UPDATE 1/28: Full text of Dr. Theon’s letter has been post on the Senate website and below.
This is something I thought I’d never see. This press release today is from the Senate EPW blog of Jame Inhofe. The scientist making the claims in the headline, Dr. John S. Theon, formerly of the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies, Arlington, Virginia, has a paper here in the AMS BAMS that you may also find interesting. Other papers are available here in Google Scholar. He also worked on the report of the Space Shuttle Challenger accident report and according to that document was a significant contributor to weather forecasting improvements:
The Space Shuttle Weather Forecasting Advisory Panel, chaired by Dr. John Theon, was established by NASA Headquarters to review existing weather support capabilities and plans and to recommend a course of action to the NSTS Program. Included on the panel were representatives from NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Air Force, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
For those just joining the climate discussion, Dr. James Hansen is the chief climate scientist at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and is the man who originally raised the alarm on global warming in 1988 in an appearance before congress. He is also the keeper of the most often cited climate data.
EPW press release below – Anthony
Washington DC, Jan 27th 2009: NASA warming scientist James Hansen, one of former Vice-President Al Gore’s closest allies in the promotion of man-made global warming fears, is being publicly rebuked by his former supervisor at NASA.
Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist, Dr. John S. Theon, the former supervisor of James Hansen, NASA’s vocal man-made global warming fear soothsayer, has now publicly declared himself a skeptic and declared that Hansen “embarrassed NASA” with his alarming climate claims and said Hansen was “was never muzzled.” Theon joins the rapidly growing ranks of international scientists abandoning the promotion of man-made global warming fears.
“I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man made,” Theon wrote to the Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works Committee on January 15, 2009. “I was, in effect, Hansen’s supervisor because I had to justify his funding, allocate his resources, and evaluate his results,” Theon, the former Chief of the Climate Processes Research Program at NASA Headquarters and former Chief of the Atmospheric Dynamics & Radiation Branch explained.
“Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress,” Theon wrote. [Note: NASA scientist James Hansen has created worldwide media frenzy with his dire climate warning, his call for trials against those who dissent against man-made global warming fear, and his claims that he was allegedly muzzled by the Bush administration despite doing 1,400 on-the-job media interviews! – See: Don’t Panic Over Predictions of Climate Doom – Get the Facts on James Hansen – UK Register: Veteran climate scientist says ‘lock up the oil men’ – June 23, 2008 & UK Guardian: NASA scientist calls for putting oil firm chiefs on trial for ‘high crimes against humanity’ for spreading doubt about man-made global warming – June 23, 2008 ]
Theon declared “climate models are useless.” “My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit,” Theon explained. “Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy,” he added.
“As Chief of several of NASA Headquarters’ programs (1982-94), an SES position, I was responsible for all weather and climate research in the entire agency, including the research work by James Hansen, Roy Spencer, Joanne Simpson, and several hundred other scientists at NASA field centers, in academia, and in the private sector who worked on climate research,” Theon wrote of his career. “This required a thorough understanding of the state of the science. I have kept up with climate science since retiring by reading books and journal articles,” Theon added. (LINK) Theon also co-authored the book “Advances in Remote Sensing Retrieval Methods.” [Note: Theon joins many current and former NASA scientists in dissenting from man-made climate fears. A small sampling includes: Aerospace engineer and physicist Dr. Michael Griffin, the former top administrator of NASA, Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a PhD in meteorology, and formerly of NASA, Geophysicist Dr. Phil Chapman, an astronautical engineer and former NASA astronaut, Award-Winning NASA Astronaut/Geologist and Moonwalker Jack Schmitt, Award-winning NASA Astronaut and Physicist Walter Cunningham of NASA’s Apollo 7, Chemist and Nuclear Engineer Robert DeFayette was formerly with NASA’s Plum Brook Reactor, Hungarian Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist with 30 years of experience and a former researcher with NASA’s Ames Research Center, Climatologist Dr. John Christy, Climatologist Dr. Roy W. Spencer, Atmospheric Scientist Ross Hays of NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility]
Gore faces a much different scientific climate in 2009 than the one he faced in 2006 when his film “An Inconvenient Truth” was released. According to satellite data, the Earth has cooled since Gore’s film was released, Antarctic sea ice extent has grown to record levels, sea level rise has slowed, ocean temperatures have failed to warm, and more and more scientists have publicly declared their dissent from man-made climate fears as peer-reviewed studies continue to man-made counter warming fears. [See: Peer-Reviewed Study challenges ‘notion that human emissions are responsible for global warming’ & New Peer-Reviewed Scientific Studies Chill Global Warming Fears ]
“Vice President Gore and the other promoters of man-made climate fears endless claims that the “debate is over” appear to be ignoring scientific reality,” Senator James Inhofe, Ranking Member of the Environment & Public Works Committee.
A U.S. Senate Minority Report released in December 2008 details over 650 international scientists who are dissenting from man-made global warming fears promoted by the UN and yourself. Many of the scientists profiled are former UN IPCC scientists and former believers in man-made climate change that have reversed their views in recent years. The report continues to grow almost daily. We have just received a request from an Italian scientist, and a Czech scientist to join the 650 dissenting scientists report. A chemist from the U.S. Naval Academy is about to be added, and more Japanese scientists are dissenting. Finally, many more meteorologists will be added and another former UN IPCC scientist is about to be included. These scientists are openly rebelling against the climate orthodoxy promoted by Gore and the UN IPCC.
The prestigious International Geological Congress, dubbed the geologists’ equivalent of the Olympic Games, was held in Norway in August 2008 and prominently featured the voices of scientists skeptical of man-made global warming fears. Reports from the conference found that Skeptical scientists overwhelmed the meeting, with ‘2/3 of presenters and question-askers hostile to, even dismissive of, the UN IPCC’ ( See full reports here & here ] In addition, a 2008 canvass of more than 51,000 Canadian scientists revealed 68% disagree that global warming science is “settled.” A November 25, 2008, article in Politico noted that a “growing accumulation” of science is challenging warming fears, and added that the “science behind global warming may still be too shaky to warrant cap-and-trade legislation.” More evidence that the global warming fear machine is breaking down. Russian scientists “rejected the very idea that carbon dioxide may be responsible for global warming”. An American Physical Society editor conceded that a “considerable presence” of scientific skeptics exists. An International team of scientists countered the UN IPCC, declaring: “Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate”. India Issued a report challenging global warming fears. International Scientists demanded the UN IPCC “be called to account and cease its deceptive practices.”
The scientists and peer-reviewed studies countering climate claims are the key reason that the U.S. public has grown ever more skeptical of man-made climate doom predictions. [See: Global warming ranks dead last, 20 out of 20 in new Pew survey. Pew Survey: & Survey finds majority of U.S. Voters – ‘51% – now believe that humans are not the predominant cause of climate change’ – January 20, 2009 – Rasmussen Reports ]
The chorus of skeptical scientific voices grow louder in 2008 as a steady stream of peer-reviewed studies, analyses, real world data and inconvenient developments challenged the UN’s and former Vice President Al Gore’s claims that the “science is settled” and there is a “consensus.”
On a range of issues, 2008 proved to be challenging for the promoters of man-made climate fears. Promoters of anthropogenic warming fears endured the following: Global temperatures failing to warm; Peer-reviewed studies predicting a continued lack of warming; a failed attempt to revive the discredited “Hockey Stick“; inconvenient developments and studies regarding rising CO2; the Spotless Sun; Clouds; Antarctica; the Arctic; Greenland’s ice; Mount Kilimanjaro; Global sea ice; Causes of Hurricanes; Extreme Storms; Extinctions; Floods; Droughts; Ocean Acidification; Polar Bears; Extreme weather deaths; Frogs; lack of atmospheric dust; Malaria; the failure of oceans to warm and rise as predicted.
# # #
ORIGINAL FULL TEXT LETTER SENT VIA EMAILS:
From: Jtheon [mailto:jtheon@XXXXXXX]
Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2009 10:05 PM
To: Morano, Marc (EPW)
Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2009 12:50 PM
To: Morano, Marc (EPW)
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leif
As I said before , in my opinion the global temperature rise in the period 1913 -1944 and again in 1976 -2007 was due to factors other than CO2. PDO,AMO and ENSO INDICIES all were positive and peaked during both of these two periods. I am not arguing that it was mostly due to the sun although the sun is part of the story, the amount of which I cannot quantify.
Smokey says:
Sorry if that caused confusion it was not quoting you. Rather it was characterizing your argument as being similar to the CEI’s (Competitive Enterprise Institute) “some call it pollution, we call it life” campaign. See here: http://cei.org/pages/co2.cfm
As for the actual runaway part, I told you what I believe. I am skeptical…but I would like to see Hansen flesh out his argument for a scientific argument and have scientists respond.
But, as for the general question about a “minor trace gas”, there are no hard-and-fast rules about how large a percentage of the atmosphere a gas has to be to cause a large effect. The atmosphere is about 99% constituents that are transparent to IR radiation, so the ~1% that is not plays an disproportionate role in our climate. Furthermore, over a large range of concentrations, the forcing is proportional to the logarithm of the concentration, which means small concentrations can play a disproportionate role in comparison to what they would play if the relationship were linear.
Don’t know where you get your graphs from, but here is a graph of what has been happening to the Northern Hemisphere sea ice anomaly: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.anom.jpg I don’t know when it will become ice-free but it seems to be happening much more rapidly than scientists were predicting only a few years ago.
As for your plot of CO2 and temperatures over a very short period, we have discussed that before and I am quite amazed that you continue to use a plot which you have been told is deceptive and have never been able to defend. In order for the temperatures to follow the slope for the increase in CO2 on that plot would require a climate sensitivity at least 4 times the best estimates. If the plot is redrawn with a more reasonable scale, the fact that the temperature plot on these timescales is so dominated by the weather noise that the temperature trend has huge error bars that would tend to include what you would expect becomes fairly obvious even from a simple visible inspection. (For good measure, the plot also cherry picks the starting date and which temperature series it shows.)
An opinion basically shared by most of the scientific community and, in particular, all the scientific academies of all the G8+5 nations.
Your point 4) is just a repeat of points that I have already responded to, including the incredibly deceptive graph that plots both temperature and CO2 that I discussed above in 2).
Man-made global warming is simply a ploy for your government to reduce your freedoms in the name of saving the world. Man-made ignorance is the means by which your government markets that ploy. Hansen is merely a joke and hasn’t an intellectually honest bone in his entire body.
Smokey, I meant to address this too…
I call this the “Wait until you sure your house is burning down before buying fire insurance approach.” There are at least a couple of problems that I would identify with this:
(1) I think there is little reason to believe that we can burn through all of our fossil fuel reserves without seriously effecting our climate (and possibly the health of the oceans through ocean acidification). Furthermore, like I said, we have to face the costs of getting off of fossil fuels eventually because they are a finite resource.
(2) There is a lot of inertia in the system. For example, there is inertia in the climate system…which means the amount of GHGs in the atmosphere commits us to an amount of warming considerably beyond what we see already. And, there is inertia in our societies / economies. (I believe that a coal plant that is built now can be expected to operate for the next 50 years.) Hence, waiting until we can more accurately assess the exact consequences risks not being able to prevent those consequences…or, at the very least, it being much more expensive to do so. The most prudent approach is to adopt measures that aim toward what the best science tells us with the flexibility to adjust targets later if further research suggests that either the less extreme scenarios of the Roy Spencers and Richard Lindzens of the world have some validity or if the more extreme scenarios of the Jim Hansens of the world are more correct.
matt v. (07:00:46) :
As I said before , in my opinion the global temperature rise in the period 1913 -1944 and again in 1976 -2007 was due to factors other than CO2.
I don’t know why it is so hard to communicate, but that, perhaps, explains why the whole debate is dead on arrival because people simply do not listen to each other, just parrot the same sentence over and over.
The dogma that the Sun is responsible for almost all natural climate change is central to and the strongest argument for the AGW argument. If we replace that with the dogma that the Sun plays no role whatsoever, the AGW argument for CO2 falls flat. The truth is, of course, somewhere in the middle: there are very many causes: solar irradiance, CO2 [yes, that too], PDO, land use, cosmic rays, chaos in a non-linear system, orbital changes, etc.
I don’t think we disagree on any of this. My original post was simply a comment on the importance of the solar connection for the AGW dogma, pointing out that agreeing [not that you did, but there are plenty of people here that do – including Anthony himself] to a strong solar connection is giving the AGW crowd a strong argument ‘for free’. Because without it, they would have to agree that there can be plenty of different causes and that it is all a matter of degree, rather than the black-and-white which is necessary for acrimonious ‘debate’ and fear mongering.
Now, one should not dismiss the solar connection simply to deprive the AGWers of their argument; that would be wrong too. So, the matter has to be discussed on its merit [or lack thereof] as we are trying to do in all the many postings on this blog following every speck the Sun produces [or fails to].
If CO2 is a pollutant, then you better call oxygen a pollutant too.
Oxygen is involved with many chemical reactions, maybe more than CO2. If someone can blame a bridge collapse on “global warming” as due to increased CO2 emission than, you should blame oxygen for a bridge collapsing due to rusting. And there is much more O2 in the atmosphere than CO2. If it weren’t for oxygen how could you get CO2 or even H2O in the first place. If there were no oxygen how could a person exhale 4,000 to 5,000 ppm of CO2?
Blaming CO2 ,as in a food plant, for catastrophic heating of the Earth becomes more and more farfetched as the chemical and physical properties of that compound are examined.So no CO2, no plants and ultimately no people.
Quite frankly, when I see my neighbors neon sign flashing the time and temperature 24/7 and I stand across the street from it with my digital temperature and the readings are 2 degrees F different. Yet when a sudden thundershower goes through both thermometers drop sometimes like 12 degrees. When a good sized cumulus cloud passes by and shades the sign the temp drops several degrees and goes back up when the sun comes out. Given the the temperature during the day can vary 20 degrees or so, it becomes increasing difficult to put credence into any extreme scenarios. A annual global mean temperature is a made up number. And they are using anomalies from that number. in my opinion, a fraction of a degree Celsius rise in this fiction number should not worry anyone. And increased CO2 does not appear to be the main cause of this rise.
Smokey:
Speaking for an assemblage of friends and colleagues, many of whom are just now waking up to the duplicitous AGW agenda – THANK YOU! We have not seen so cogent an assessment of the AGW clan and their disingenuous purpose in some time. As you point out, the demonization of carbon is a convincing indicator of the AGW clan’s real intent. That they pursue it by personal attack, manipulation of fact and incessant obfuscation – betrays their unstable scientific arguments.
One must conclude from arm’s length point of view that climate alarmists are hardened misanthropes, willing to lie, cheat and steal that which man has built. Of course that construction is far from perfect. But those who condemn the entire human enterprise are in fact – an enemy. Exposure and transparency is anathema to them.
LEIF
I think we understand one another now. Thanks
@J Nicklin
That’s exactly what I’ve been wondering. When John Theon was working at NASA, and getting paid to check that taxpayers’ money was being spent correctly, he funded Hansen’s research and he justified Hansen’s modelling work to his superiors, even though he knew Hansen’s work on models was “useless”, and the data was “manipulated”. I can’t believe a manager that weak would last long anywhere outside the government sector. One thing I know for sure, I wouldn’t want him working for me.
I wonder if MSNBC has announced this story yet. Maybe Katie Couric will do a special on the evening news.
matt v: I presume this is the webpage you quoted:
http://ffden-2.phys.uaf.edu/645fall2003_web.dir/Jason_Amundson/pdoindex.htm
Its definition is misleading. Try the actual JISAO PDO website:
http://jisao.washington.edu/pdo/
I’m not sure where your reference got his definition, but the definition I provided is from the gentleman who calculates the data, Nathan Mantua. On this page…
http://jisao.washington.edu/pdo/PDO.latest
…they state: “Updated standardized values for the PDO index, derived as the leading PC of monthly SST anomalies in the North Pacific Ocean, poleward of 20N. The monthly mean global average SST anomalies are removed to separate this pattern of variability from any ‘global warming’ signal that may be present in the data.”
Also refer to the references at the bottom of the JISAO webpage. Then, when you’re through, email Nate Mantua and ask him to define the process he goes through to calculate the PDO. His reply to me stated:
“The full method for computing the PDO index came from Zhang, Y., J.M. Wallace, D.S. Battisti, 1997: ENSO-like interdecadal variability: 1900-93. J. Climate, 10, 1004-1020.
“They labeled this same time series ‘the NP index’ (see their figs 5 and 6). The steps are listed below, and files described below can be found at:
ftp://ftp.atmos.washington.edu/mantua/pdofiles/
“Data used: * monthly 5×5 Hadley Center SST 1900-93
“Method:
1. create monthly anomaly fields for all grid points
2. create a monthly mean global SST anomaly time series for all months, 1900-93, using gridpoints specified in file grid.temp.glob_ocean.977
3. create a “residual SST anomaly” field for the North Pacific by subtracting out the global mean anomaly from each North Pacific grid point in file grid.N_Pac_SST.resi.172 (20N-65N, only in Pacific Basin) for all months and locations
np_resi(mo,loc)= np_ssta(mo,loc) – global_mean(mo)
4. compute the EOFs of the North Pacific residual SST anomaly fields, and ignore all missing data point (set them to zeros)
5. the PDO index is the leading PC from the above analysis
6. for PDO index values post 1993, project observed ‘North Pacific residual SST anomalies’ onto the leading eigenvector (what we call the ‘PDO pattern’ of ssts) from the EOF analysis done in step 4. We now do this with the Reynold’s and Smith Optimally Interpolated SST (version 2) data.”
matt v, that description was included in the link I provided earlier “The Common Misunderstanding About The PDO” :
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2008/06/common-misunderstanding-about-pdo.html
matt v, feel free to stand behind a position that is incorrect. If you doubt the graphs I prepared that illustrated the SST anomalies and residuals for the North Pacific North of 20N, feel free to download the data yourself and create your own. There are links to my sources at the bottom of my webpages.
Regards
Re: Brian (13:16:46) wrote:
“I wonder if MSNBC has announced this story yet. Maybe Katie Couric will do a special on the evening news.”
Bwa ha ha ha!!!
The music is about to stop. Any climate scientist who wants to maintain an ounce of credibility is beginning to weigh his/her options. Watch for more and more to get out of the game. Your friends and neighbors have begun to see the hoax for exactly what it is. Ask them and you will be surprised at their responses.
Mike
Bob Tisdale
Re PDO
Thanks for the extra information. I understand now what you were trying to say based on the article THE COMMON MISUNDERSTANDING ABOUT PDO. The article was a little clearer than your previous posts. Much appreciated for your persistence to get me to look at it .
The article claims that PDO is a residual SST effect of ENSO or the after effect of ENSO events, yet it still impacts regional temperature[ notice the word ‘impacts’which is what I was trying to say] and precipitation but the primary cause of the change in global temperatures and precipitation remains the ENSO.
I had previously looked at ENSO and PDO but found better identification of more distinct temperature periods with the residual PDO index. These show the global cooling and warming periods together with positive and negative PDO periods better.
The following reference shows the comparison. http://www.iphc.washington.edu/Staff/hare/html/decadal/post1977/pdoenso1.jpg
The PDO Index and Canadian national surface temperatures well illustrate the warm and cool periods . The Maritime region seems to be impacted by AMO as well .
I think I was on the right track but I will be more careful to qualify my words about which is primary and which is residual . Both have an effect.
Thanks again Bob.
Roy Spencer has an interesting commentary on Theon’s “coming out” and the political manoeuvring inside NASA:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/01/another-nasa-defection-to-the-skeptics-camp/
Joel,
“But, as for the general question about a “minor trace gas”, there are no hard-and-fast rules about how large a percentage of the atmosphere a gas has to be to cause a large effect. The atmosphere is about 99% constituents that are transparent to IR radiation, so the ~1% that is not plays an disproportionate role in our climate. Furthermore, over a large range of concentrations, the forcing is proportional to the logarithm of the concentration, which means small concentrations can play a disproportionate role in comparison to what they would play if the relationship were linear”
(Firstly, for small concentrations a logarithm will be approximately linear, but more importantly …)
I think the party line on this is that the trace gas CO2 is actually NOT able to raise the temperature significantly by itself. It needs help. Which is where the positive feedback loop involving water vapor kicks in. So the CO2 does just enough to evaporate some water to get it started, then the newly arrived water vapor causes more heating, more evaporation etc. Have I misunderstood this?
The trouble with this mechanism is that it’s quite nonspecific for CO2. By the same mechanism an unusually hot summer afternoon could be the end of the planet.
On the matter of the safety of burning all fossil fuels, why do you think they are called that? They are “plant fossils” and got all their carbon in the same way as plants do today. From CO2 in the atmosphere, though there was much more then. If we burnt every last milligram of fossil fuel we would simply be returning the CO2 to its rightful place.
Graeme Rodaughan (22:54:25) : Maybe “Climate” is a myth.
What we actually have is weather, you can easily access weather, just step outside your front door…
I generally agree with your comments.
I’ve adopted the habit of talking about ’30 year weather’ and ‘200 year weather’ etc.
I’ve been convinced by Pamela Gray that ‘climate’ only changes if you move a mountain range, shift your latitude, or do something similar on a geologic time scale. Everything else is just weather. Some long, some short..
FWIW, I’m also avoiding the use of the word “forcing”. There is no “forcing”. It implies something that can not be resisted. I’m using the older term ‘driver’ whenever possible. It implies something that pushes in a direction, but sometimes just doesn’t get there. Ever drive a herd of cats?
😉
allister duncan (11:32:55) :
@ur momisuglyJ Nicklin
Why do many of these people have to wait until they are retired to make these pronouncements?
That’s exactly what I’ve been wondering. When John Theon was working at NASA, and getting paid to check that taxpayers’ money was being spent correctly, he funded Hansen’s research and he justified Hansen’s modelling work to his superiors, even though he knew Hansen’s work on models was “useless”, and the data was “manipulated”.
Been there, done that, in another field, in a smaller way. When you reach an administrative level you tend to trust the peer review process, the long curriculum vitae with the respectable publications. You tend to trust in the scientific integrity of the people in your “care” unless there has been something gross in their past.
I am sure while dr Theon was administering the funds all this that he describes is hindsight. Even though Hansen was an alarmist, he was not a discredited by bad science scientist. He had a working model and he believed in his theories, which at that time might have been proven correct. It is the last ten years where science has been departing from the argument and naked politics has shown its face in this AGW hypotheis.
There are a lot of retired people from scientific disciplines that start looking in the details of AGW because they now have the time. When they realize what has been happening they go @ur momisugly#$%^. Happened to me too, about a year ago. I also depended on the scientific integrity of the climatologists. I would not expect them to comment on the quark model so why would I doubt their climate model ab initio?
John Galt (06:41:08) : How is it that you are working on the GISSTemp source code? Is it posted on the internet?
I have chosen to so that I can see what it really is doing. Yes, it is published for download. I’ve put directions in the comments under the ‘resources’ tab up at the top of this site.
Joel Shore:
Let’s not create some fiction that Milloy is some unbiased arbiter of junk science. His criterion for judging science to be junk is merely that it could be used to support environmental or health regulations. Nothing more, nothing less.
I think you have it backwards. The frequency with which Milloy is debunking Junk Science in these areas is proportional to the frequency with which they occur there. Both fields are awash in Junk Science… Like I said, he could hire hundreds and never get the job done. It’s a bit overwhelming I’m sure.
marshall (20:10:37) :
Scientists manipulated data to fit their models – how?
In the GISStemp code from Hansen’s group, they take temperature data from three major data sets. Antarctic, GHCN & USHCN (Global and US Historic Climate Network – i.e. land thermometers). They then throw away many record and rewrite many others with different temperatures. I would call that ‘manipulation’.
They throw out all records older than 1880.
Where USHCN and GHCN both have data: Any GHCN data from prior to the earliest USHCN data for a given station are deleted. Why? Who knows.
The remaining data have a ‘difference’ calculated by taking up to ten of the most recent years of data and subtracting the GHCN data from the USHCN data making an ‘average difference’ for each month. THIS is then subtracted from ALL prior USHCN records (with the resultant modified USHCN record kept) while the GHCN data are discarded. Why? (This matters because, for example, if a thermometer change was made in, say, Reno that reported 2F high and done 9 years ago, that 2F ‘correction’ would be subtracted from all months as far back in time as there were records. What does an equipment change in 2000 have to do with temperatures recorded in 1930?) I would assert this qualifies as ‘data manipulation’.
The resultant temperatures can be ‘adjusted’ based on the temperatures at sites up to 1000 km away via what the software calls the “reference station method”. Just what does Lodi tell me about temperatures in San Francisco?
Models omit certain sub grid scale processes – which ones?
Take the Lodi / SFO example: In summer the air over Lodi gets hot and rises. This pulls fog over SFO and cools it. The code asserts that Lodi rising means SFO ought to have risen, so can ‘adjust’ SFO upward. The reality is that the model omits the sub grid scale process of fog and hot air rising over Lodi… and the fact that SFO negatively correlates with Lodi. There are other things omitted as well.
Lack transparency- then how do you know what’s been manipulated and omitted?
You may not know what, but you can know ‘that it has’. There is a thread on this site about temperatures in Italy. It includes a temperature graph for Pisa showing ‘as reported’ and ‘after GISS’. Some data points in the GISS data are moved up to 1.75 degrees. I can tell you it was done, and I can guess about what did it, but exactly what, why and how is not ‘transparent’ or clear.
GISS data is clearly ‘cooked’ and IMHO useless for any scientific investigation.
@anna v
I suppose the issue I have with John Theon is that he was supposed to be looking into the details of AGW as part of his day job, not after he retired. He was responsible for evaluating Hansen’s results.
I certainly agree that being a middle rank or senior rank manager in a large bureaucratic company is a complex and difficult task. It takes some brains, but more importantly it takes guts to do the job effectively. That’s why these managers get paid a larger than average salary to do the job.
You’ll certainly find some quiet-life, go-with-the-flow managers in any organisation. The paperwork appears on their in-tray, they rubber-stamp it and put it onto their out-tray, and collect their salary at the end of the month. They provide no independent judgement, there is no added value. If they were removed from the loop, nothing would change.
allister duncan (03:59:41) :
You are describing a government organization the world over:
You’ll certainly find some quiet-life, go-with-the-flow managers in any organisation. The paperwork appears on their in-tray, they rubber-stamp it and put it onto their out-tray, and collect their salary at the end of the month. They provide no independent judgement, there is no added value. If they were removed from the loop, nothing would change.
And do not forget that salary differences among peers with just a bit of extra seniority and responsibility, if they they exist, are not so huge.
Still, from the head article here:
“As Chief of several of NASA Headquarters’ programs (1982-94), ”
he would be excused of being in negligence of Hansen’s reputation. There was nothing obviously wrong with it at the time , except a licence to speak out boldly, which probably the association with an academic institute gave him.
davidc:
No…a logarithm is a logarithm period. There are two possible sources of your confusion here: One is that any function including a logarithm will look linear (except right at maxima or minima) over a small enough range in concentrations…But since Smokey is presumably interested in the concentration that CO2 is actually at in comparison to some much higher concentration that he thinks would make its effects more plausible, that doesn’t apply. The second is that it is true that at low enough concentrations, the dependence of forcing on concentration is no longer expected to follow a logarithm but is expected to be more linear…but this is not due to properties of the logarithmic function itself…And, this is also irrelevant to the discussion because at the concentrations that CO2 is at, the logarithmic dependence is already occurring.
Well, you are not completely off-base but I think you may be exaggerating the size of the water vapor feedback in relation to the direct rise in temp due to CO2. Basically, the breakdown in current climate models appears to be roughly like this (roughly because the feedbacks interact in a way that makes it hard to separate their effects): Doubling CO2 would directly raise temps about 1-1.2 C. The water vapor feedback roughly doubles this although the closely related negative lapse rate feedback takes some of that back, so that the net effect of the two is about a 1.5 X factor. The ice albedo feedback then adds a little bit more. And, finally the cloud feedback adds some more (and ranges from close to neutral to a quite positive feedback, depending on the model).
No…Things are not that sensitive. And, in fact, as I have pointed out above, the evidence from past paleoclimate events…and the cooling after the Mt. Pinatubo eruption…in fact seems to imply that the earth’s climate is indeed quite sensitive to small perturbations and thus our current understanding of these seems to require the net feedbacks to be significantly positive.
Yes…but, while the earth is just fine with the seas being tens of meters higher than they are today, some people might find that less than ideal. And, as for ecosystems, the history of the earth is also full of dramatic extinction events. Furthermore, the rate at which we are returning the carbon to the atmosphere may have few or no other precedents…And, ecosystems are under other stresses, such as pollution and habitat fragmentation that will make it even more difficult for them to adjust than in the past.
Now, if you are talking specifically of the prospect of a true runaway global warming effect: Hansen’s counterarguments to your point are that the sun is believed to have increased slowly in output over timescales of hundreds of millions of year and that the rate of release of CO2 into the atmosphere may be so unprecedented that it overwhelms the negative feedbacks that operate at more geological timescales (like those that drawdown CO2 levels over millions of years). Again, as I have noted, I remain somewhat skeptical of Hansen’s arguments in favor of such a true runaway effect…but I don’t think they can be dismissed out-of-hand using the argument that you do.
Joel Shore (18:32:17) :
Well I must say that your comment:
“I think there is little doubt that Lindzen is an outstanding atmospheric scientist. And, maybe the word “fringe” is a bit too loaded. But, just because someone is a very good scientist does not make them infallible and the fact is that he is really out on the edge in the climate science field … And, for someone as smart as he is, I think that he has shown some very poor judgment in some of the arguments he has made or allowed himself to be associated with in the popular media.”
is hugely arrogant. Your credentials are?
As ever I find that when asked questions about giving “real world evidence” for your theory you have none. You refer to the IPCC report – please cite the specific references that support your comment because I cannot find any.
I am not looking for absolute proof of CO2 as the cause of Global Warming as you intimate but I am looking for good evidence of it because like many people I do not believe there is such a thing. So please show me where I can find it?
For the record I believe the earth is over 4 billion years old. I have no opinion on the G&T paper either.
Your comments about the JunkScience site and its author say a lot more about you than you will ever know.