Steve McIntyre writes: One reviewer of the IPCC 2007 Assessment Report specifically asked IPCC not to hide the decline. The reviewer stated very clearly:
Show the Briffa et al reconstruction through to its end; don’t stop in 1960. Then comment and deal with the “divergence problem” if you need to. Don’t cover up the divergence by truncating this graphic. This was done in IPCC TAR; this was misleading (comment ID #: 309-18)
The IPCC said that it would be “inappropriate to show recent section of Briffa et al. series“.
Bulldust
Submitted on 2009/11/19 at 3:52pm
Hmmm how long before this is dubbed ClimateGate?
You minted a grand slam in the 9th over the Green Monster with that line.
By Monday, you’ll have more hits on Google than sq km of Ice in the Arctic.
JPSobel (20:35:37) :
Provided the Green Monsters don’t kill the free market and plunge the West into the Modern Dark Age, there’s plenty of oil shale, coal and time develop alternatives. We probably need it. 2 years after the first SC24 region and the Solar Activity is still smoldering like wet firewood.
We’ve been listening to the “peak oil” scare now for thirty years. It’s lost its legs.
Of course one day it will come. So denying it utterly would be particularly stupid. And even if it isn’t soon, not wasting oil is a good idea in its own right.
We don’t need to research “peak oil” though. Watch the money guys, and follow their lead. They have the resources and skill to investigate the true situation in places like Iran and sub-Saharan Africa which we do not. When guys like Soros and Buffet start getting rid of all their oil-based investments, then I will suspect it is truly running out.
[REPLY – Thirty years, hell. We’ve been hearing it since before they stuck a straw in the ground in PA in 1959.]
If I am not mistaken our friend Bulldust is a West Australian. – Now world famous.
twit (18:07:09)
“Like it or not, a sizable cross-section climate change skeptics also happen to be oil
depletion skeptics”
Well now let’s think about this. Nearly every single peak oiler also happens to be a global warmer who advocates the continued and expanded prohibition of drilling and using the vast untapped oil supplies.
So they are in effect attempting to cause the peak oil scenario.
An interesting combination of advocacy. One cause, global warming, obstructs and reduces oil production leading to the other cause of peak oil. And visa versa with peak oil being credited for reducing CO2 emissions and saving the planet
Of course in neither case is it necessary to have validation.
Is that about it?
Few if any would argue there’s not a limited supply of oil in the ground. However there are enough vast supplies of oil and natural gas to avoid any “peak” calamity well into the next era of replacement power.
The desire to reduce fossil fuel use before adequate and affordable replacement technology arrives is irrational and premature.
With technology rapidly advancing new means for powering our vehicles and replacing fossil fuel use the only way peak oil pandamonium happens is if it deliberately caused by another boneheaded movement.
“As with Watergate, Plame, and Martha Stewart, it’s not the act that gets you caught it’s the cover-up.”
All Anthony has done is demonstrate there was no cover up. The point McIntyre raised, the ‘divergence’ problem, has indeed been covered in the discussion the AR4, it is there right now, you can read it if you want.
Rod Gill:
With all due respect, Rod, you’ve got a skewed perspective on the Alberta oil sands. Heck, even wikipedia’s article (search Oil Sands) has a decent breakdown in spite of being “greenpeace-ized”.
Alberta’s oil sands contain 1.7 TRILLION bbls of oil. The cost to extract is currently in the low $20s, and it does drop. Just because natural gas is being used in production does not even remotely mean that is the only way, it’s just that Alberta has such a MASSIVE reserve of easily (cheaply) available NG.
As someone who lives in Alberta, I’ve been hearing about and following oil sands production my whole life. Everything was great: costs were coming down, efficiency was increasing, until the !@ur momisugly#$% environmentalists and CO2 obsessors started sticking their ignorant noses into things. Now there is talk about sequestering CO2 and other unneccessary and expensive things. And don’t even get me started on the manufactured outrage about a few ducks drowing in tailings ponds… on the other end of the province are HUGE wind farms surrounded by bird carcasses.
……yeah, i just posed the question because i think when the average joe may hear of ‘peak oil’ they would more often then not think the implication is of a hard limit of hydrocarbons which isn’t realistic (think of the 1.5-2.0Tb reserve size in Alberta as an example) A production bottleneck is the only realistic possibility….but to me it’s overinflated……much of petroleum usage can be replaced with NG usage…this will happen & NG resources are so vast what with the astronomical potential of shale gas drilling i think much of any oil production shortfalls can be made up with NG. IIrc Canada is the only country that currently has the potential to massively increase it’s oil exports over the long term. & there have been huge new shale & deep gas discoveries in Canada/US also.
Alvin (18:14:54) :
“Some guy named McIntyre. Sounds like a smart scientist 🙂
Or an auditor whose name must not be mentioned.”
Shhhh! you’re not even supposed to mention that you can’t mention the name of he who can’t be mentioned.
twit:
It is likely that the oil companies will transition to renewable biomass sources for their hydrocarbon products, but before that, they have 100+ years of coal to gasify first (and that is not counting in-situ pyrolization of deep coal that is not counted in reserve figures), but I believe they have covered that already at theoildrum.
I don’t think that Barry will have too hard a time jumping off the AGW train he only jumped on to win the nomination. He was all for Coal-to-Liquid before the campaign.
@ur momisugly Rathyen – Yes, there is certainly something Potter-esque about the whole thing. My partner noted, when she was putting together the little tribute to Ian Harris below, that it wouldn’t be too hard to Hagrid-ise the scruffy Briffa and Dumbledore-ise the omniscient Jones… Because obviously they are the good guys in this story.
http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/6fa0eea5a0.jpg
Richard (19:36:22) :
Sorry, don’t do wunderlabel religion. What has happened here is ‘scientists’ arrogantly playing about with tools they are unskilled to use. Pure and simple.
However, you might like to consider what tag language mania (the product of another ‘scientist’ with too much publically funded play time) has wrought on the world. Next up some climate scientist will no doubt release AGWML, thereby increasing warming by wasting another four or five orders of magnitude of the world’s CPU resource parsing indefinite text strings so easily fiddled with at source and over the wire. [C, assembler and security bigot].
Integrity means different things to different folks I guess.
1556: ice sheets extended two miles around the British Isles. There was ice from Dover across to Calais.
1682: All major rivers in Europe froze.
1684: the lagoons of Venice froze solid (in the Mediterranean!)
1779: New York Harbour froze. You could walk from the mainland to Manhattan Island.
“All the data and what models exist seem to indicate that we have reached a peak in oil production and a long steady decline is ahead of us.”
That has been said for nearly 100 years now.
The politicians can’t keep the energy companies from finding more, yet, so they work on preventing anyone from being able to recover the reserves. The companies will find reserves and Congress will prevent any recovery of them. Any “peak oil” is man made.
I get tired of hearing every 10 years that we have only 10 years left. It is just as bad as the climate fear mongers.
Contrary to your assertion, I think that most, if not all, skeptics do realize that climate changes. It is the attribution of cause upon which the warmists and skeptics differ. I believe the skeptics point of view could be fairly summarized as: there is nothing in current climatic changes that cannot be attributed to natural causes – with possibly a very, very small contribution by manmade sources.
We have two positively huge strikes of oil. One in the Gulf of Mexico and one in Brazil in 2009 that practically doubled the amount of recoverable oil estimates. Now Iraq is looking at new discoveries in the Western part of the country and is looking to surpass Iran as the world’s #2 exporting country.
Twit, surely the bigger issue is overpopulation. That’s why greens don’t want more technology and more energy–these are what allowed our numbers to escalate so rapidly. (Plus cheap grains from modern agriculture, so we should really be eating meat instead, as we couldn’t support as many people if we all ate meat, which is a bit ironic for the vegetarians who say we must avoid meat to save the planet, as it is the grains that allowed us to overpopulate so fast, so eat the burger and leave the bun, to save the planet). My point is that no matter how obvious or inescapable a future scenario may appear, we are living adaptive complex systems with surprising emergent potentials that are often completely unpredictable. It is telling with peak oil that we won’t know we’ve peaked until sometime after it has happened—-in other words, not only can’t the future be predicted, but apparently not even the present.
I posted this on CA but thought for entertainment purposes I’d share it here as well. It’s a reworking of Coldplay’s Viva La Vida, for Phil Jones, et al.
=========================================
I used to fool the world
Seas would rise when I gave the word
Now in the morning I simply groan
About the data I used to own
I used to roll in lies
Feel the fear in the taxpayer’s eyes
Listen as the data’d sing
“Now the warming’s dead! Long live warm-ing!”
One minute I held the key
Next the data and emails were free
And I discovered that my theories stand
Upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand
I see the cooling nature’s bringing
Twist the data ‘til it starts singing
Be my mirror, my sword my shield
I’m keeping my data and I won’t yield
For some reason I can’t explain
Once you know there was never, never an honest word
That was when I fooled the world
(ohhh)
It was the wicked and wild wind
Blew the ice and made it thin
Shattered hockey sticks looked pretty dumb
People couldn’t believe what I’d become
And now the people wait
For my head on a silver plate
Not a puppet on a lonely string
But a liar for global warming
I see the cooling nature’s bringing
Twist the data ‘til it starts singing
Be my mirror, my sword my shield
I’m keeping my data and I won’t yield
For some reason I can’t explain
How I made the data that bears my name
Never an honest word
But that was when I fooled the world
I see the cooling nature’s bringing
Twist the data ‘til it starts singing
Be my mirror, my sword my shield
I’m keeping my data and I won’t yield
For some reason I can’t explain
How I made the data that bears my name
Never an honest word
But that was when I fooled the world
F Ross – I think you misinterpret Ripper, my old freo dockers mate from Bigfooty. He means that if “skeptics” is a term of derision, it should apply to people like me who are “alarmists” as we are in “denial”…. he probably should have use the term “deniers” to be clearer… but Rip is no warmist I can tell you that.
Disclaimer: the above rendition of Viva La Vida is meant as humor only and is not meant to suggest any illegal acts or inappropriate actions by any party or parties associated with the current situation at East Anglia – since of course we really don’t know definitively know the source or veracity of any of the alleged emails and/or data concerned.
See the Washington Times:
http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/nov/27/the-global-cooling-cover-up/?feat=home_editorials
Sorry, can’t recall how to create it as a link.
Oops, already posted.
” I believe the skeptics point of view could be fairly summarized as: there is nothing in current climatic changes that cannot be attributed to natural causes – with possibly a very, very small contribution by manmade sources” – F.Ross
I think there’s a graduation across scepticism from those who believe man’s influence is non-existent to negligible, those who think it measurable but not major, to those who think it significant but not catastrophic. With possibly a larger “agnostic” proportion who say we simply don’t know understand enough about climate or havecomplete or honest enough climate data to know whether man is affecting it or how much.
That said, and with terminal irony, if there’s one thing almost all sceptics agree on it’s that climate changes. Always has, always will. And it’s those who say “we can’t think of any other reason for current changes except man and we’re pretending pre-industrial changes never happened” who are the ones in denial.
twit,
I consider your posting to be very relevant. It relates to a question that needs more discussion: Why are so many scientists willing to go along with the AGW scam?
First, many scientists are honorable people, who assume that scientists in other fields are equally honorable. The path of least resistance is to accept the artificial consensus, rather than doing one’s homework.
Second, most scientifically literate people understand that petroleum is a semi-renewable resource, and that there’s not an infinite supply of the stuff.
Yes, there’s a substantial amount of very deep oil under North Dakota. And there are huge supplies of tar sands in Alberta, and in Venezuela. I’m not current on Oil shale, but if and when that technology matures, there’s also a huge amount of OS on the Western slope of the Colorado Rockies. But even these sources are not infinite. And they’re more expensive to extract and/or process than our current oil imports from other countries. People who say that we have plenty of oil are really saying: I don’t care, because I’ll be dead long before the fit hits the shan.
It makes sense to be proactive, and to prepare for a soft landing when the price of oil goes through the roof, our agricultural and manufacturing practices become dramatically more labor-intensive, we drive our smaller cars more sparingly, and our living standards decline appreciably. Of course, this will be some time after we recover from the global recession. However my crystal ball is in the repair shop at the moment. And Psychic Larry can’t be specific about the date or even the year.
As you point out, there is some degree of overlap between Climate Alarmists and people who are deeply concerned about Peak Oil. Example: Both groups advocate strong energy efficiency measures. Some scientists are inclined to look the other way when it comes to Climate Alarmist pseudoscience, because that brand of codswallop is easier to peddle than a Jimmy-Carter-style energy crisis hanging over our heads at some unspecified time in the future. And if successful, either approach would result in strong-to-draconian energy conservation measures. In their view, the ends justify the means. In the case of AGW, the means include lying and cheating, as Phil Jones and others of his ilk have done over the years, because the Great Unwashed can’t handle the truth.
By the way, in 2005, Tom Wigley recommended us another way to see that the hockey-stick-like reconstructions were rubbish:
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=538&filename=1119957715.txt
Wigley: “A word of warning. I would be careful about using other, independent paleo reconstruction work as supporting the MBH reconstructions. I am attaching my version of a comparison of the bulk of these other reconstructions. Although these all show the hockey stick shape, the differences between them prior to 1850 make me very nervous. If I were on the greenhouse deniers’ side, I would be inclined to focus on the wide range of paleo results and the differences between them as an argument for dismissing them all.”
That’s interesting. Because he’s not on the “deniers’ side”, he finds it appropriate to hide the evidence against a hypothesis even though he is aware of it.