable of reading the actual scientific sections one at a time to assess how seriously to take the policy recommendations. The only possible defensible (bad) science is bias in the individual scientific sections, but there all the actual participating scientists know better than to take even their own work TOO seriously and generally acknowledge a much higher level of doubt than that presented to policy makers.
So absolutely, do not charge scientists who were working — biased or not — in good faith. From what I understand, however, the AR summaries were not written by all of the actual scientists contributing to the report — they were written by a carefully selected group that presented the “scientific” conclusions as frighteningly as possible. The problem is, as Monckton points out, that they didn’t just bend the rules of scientific discourse in defensible ways, they utterly broke them, and given the political nature of the document and the fact that (we hope!) the breakers aren’t that incompetent in statistics, one has to assume that they were broken deliberately and with a certain malice aforethought. The alternative (and yes, it is always an attractive one in science) is that the writers of the AR4 Summary for Policy Makers are utterly incompetent in statistics.
Monckton has identified one problem with the report — presenting a visual graphic that shows, on the usual utterly exaggerated temperature scale produced by plotting only “the anomaly”, with “decadal error bars” that are so utterly unbelievable that they literally beggar the imagination (We knew global mean temperature to within 0.1 to 0.2 C in 1880? Really? Curiously, we supposedly only know it within 0.1 C today according to an equally fraudulent presentation from AR5.) and then accentuating a supposed “acceleration” at the end of it that is supposedly due to human causes.
Suppose that one presented the entire thermal history of the Holocene instead of this curve (still as an “anomaly”)? Hmm, that would be quite different. Temperature goes up, temperature goes down. The unshown start of the warming trend presented above, the low point in the LIA, was the coldest single century in the entire Holocene, and nearly all of the “warming” in figure above is a) not anthropogenic at all; and b) regression to some sort of warmer mean from this 12,000 year minimum. We are still well short of the Holocene Optimum — achieved without the benefit of human derived CO_2; c) and finally, we do not know and cannot compute or explain either the past history of global climate or what the current global average temperature “should” be with or without CO_2, so we cannot ascribe causes in a quantitative way to any part of the observed warming “anomaly”. The implication of the figure is that humans caused allof the warming evident in the figure with their building of an industrial civilization, even though CO_2 did not significantly increase due to industrialization until post WW2. The secondary implication is that (for the slightly more sophisticated reader) we can somehow linearly extrapolate the trend from 1945 to the present and observe a “human derived” component by subtraction — this is the “accelerating” part — in spite of the fact that the global average temperature has never had a meaningful linear trend on any timescale because it is a reflection of an underlying chaotic, nonlinear process that we cannot begin to compute!
As I’ve pointed out, this isn’t even the worst abuse in AR4. The presentation of GCM results with a mean and standard deviation and the inversion of hypothesis testing in science wherein the mean of the GCMs is treated as a reliable predictive truth complete with error-function derived probabilities goes beyond mere incompetence.
The fundamental problem with these diversions and abuses is that they are highly lethal in and of themselves. If Obama’s plan to “control” the uncontrollable production of CO_2 resulting from breathing, driving cars, producing electricity, making concrete, and all of the other activities associated with human civilization goes into effect, it will increase the cost of all forms of energy dramatically. This, in turn, will cause directly and indirectly the deaths of millions of humans a year as it slows the creation of a truly global civilization, condemning the world’s poorest people to a life of continuing 17th century energy poverty in the 21st century. Most damnably, it will do so without more than inconveniencing people living in the first world instead of the third world, because they will still jet all over the world to climate conferences and come home to their centrally heated and air conditioned houses to wash their clothes in a washing machine while sipping a refrigerated beverage before driving their kids 1000 miles to the beach in their oh-so-politically-correct Prius.
In the meantime, in India there will be a child that is born in a mud hut, fed food cooked on dried animal dung, who wears filthy rags (if they wear anything at all) and urinates and excretes into the dust outside of the hut like an animal who dies of utterly preventable dysentary before their fifth year of life. I have lived there, I have seen it. It is true. It is true in India, in Africa, in South America. I’m certain that it is still true in parts of Australia and China and the rest of Southeast Asia. Obama might as well be holding a gun to their heads and pulling the trigger.
So it is not correct to state that AR4’s Summary for Policy Makers was without effect. It has been the proximate or indirect cause of the deaths of millions of people over the last five years, and is poised to become the cause of millions more over the next because the policy makers trusted the scientists to present mathematically defensible conclusions in the report, not graphs that they just made up and presented to tell a story that they thought was true but could not prove (which includes the unprovable statements of estimated probabilities for future temperature ranges).
Time for some elementary economics. One cannot increase or decrease the cost of energy by fiat. Energy cost sets the scale of the value of the currency used to purchase it, not the other way around. Energy is used in the production and delivery of every single good or service in civilization above the level of an 18th century agrarian “ideal” that, in fact, never existed except in the rural southern US and in a fantasy world of European colonialism and then only on the back of slavery as a cheap source of energy. The only way we use less energy in the world — and I mean significantly less, enough less to affect the “projections” of the IPCC — is to regress civilization to the 18th century reality of massive poverty, de facto slavery (wage and otherwise), poor health, starvation, and — because the world’s population is pushing on towards 8 billion instead of the less than 1 billion alive in the actual 18th century — a global kill-off of some enormous fraction of the world’s population and the deconstruction of its cities.
Cities and industrial production centers live and die on energy. Read Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank if you think otherwise — it is a novel written in the 60’s presenting the “depression” that would have followed an apocalyptic nuclear war. The worst part of that apocalypse wasn’t just the incineration of a comparative handful of cities — it was the complete breakdown of the delicate web of transportation and production upon which our comfortable 21st century lives rely.
There is precisely one energy alternative that is technologically feasible now — not in twenty years, now — that would permit us to scale back on carbon-based energy and preserve civilization itself while allowing it to continue to extend into the third world to uplift the saddest, poorest of the world’s citizens to the level of comfort and security we take for granted. That is nuclear power. If Obama had wanted my attention, he would have left carbon based energy completely alone, and would have called for the aggressive promotion of safe nuclear power. He would have announced an aggressive government initiative into the development in LESS than 20 years of even safer nuclear energy — liquid salt thorium reactors — where North Carolina alone has enough thorium mixed in with equally valuable rare earth metals to fuel the entire US for (IIRC) 17,000 years. In the meantime, solar will probably be ready for prime time as an economically viable energy alternative for much of the world (especially if glued together with LFTR reactors to cover the times that the sun doesn’t shine) within the next 20 years as well (it is marginal to profitable in certain places already but cannot stand alone) to eke out nuclear in the longer run and sure, to partially displace the burning of carbon and make it CHEAPER to burn carbon to help the third world BOOTSTRAP their way to 21st century civilization.
We are dealing with a bizarre social contradiction. Modern civilization is (unsurprisingly) unsatisfying to many of the people who enjoy its comforts. They descry the overpopulation problem (even though they personally do not experience the “problem” at all). They worry about ecological disasters (with some merit — there is every reason to want to preserve and protect the global ecology in sensible ways). They neurose over “the end of oil” even though rumors of the demise of oil appear to have been greatly exaggerated, probably by the very people that profit from the higher energy prices associated with the anthropogenic global warming scam (as opposed to the unproven, uncomputable, but plausible hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming). They long for an utterly fictional rural past where everybody lived in balance with nature and in clean, white, small towns where families talked instead of watching television and June Cleaver’s biggest problem with keeping that scamp, Beaver, out of completely non-lethal non-drug-related trouble. They attribute all of their problems to some sort of society of Illuminati that own, and run, everything and that secretly have space aliens tucked away at Roswell and tap all of the phone lines and put fluorine in water to destroy our purity of essence (joke, joke, see “Dr. Strangelove”:-).
They hate civilization even as they themselves would no more give up any of its comforts like some sort of modern day Thoreau than Thoreau really did. Periodically in North Carolina we get hit with category 3 hurricanes that wipe out electrical power for a week, or ice storms ditto. Life in the 19th century ain’t what its cracked up to be, let me assure you (19th because we will had clean water, flush toilets, cars, access to food we did not grow ourselves, gasoline generators, batteries, electrical lights, and modern health care not to mention stable communications). If it is hot outside then you are hot. If it gets too hot, you die. If it is cold outside then you are cold. If it gets too cold, you die. You are sick and/or uncomfortable nearly all the time either way (unless you already live in the 18th or 19th century, e.g. on an Amish farm).
They would like the entire world, basically, to be Amish. A world with only a few hundred million people in it, preferrably, living surrounded by primal wilderness. They hate the human species itself.
I honestly think this is the root cause of a lot of the mass killings, the “going postal” we observe with increasing frequency.
What the world lacks is any sort of global vision — a vision of where we, as a civilization, want to be in the year 2100. Personally, I’d like a vision that doesn’t involve the killing off of 3/4 or more of the world’s population to get there, and I have no patience with the Amish. I love electrical lights, clean clothes, delicious and varied foods, instant personal transportation, excellent and readily accessible heath care, and all the other trappings not even of wealth, but mere ordinary existence in the first world, things that are available in some measure to even the poorest in our society. I’d like those same things to be equally available to that poor child in the mud hut in India, the poor woman living in a village deep in Brazil near the Amazon, to a peasant in Tibet, to a man living in a crude hut in Africa. Perhaps they would reject these gifts. Perhaps they wish to continue as they are, like the Amish, trapped in the wrong century and hence subject to all of the inconveniences and dangers of an energy poor life.
But I doubt it.
Is it a criminal offense to condemn two to three billion people to a continuation of a life of poverty with all of its inconveniences and dangers? No. If it was, we’d have to prosecute the other half of the world, because there is competition for scarce economic resources and there is the vast weight of history to overcome. The only way to alleviate this is to eliminate the scarcity and fairly deliberately work to overcome history, to educate, to uplift, to help out, to encourage, to recognize this as the fundamental problem that the 21st century should address. Not AGW, AGP — Anthropogenic Global Poverty. Unlike AGW, AGP is easily demonstrable — a trip to any of 2/3 of the countries of the world followed by a walk down what passes for the street would do it. Walk a mile in those shoes — stay in a genuine mud hut for a year, eating what the poor eat, cooking as they cook, drinking as they drink, shitting as they shit. If you survive, come back and then campaign for solving the hypothetical and unproven AGW problem before the real and demonstrable AGP problem.
I dare you.
rgb
Hats off Dr.Brown, an absolutely truthful and stunning narrative.
The likes of people who wantonly support such a scam are the real criminals here, They are the ones who bend over backwards to justify such malpractices.
We all know who the culprits are atleast in this board.
Philip Bradley says:
It’s a condition of joining the UN that employees of the UN and its agencies are exempt from all of a country’s laws. The UN itself has no laws. Thus fraud (and everything else we consider a crime) is perfectly legal if you are a United Nations employee.
===
So, if there’s no oversight, no auditing and legal acountability, it may not be such a good idea to set up a $100bn per year fund and let them have control over it,.
It would be like giving your savings to someone who you know has lied and tricked you in the past and hoping they won’t do it again.
That would be stupid. Wouldn’t it?
I agree the IPCC fudges the science and is the one of the reasons we have not solved the problems 1) why did the planet warm in the last 70 years, 2) what causes the glacial/interglacial cycle, and 3) how will the planet’s climate change due the current abrupt solar magnetic cycle change and due to future increase in atmospheric CO2.
The IPCC is however a bit player in the climate wars. The IPCC provides the justification for the green scam policies. The green scam policies is the problem that causes damages not the IPCC. Likely criminal negligence is the legal tool to address the green scam policies rather than fraud.
The starting block for a criminal or civil case for damages or an order to cease the action that is causing damages is first to determine what is the strength of the evidence and logic to support ‘negligence’.
An example of a related negligence case that might be initiated is to stop the conversion of food to biofuel which is madness and will lead to food wars if it is not stopped. There are injured parties (starving and malnutrition in third world countries), the mandated used of biofuel forces the conversion of food to biofuel. There is a direct connection between the conversion of food to biofuel and a reduction in available food for people due to the lag in time to convert additional virgin forest to agricultural land and there are limited third world resources to compete with Western countries for agriculture land to grow food to feed people as opposed to convert to biofuel. The food to biofuel problem becomes particularly actuate if one adds significant crop failures do global cooling.
The case to establish negligence for actions of the IPCC is more complicate and is dependent on what will happen next (warming, cooling, or no change in planetary temperature) and what is the current understanding of the science (the cause of the observed climate change). The warmists have unsuccessfully tried to push cases that coal suppliers or power companies are negligence based on the warmist paradigm. The warmists failed as they could not establish causation.
The warmist have correctly noted that if the planet was not highly sensitive to forcing changes and if CO2 was not the primary driver of climate they could not logically explain the glacial/interglacial cycle.
As it appears there will unequivocal significant cooling, legal action will not be necessary to get the attention of the scientific community or the politicians. Based on the warmist’s paradigm significant cooling due to current solar magnetic cycle change is currently believed to be possible. If the impossible happens, then there will need to be first a physical explanation for what is happening or at least an acknowledgement that the CO2 mechanism saturates and the sun was cause of the majority of the warming in the last 70 years which will soon be followed by a discussion of options to address cooling climate change.
Criminal negligence
But criminal negligence is a ‘misfeasance or ‘nonfeasance’ (see omission), where the fault lies in the failure to foresee and so allow otherwise avoidable dangers to manifest. In some cases this failure can rise to the level of willful blindness where the individual intentionally avoids adverting to the reality of a situation. (In the United States, there may sometimes be a slightly different interpretation for willful blindness.) The degree of culpability is determined by applying a reasonable person standard. Criminal negligence becomes “gross” when the failure to foresee involves a “wanton disregard for human life” (see the discussion in corporate manslaughter).
Definition:
Negligence is often defined as
(1) not doing something which a reasonable person would do, or
(2) doing something which a reasonable person would not do.
Thus negligence can involve acts of commission and acts of omission.
In order to succeed in a negligence case, the plaintiff, or person suing, must generally satisfy the court of the following four elements:
1. Duty of care
2. Breach of standard of care
3. Injury or loss
4. Causation, ie., the causal link between the defendant’s act and the injury or loss.
rgbatduke says:
June 29, 2013 at 6:30 am
======================
Fantastic essay. Thank you.
The IPCC respondent(s)sound like very open minded folks “NO, NO, NO, NO!”. Certainly the type of folks that we would want to influence our energy use and related behavior.
On a more important note, I also endorse the notion of using legal remedies to curtail the efforts of these Eco-Fascists based upon the fact that their misguided science will exact tremendous economic hardship on many innocent people worldwide. Unfortunately, that is the only remedy that those misguided folks are likely to understand.
Four papers on line, that you may find of interest, provide some eye-opening insight on the cause of change to average global temperature and why it has stopped warming. The papers are straight-forward calculations using readily available data up to May, 2013.
The first one is ‘Global warming made simple’ at http://lowaltitudeclouds.blogspot.com/ . It shows, with simple thermal radiation calculations, how a tiny change in the amount of low-altitude clouds could account for half of the average global temperature change in the 20th century, and what could have caused that tiny cloud change. (The other half of the temperature change is from net average natural ocean oscillation which is dominated by the PDO)
The second paper is ‘Natural Climate change has been hiding in plain sight’ at http://climatechange90.blogspot.com/2013/05/natural-climate-change-has-been.html . This paper presents a simple equation that calculates average global temperatures since they have been accurately measured world wide (about 1895) with an accuracy of 90%, irrespective of whether the influence of CO2 is included or not. The equation uses a proxy which is the time-integral of sunspot numbers. A graph is included which shows the calculated trajectory overlaid on measurements.
Change to the level of atmospheric CO2 had no significant effect on average global temperature.
A third paper, ‘The End of Global Warming’ at http://endofgw.blogspot.com/ expands recent (since 1996) measurements and includes a graph showing the growing separation between the rising CO2 and not-rising average global temperature.
The fourth paper http://consensusmistakes.blogspot.com/ exposes some of the mistakes that have been made by the ‘Consensus’ and the IPCC
rgbatduke says:
June 29, 2013 at 6:30 am
I’ll second the “fantastic essay” rating.
However, you say this: “…They would like the entire world, basically, to be Amish. A world with only a few hundred million people in it, preferrably, living surrounded by primal wilderness. They hate the human species itself….” These aren’t the rural, non-college folk living around Duke, but people being “taught” at Duke, and Princeton, and just about every university these days, as well as many who are doing the “teaching”. How do you coexist in such a place, and more importantly, is there any hope to wrest these “places of learning” back from the idiots?
I wonder if anyone has developed any tests(legal) to distinguish a professional persons actions from incompetent to fraudulent?
It would appear to me we need a series of tests that legal professionals could use when prosecuting these people, to tunnel down into their behaviour to determin guilt.
You can see it now, a wide variety of culprits escaping justice (my view) by wriggling through poorly devised tests.
We need gold standard tests for use against a series of professional areas of activity ie
You can you this type of stats but not this one to ‘demonstrate’ this effect etc etc
Thank you for another excellent thread Lord Christopher Monckton of Brenchley.
Well, the short answer is Yes!
To be fair, I should also mention that the long answer is H–l Yes!
Should I be hopeful that the penance for being found guilty is winter duty physically measuring ice at the poles?
The sine curve was just an ad absurdem example to show how you can mislead! No one is suggesting a sine wave pattern in the climate.
If you examine the data properly using the best tools available there is a clear cut sine component which should be deducted before attributing any changes to anything. Sadly the best of this sort of tool is only available to military users as it is used to test if supposedly random data has a hidden information content. If you take the sinusoidal component out, the forcing drops from a figure you can fiddle to be from 1.3 to 2.2 depending on your wishful thinking factor, sorry mathematical trick, to a maximum of around 0.7 if my memory is correct.
As for a test to distinguish incompetent from fraudulent, surely lobbying to present only one side of a case when the claim is that the case is beyond question shows clearly that the intent was fraudulent. Even if the IPCC cannot be prosecuted the lecturers that lobbied the BBC to violate its charter and brainwash the public should be taken to the cleaners. Sometime if you can’t kick the lion it helps to at at lest kick the cat.
Yes, prosecute the rascals (oh, sorry, don’t mean toi insult the term ‘rascal’ by using it to refer to these australopethecines (woops! another insult to a word).
The IPCC obtained money by making statements which they knew or should have know were false. Many individuals did likewise (the so-called “research” grants). We know who the bad guys are, and what they did – let’s go after them.
And hats off to Lord Monckton, whose nobility extends far and away beyond his bloodline.
rgbatduke says:
June 29, 2013 at 6:30 am
Interestingly, the millenium goal of reducing poverty by half by 2015 might have already been reached…
http://archive.atlantic-community.org/index/items/view/Global_Poverty%3A_Has_a_Millenium_Goal_Been_Reached%3F
…notice the interesting conclusion:
“There is ample food for thought, too, if one only considers the fact that, had such a cash transfer programs been in place in 2010, they would have cost $66 billion – i.e. little more than half of official international aid.”
…in other words, international aid is mostly a scam…
It would seem that the UN IPCC do not recognise a schoolboy stats error when it is staring them in the face. If they leave this in the publication then individual governments should be notified of an error of such magnitude in what should be a simple chart, then how many other errors are there in the document and are they prepared to risk the fragile economies of the world on such shoddy statistics.
“increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases dominate the observed warming after the mid-1970s …”
I think they are leveraging what this report predicted back in 1979:
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=aJpjAAAAIBAJ&sjid=N3wDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6824,139587&dq=global+warming&hl=en
And now that this same report’s predictions about cooling look to be coming true (at least so far up to this point), they are scrambling to find anthropogenic reasons for “the pause.”
And does anybody know how the CO2 ppm is measured? Do we have thousands of CO2 stations all over the globe and are we taking the data from them to come up with a global average? Or is the CO2 ppm taken from just 1 single CO2 site?
This is the Monckton I’ve come to respect. Of course the game is very simple really, the science wing makes vague statements while the political and media wings make the core of the unsubstantiated dire alarmist agenda policy twaddle out of the “science”. They are coordinated and corrupt but it’s accepted as a social norm. A hard politically correct system that will also be judging the “fraud” claims.
There’s merit in the concept but the U.N. is unaccountable in practice. AGW is a coded term for a global political regime, the co2 and science inferences are only a part. This is certainly a better approach than the last headline of accepting IPCC talking points and figures as a starting point in “adaptation” cost analysis debates. Totally validating the IPCC fraud benchmarks in the process.
I commend Monckton but does he really believe the AGW movement was based on science to begin with? That’s a myth reinforced while his intentions are good. Climate science itself is cherry-picked mud leading nowhere which is how the crime was conceived very early on. Proving fraud through mountains of abstracts that everyone has already self-indemnified as being “our best work at the time” looks impossible. The IPCC is fundamentally a political consensus organization not a valid science authority following the implied standard practice logic Monckton wishes to assume in the courts premise. AGW is first and foremost a political crime and fraud, the willing base of academics and “experts” are a chapter.
Technical skeptics and technical front-line advocates would be better focused on the whole AGW motivation meme that leads to political rejection of the premise of Greenshirt social management which is more important in totality to the broad debate. For example, why would IPCC related people commit fraud for the AGW meme to begin with? Most skeptics know but many are reluctant to be direct and take the position. Fraud and deception are assumed around the IPCC and climate science community and under the protection of the very global consensus that created it and whom Monckton is asking a hearing, whitewash results are 97% certain. This has better intentions but again may not be the best tactic in practice.
These aren’t the rural, non-college folk living around Duke, but people being “taught” at Duke, and Princeton, and just about every university these days, as well as many who are doing the “teaching”. How do you coexist in such a place, and more importantly, is there any hope to wrest these “places of learning” back from the idiots?
I don’t think you do them justice. First of all, most of the people teaching at the University level, certainly at the level of the Universities you mention, are very committed and do a very conscientious job teaching. Remember, climate science is almost UNtaught at any University — part of the problem. There was no such thing, not really, until a decade or so ago. Students by and large aren’t either committed or uncommitted to AGW. They are at an age where they no longer respect their elders enough to accept everything they are told as being gospel truth (a good thing!) and not yet at an age or experience where they can fully judge for themselves. And they are not stupid.
So there isn’t really any need to “wrest” places of learning back from idiots, at least, no more than usual. Most faculty are disinterested and unable to make informed judgments in climate science because (and trust me on this one) it is not easy to become decently informed in climate science. I’m still working on it, and I’m not “an idiot”. The problem is that the science is very, very difficult, the evidence is diverse and easily misinterpreted, and it is thus easy to just “trust the experts”, especially when the experts tell you that they are saving the world, if you’re not with us you’re against us, if you do not accept everything we tell you are a “climate change denier” and responsible for destroying the earth.
Perhaps a lot of faculty have a “wait and see” attitude — if CAGW is wrong, nature will eventually let us know (true) and no harm will be done (not true) if we pursue a policy of abating CO_2 in the meantime.
It is this last belief — that no harm will be done, no harm is being done, with things like carbon trading, exorbitant obstacles and controls on carbon burning electrical plants, subsidy of inefficient electrical generation schemes — that is not clearly articulated. The actual cost of the amelioration efforts is carefully hidden and deeply amortized. It takes something like the near-collapse of the Euro and the quenching of the entire European economy to wake people up to a realization that demonizing carbon at the same time they continue to demonize nuclear power (the only viable global alternative capable of actually sustaining civilization at even current levels) is a sure road to a depression that will make the Great Depression seem like good times.
It is this facade that is really cracking. China no longer buys it at all — they will worry about CO_2 when all of China is civilized and wealthy (and in the meantime they are investing heavily in thorium, because it is a “toxic waste” byproduct of their rare earth mines ANYWAY and it is almost certainly useable as a comparatively safe fission fuel. Russia seems unconvinced — and Russian scientists are no slouches! Europe is in open revolt as the “bill” for all of the wind generation plants is finally coming due. And it hasn’t warmed according to any of the prescriptions of e.g. AR4.
Personally, I plan to wait and see — even with a dearth of cooling for 13 to 17 years, CAGW could still be a true hypothesis. We cannot tell, because we don’t know what the baseline temperature “should” be doing or would be doing without the CO_2. Perhaps we’d be plunging into the next glacial era. Perhaps not. The GCMs cannot tell us, because they fail basic hypothesis testing (which doesn’t mean they are wrong per se, but it means that there is no reason to think that they are correct, individually or collectively). They also fail to even validate one another — no two GCMs seem to give the same answer even when presented an idealized “toy planet” without any of the “interesting” structure that Earth has.
But in the meantime, while waiting to see — perhaps we could raise the standard of living of the poorest 1/3 of the people on the planet up to, say, the 1950s? Washing machines, refrigerators, electric lights, flushing toilets, reliable clean water, decent transportation? Is that too much to ask? Because if we fail to do that, we don’t HAVE to wait until 2100 for a catastrophe. We are a catastrophe to the poor, right now.
rgb
If the actual frauds can be proven, then the IPCC should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity.
The claim that “the rate of global warming has been accelerating” would be supported by a second-order linear regression – one that uses a quadratic equation instead of a straight line. The least-squares *estimate* of the ‘accelerating rate of warming’ would appear quantitatively as the coefficient of the second-order (quadratic) term in such a regression. The curve would be a parabola, not a splicing of straight lines. There would also be variances to estimate probable errors of the estimates, confidence limits, etc.
But one can hardly expect such statistical sophistication from anyone who is evidently oblivious to the hyperbolic error bounds on the linear regression produced by the separate variances in the bi-variate mean and the slope. Such concepts are treated in any basic statistics course, and do not even require calculus. Any chapter on standard linear regression will explain them.
http://www.jerrydallal.com/LHSP/slr.htm
We need to be aware that the climate wars are a dangerous distraction from what appears to be a real and imminent problem that it appears will require a global response. The skeptics should not cheer that the planet is now cooling and we have won the climate wars.
Even though we are currently experiencing the start of cooling, the paradigm of global warming is so strong and the knowledge of the abrupt end of all of the past interglacial periods and cyclic abrupt climate change so remote, we are continuing as if all is fine which it is not. There are cycles of warming followed by cooling in the paleo record. For example, the Medieval Warm period was followed by the Little Ice age. There are nine (9) cyclic warming and cooling periods during the current interglacial period (the Holocene) and there are a further 14 more warming and cooling periods in the glacial period. (23 in total that can be tracked and the warming and cooling periods correlate with solar magnetic cycle changes.)
We should be aware the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle is occasionally followed by a Heinrich event which it appears terminates interglacial periods. The abrupt very, very, strong Heinrich cooling events occur roughly every 8000 to 10,000 years. The cooling associated with an abrupt change to a Little Ice age climate will result in crop failures and food shortages. The cooling associated with a Heinrich event, the termination of an interglacial period is difficult to even imagine which needs to be done and its affects quantified to enable preparation to be done, if it appears the Little Ice age cooling will be followed by what causes a Heinrich event.
The same regions of the planet that warmed in the 20th century are the same regions of the planet that warmed during the Medieval Warm period. Obviously as we are suddenly experiencing Little Ice age type cooling something has changed to cause the cooling. The something that has changed to cause the cooling is the sun. The below graphical comparison of solar cycles 22, 23, 24 tells only part of the story.
The solar magnetic cycle is changing quarter by quarter. There is a visual change in the appearance of the sunspot groups. I have no idea what NASA is waiting for to make a public announcement. The climate wars will be soon be over. The warmists are fighting the wrong war.
http://www.solen.info/solar/images/comparison_recent_cycles.png
http://cc.oulu.fi/~usoskin/personal/nature02995.pdf
Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the previous 11,000 years
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/jun/12/farmers-fail-weather-wheat-crop
The wettest autumn since records began, followed by the coldest spring in 50 years, has devastated British wheat, forcing food manufacturers to import nearly 2.5m tonnes of the crop. … ….Britain is usually the EU’s third biggest wheat grower but it will be a net importer for the first time in 11 years.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/typical-british-weather-rain-cold-and-high-winds-set-to-return-as-uk-summer-fizzles-out-8655945.html
http://www.thelocal.fr/20130521/weather-men-bring-more-bad-news-for-france
According to Météo France, the national weather agency, the heavy rain that kept most people trapped in doors over last weekend’s Pentecost holiday is to continue until the end of the month, meaning that Spring 2013 is set to be one of the coldest in the last 20 years.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/31/italy-shivers-cursed-spring-relentless-rain
In the north-west, according to the Italian meteorological society, residents have had the coldest May since 1991. In much of the north-east, the spring has been the wettest for at least 150 years. A mountain stage of the Giro d’Italia bike race was called off due to snow and ice. Beach resorts in Tuscany have been flooded. Many farmers have suffered huge damage to their crops. …. ….Now, as June arrives, it should technically be summer. But it certainly doesn’t feel like it.
https://www.wmo.int/pages/mediacentre/news_members/documents/2013-05-29DeutschlandwetterimFruhling2013en.pdf
… Coldest spring since 1987 Spring 2013 was the coldest in Germany since 1987. The average temperature of 6.7 degrees Celsius (°C) was 1.0 degree lower than the reference values for 1961 to 1990 and as much as 1.8 degrees below the figure for the comparative period from 1981 to 2010.
http://www.euronews.com/2013/05/24/wintry-spring-costs-western-europe/
…A tourist who found it bewildering said: “It is very strange, but I think the whole of Europe had a very long winter, but I didn’t expect snow in the Serra de Estrela in May.” The northern Spanish city of Burgos felt temperatures drop to 3ºC on May 15. In the French interior they’ve been averaging 4-5 degrees below normal, so people have kept the heating going.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age
Little Ice Age
The Little Ice Age (LIA) was a period of cooling that occurred after the Medieval Warm Period (Medieval Climate Optimum).[1] While it was not a true ice age, the term was introduced into the scientific literature by François E. Matthes in 1939.[2] It has been conventionally defined as a period extending from the 16th to the 19th centuries,[3][4][5] or alternatively, from about 1350 to about 1850,[6] though climatologists and historians working with local records no longer expect to agree on either the start or end dates of this period, which varied according to local conditions ….
….The population of Iceland fell by half, but this was perhaps caused by fluorosis after the eruption of the volcano Laki in 1783.[20] Iceland also suffered failures of cereal crops, and people moved away from a grain-based diet.[21] The Norse colonies in Greenland starved and vanished (by the early 15th century), as crops failed and livestock …. …. Hubert Lamb said that in many years, “snowfall was much heavier … ….Crop practices throughout Europe had to be altered to adapt to the shortened, less reliable growing season, and there were many years of dearth and famine (such as the Great Famine of 1315–1317, although this may have been before the LIA proper).[25] According to Elizabeth Ewan and Janay Nugent, “Famines in France 1693–94, Norway 1695–96 and Sweden 1696–97 claimed roughly 10% of the population of each country. In Estonia and Finland in 1696–97, losses have been estimated at a fifth and a third of the national populations, respectively.”[26] Viticulture disappeared from some northern regions. Violent storms caused serious flooding and loss of life. Some of these resulted in permanent loss of large areas of land from the Danish, German and Dutch coasts.[24] Historian Wolfgang Behringer has linked intensive witch-hunting episodes in Europe to agricultural failures during the Little Ice Age.[36]
rgbatduke-
As a non-scientist, I really appreciate your posts and enjoy them as much as any that I read. Your thought process and conduct on this site should be the gold standard for all scientists. Climate science would improve if all participants followed your lead. Sadly, I have seen far too many examples of the worst that science has to offer. The very top scientists of any field are the first to admit they dont know it all and welcome the search for the truth.
No. It is time we sued our politicians for fraud in imposing increasing taxes for one of the biggest scams in history. To believe sycophants, who hide under their titles of “scientists”, beggars belief when the interests of politicians, who are no more than public servants, are devoid of the long term interests of their Country and the legitimate peoples therein.
rgbatduke says: June 29, 2013 at 5:03 am
“A correct application of statistics to the GCMs would be to formulate the null hypothesis “this model is correct” (one at a time!), generate a Monte Carlo spread of results for that model to sample the effect of chaos, generate the mean (per model!) and deciles away from the mean (per model!) and note that reality is in every single case in the last decile (or worse) of the model envelopes, and that the models without exception (one at a time!) exaggerate the warming. One would then systematically reject the null hypothesis “this model is correct”, one at a time, for all of the models that contributed to AR4, and conclude that we have very little idea w
hat is going to happen to the climate in 100 years because we do not understand and cannot predict what the climate is doing right now.”
The above was actually already done here:
Scafetta N., 2012. Testing an astronomically based decadal-scale empirical harmonic climate model versus the IPCC (2007) general circulation climate models. Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 80, 124-137.
http://people.duke.edu/~ns2002/pdf/ATP3533.pdf
The claim that “the rate of global warming has been accelerating” would be supported by a second-order linear regression – one that uses a quadratic equation instead of a straight line. The least-squares *estimate* of the ‘accelerating rate of warming’ would appear quantitatively as the coefficient of the second-order (quadratic) term in such a regression. The curve would be a parabola, not a splicing of straight lines. There would also be variances to estimate probable errors of the estimates, confidence limits, etc.
Well, yes, but there is no justification for fitting a) a constant; b) a straight line; c) a quadratic; d) an exponential (which would also fit the data tolerably well given the broad error bars), e) a harmonic function; f) more complicated analytic functions, including cubics, hyperbolic secants, etc.
As previously mentioned, the error bars on the figure are absolute nonsense from the point of view of trying to do a proper regression fit anyway. I know from a considerable amount of experience that the quality of the fit one obtains (and one’s ability to resolve different nonlinear function fits as “better” or “worse”, e.g. the computation of R-squared to differentiate a linear fit with nonzero slope to one with zero slope) strongly depends on having meaningful error bars. Otherwise one risks fitting statistical noise, not any actual trend at all. If you (say) quadruple the error bars on the data from the nineteenth century, and amplify the error on the earlier part of the twentieth century by a factor of three, and the error on the latter part of the twentieth century by a factor of two (to smoothly match contemporary estimates of probable error in global temperature that are still IMO too small and lacking much in the way of systematic defensible basis, at least that I’ve seen).
Remember, one is sampling a large planet with imperfect tools at flawed land sites and with almost NO useful oceanic data. Antarctica was terra incognita; much of the Arctic, much of Siberia, much of China, even large parts of Canada and the United States were virtually unmeasured except in very specific locations back in the 19th century. Only satellite measurements of LTT and ARGO measurements in the last decade form anything like defensibly precise measures of global temperature without unknown UHI and method/sampling errors, and ARGO is by no means stable yet in its results and still horrendously undersamples the surface area of the sea.
Next, the graph above HAPPENS (IMO quite deliberately) to be an interval where the behavior is (nearly) monotonic — this quite naturally causes the human mind to assume that the unseen part of the graph off to the left is nearly constant, uninfluenced by evil human activity, and suggests that humans and their expanding civilization are the proximate cause of all of the warming visible on the curve. Replace the graph with this one:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png
(noting well that even this curve is based on the illustrated mess of colored spaghetti, and has probable error bars that are large enough to translate any attempt to fit anything to it to R-squared = 0 from 8 to 10 ky before the present to the present) and all bets are off. Even using the (IMO probably biased) 2 kybp graph (which curiously lacks the RWP clearly visible on the 12 kybp graph). The 2 kybp still has the MWP on it, as well as the LIA, where it is clear that the LIA was the coldest single stretch in ten thousand years (and with much better resolution — we can be fairly sure that it really was seriously cold). The entire graph above is revealed to be only part of an upswing 400 years old, that began utterly without human influence and that appears to have peaked — although this is difficult to properly say given the relative time scales and granularity of the curves, but they started it by putting e.g. “2004” temperatures on the curves to commit a sampling error fallacy that is not forgiven by being explained in a caption nobody reads and few would understand if they did read.
Global climate as represented in “global average temperature” (or by any other measure) has never been constant, linear, quadratic, predictable, or (so far) understandable. We cannot predict, compute, or even explain a single one of the structures visible in the 12 thousand year curve, and have only the crudest of heuristic explanations for the variation on the (click through) 5 mybp curve linked at the bottom of this figure. We are on a rollercoaster driven be enormously powerful forces that apparently can easily overwhelm any predicted increase due to CO_2 and utterly confound any attempt to establish e.g. climate sensitivity or feedback from an imagined “warming signal” somehow resolvable from a predictable baseline behavior.
If the human race had any sense at all, it would acknowledge that the right answer to the question “What will the climate be doing in 100 years?” is nobody knows, we cannot yet predict with any confidence at all what will be happening in two years, let alone twenty or a hundred. We could be plunging into the next Pliestocene glaciation. We could be warming back to near the Holocene Optimum. We could be returning to conditions and temperatures not seen since the Miocene — this is essentially the “catastrophe” predicted by Hansen (see the 65 mybp curve) — putting an abrupt end to the Pliestocene. Or, we could be doing none of the above, merely continuing to bounce around some sort of latter-day Holocene mean trend (where the Holocene itself has clearly been cooling on average for some 8,000 years, although there are clearly warm and cool periods interspersed that nobody can predict, compute, or even heuristically explain).
Given the honest, correct answer of “We don’t know”, we need to look long and hard about the motives and interests of those that claim otherwise, that claim a knowledge that the data and our demonstrable computational capabilities clearly do not support, while diverting a significant fraction of the GGP — gross global product — into “climate stuff”, research, ameliorating a supposedly certain disaster, and so on, at the expense of the simple economic health of the developed countries and the prolongation of the misery of the underdeveloped countries. We need to think about longer term plans, and what the real costs of both action and inaction are while we wait to accumulate data and knowledge that might in 20 to 50 years (or more) allow us to actually understand what is going on well enough to make actual predictions with some computable and empirically verifiable probability of being right.
At the moment, the best that can be said of the GCMs is that simple hypothesis testing suffices to reject all, or nearly all, of them as being too broken to take seriously, and curiously, all of the errors are on the side of far too much warming compared to what has been observed over the last 30 years that the GCMs have been supposedly predicting disaster, especially over the last 13 to 17 years where there has been little to no warming at all but the GCMs predicted strong warming.
Without the support of verified, functioning, predictive, hindcastable GCMs, all we are left with is the statement of the CAGW hypothesis. Yes, it could be true. No, it could be false. Yes, if true it would probably be bad, but one cannot rationally compute the risk and expectation value of any associated loss if one cannot assign an actual meaningful number to the probability that it is true, and even “true” comes with a rather wide range of possibilities ranging from not catastrophic at all to “Back to the Eocene Optimum” or even worse. Taking small, inexpensive steps to hedge our bets against the worst of these possibilities is fine while we learn to do better, but diverting 10 or 20% of the GGP and ensuring the deaths of tens to hundreds of millions of humans due to prolonged energy poverty and misdirected resources on the basis of a deliberately misrepresented picture of certainty? That’s not so fine. At the very least an honest appraisal of risks and costs needs to occur that simply has not occurred.
The dialogue so far has been a monologue, one where even questioning the certainty of the disaster or the real costs of trying to avert it has been rendered politically incorrect, stupid, willfully blind, in cahoots with a greedy energy industry (that I am fairly certain are making far more money, far more easily, from selling energy at the inflated and rapidly fluctuating prices associated with the panic and amelioration than they ever would have in a flat untampered economy). The real cost to the world’s poorest people is only just now being exposed, and is horrific enough that even some of the (formerly) most passionate advocates of the CAGW scenario are backing off, especially given that the global temperature is at least momentarily no cooperating with and supporting the catastrophic scenario.
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Definitely recent deceleration in evidence (thought to be of Somalian origin).
O/T A wind farm scheduled for New England region in NSW has been aborted, too expensive.
One step in the right direction. We are very windy here sometimes, and after the two wind turbines capsized in Cornwall, maybe they are worried about how this will go? Also they are pushing solar here too. Anyway must go, and gud luck Lord Christopher?