The intro reads: Plagued by reports of sloppy work, falsifications and exaggerations, climate research is facing a crisis of confidence. How reliable are the predictions about global warming and its consequences? And would it really be the end of the world if temperatures rose by more than the much-quoted limit of two degrees Celsius?
This series features Steve McIntyre prominently, and well worth the read. See the series links below:
- Part 1: A Superstorm for Global Warming Research
- Part 2: Politically Charged Science
- Part 3: A Climate Rebel Takes on the Establishment
- Part 4: The Smoking Gun of Climatology
- Part 5: The Reality of Rising Sea Levels
- Part 6: The Myth of the Monster Storm
- Part 7: Climate Change’s Winners and Losers
- Part 8: The Invention of the Two-Degree Target
James Delingpole quips in the Telegraph:When the Germans give up on AGW you really do know it’s all over…
I think we’re getting a little taste of the direction the MSM is going now… And it’s about fricken time !
This was a good attempt at sitting on middle ground rather than spouting the usual dogma, but as one poster previously put it : “schizophrenic article”… I think sums it up beautifully.
“Schizophrenic” will be the norm in the MSM for a while until they are able to completely plant their feet on solid ground once and for all. Not unlike how a person/group of persons releases themselves from any type of dogmatic belief system… it’s a long, slow process of transition with a few bumps along the way.
Amazing that Der Spiegel published this article. I had read Der Spiegel on the web for years until the Bush era when it got too hard to take the anti-American tone and generally “leftie” orientation. Die Welt (another German newspaper) is a bit easier to take for an American reader.
They got a lot wrong in the article as noted in the posts above; but for a widely read, and in my opinion (extremely) left-wing greenie publication, this article is just astounding. Seven parts; a flattering description of Steve M; wow. If you think they didn’t go far enough into the real truth of AGW – just have a look at the latest edition of Scientific American.
John Wright (19:35:41) :
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,druck-686697,00.html
Thank you John for that link.
“Seven parts” whoops! I should have said eight…
Anthony, check it out http://www.texasinsider.org/?p=24823
Here’s another one for you Anthony: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1263207/Increase-Arctic-ice-confounds-doomsayers.html
R. Gates
I agree that it would appear that German climatologists haven’t given up on AGW (although one might read that they have given up on CAGW), but don’t you think that if you had given policy advice to your government on switching to antediluvian windmill tech and other methods of destroying your nation’s economy (Germany gets nearly all its energy from coal) and been promoted to chief government scientist for it that you might start backing away in small steps? Doesn’t “or we might have a completely different outcome” (excuse the estimated quote) tell us that regardless of what we believe, we really don’t know. Another hint of the backing away is to highlight that the real bad guys were the British.
If we really don’t know what is going to happen, then how can we be certain that it will continue to warm, that it is caused by humans and that there is nothing we can do to stop it?
And one more Anthony about this Spiegel series:
It looks like we’re all global warming skeptics now
By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst
04/02/10 4:43 PM EDT
My American Enterprise Institute colleagues Kenneth Green and Steven Hayward provide a pithy summary of this long article in Germany’s Der Spiegel entitled “A Superstorm for Global Warming Research.” Green and Hayward write:
“Far from parroting the ‘settled science’ canard, Der Spiegel points to many ‘open questions’ of the science, and says ‘anyone who speaks with leading climatologists today will discover how many questions remain open. The media, politicians and even scientists often talk about changes to the weather with a certainty that does not in fact exist.’ The authors are even willing to raise the ultimate heretical question: ‘Will the situation on the planet truly spin out of control if the average global temperature increases by more than two degrees Celsius?’
For a more pungent appreciation of the Der Spiegel article, read the Daily Telegraph’s James Delingpole. Sample: “When the Germans say Auf widersehen AGW [anthropogenic global warming], it really is time for the rest of the world to sit up and take notice.”
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Were-all-global-warming-skeptics-now-89798067.html#ixzz0k4GU3nJS
Once again there is no assessment of how believable GCM results are that cannot match most of the 20th century. Fred Singer is right when he characterizes GCMs as a mere curve-fitting exercise (with no predictive capability). And as pointed out by rbateman (21:29:10), GCMs are trying to fit temperatures that have been adjusted.
Enneagram: “McIntyre asserts that he believes in Climate Change”
That is pitiful.
It’s not pitiful, it is simple acceptance of fact. Climate changes. Always has; always will — that is, unless the alarmists, against all likelihood, actually succeed in coercing global policies that cripple the natural mechanisms that cause the world ecosystem to breath in … breath out … as it’s been doing for eons, long before mankind came along.
When climate stops changing, the earth dies — or at least gets very sick.
It will begin with perhaps a century or two of slow decay, living off the momentum of millennia of climate dynamics, before the planet descends into a dull cream-soup of torpor; evolution grinds to a halt, local ecospheres fail to be cyclically refreshed as is essential to their health, and many species stagnate and die off. Bacteria and scavenging insects will thrive as long as the decay continues; if the earth is able to cleanse itself of the scourge of anthropogenic climate intervention before rigor mortis sets in, climates will return once again to their natural, ever-changing state, and the biosphere will slowly rise again from whatever level of primordial mush it has descended to.
Sorry. I’m not naturally dystopian in my outlook, but if we’re going to be alarmist, we might as well be sensible about truly alarming potential outcomes.
“In reality, it isn’t about stopping a luxury ocean liner, but about the massive effort that is required to end the age of oil and coal as quickly as possible…”
How romantic. And in our zeal to end our love affiar with “oil and coal,” we will turn out the lights and revert to a life of pre-industrial peasantry.
As Ross MicKitrick pointed out in response to the touchy-feely Earth Hour blackout:
“Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century. Every material social advance . . . depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity. . . I don’t want to go back to nature. Haiti just went back to nature. People who work to end poverty and disease are fighting against nature.”
The AGW movement is animated by a deep-seated hatred of capitalism and the material advances that have brought some measure of comfort to mankind. The nature-lovers who recklessly demonize the extraction and use of life-giving fossil fuels are pushing us towards another hellish Dark Ages.
Over and over, I ask, “Why wasn’t this ‘humans did it all’ accusation addressed back in 1988-1990?”
It is utterly ridiculous that at this late stage such fundamental questions are just now being asked.
It is utterly ridiculous that at this late stage such fundamental questions are just now being asked.
This is all comes down to the way it has been sold as “settled science”. Al Gore became the arbiter of off things settled in 1993, and had very much control over who was funded by the US government until 2001. After that there was no point in studying any of the basics.
Why study something that is settled?
France to organize public debate about Global Warming!
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=5474&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+co2sceptics%2Fnews+%28CO2sceptics+News+Blog%29
Meanwhile, CNN has a hard hitting piece on Scientology.
R. de Haan:
“France to organize public debate about Global Warming!”
Hey this is great – I love it. And check this out as well:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/04/claude-allegre-dismisses-useless-and.html
@Doug in Seattle (16:51:15) :
You guys sure like beating up on Al Gore! But it predates his involvement. He became their huckster. No argument there. And he is getting the crap beat out of him about that.
But it’s bigger than Al Gore and kicking him.
How about everybody ELSE that ran around yelling “Consensus! Consensus!”
Those who were part of the “consensus” – it turns out they didn’t even know what they were agreeing with, since now everyone is saying that the evidence isn’t really there.
If it wasn’t, what in the HELL were they consenting to?
Boy, if they don’t get it by now:
Science is not about talking people into something. It is about can you back up your work with predictions and replication? And is your data solid?
I love this bit:
A bunch of guys whose data housekeeping is like Delta House’s frat house – these are the guys who had the world wanting to spend several trillion dollars on something burped up by James Hansen and Mike Mann.
Anyone know why the arctic-roos site has been down for a few days?
The world may yet spend trillions – look at California. Actual scientific endorsement of AGW may be years away, but policy has been legislated and implementation through regulation is coming this year for implementation in 2012. Climategate? IPPC factual problems? Please don’t disturb California staff, we are working too hard to implement this law. France says it won’t act on costly measures until neighbors do too? How unsympathetic to the world’s condition. California will lead the way. Costs of allowances are not a cost to the economy – says a leading economic report. So who is going to pay???
Shsss, don’t tell them, Californians will pay, and rightly too.
Actually, I was wrong that there had been no analysis of raw global data (at least on the skeptical side). Jeff ID comes up with a warmer trend using raw data instead of adjusted.
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/02/26/global-gridded-ghcn-trend-by-seasonal-offset-anomaly-matching/
Same at The Blackboard, (but not posted by a skeptic):
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2010/a-simple-model-for-spatially-weighted-temp-analysis/
Which corroborates the analyses done by AGWers or neutral contributors:
http://rhinohide.wordpress.com/crutemp/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/12/are-the-cru-data-suspect-an-objective-assessment/ (samples)
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cmb-faq/temperature-monitoring.html
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2010/02/25/false-claims-proven-false/
The last post deals with station dropout, too. Here’s another.
http://clearclimatecode.org/the-1990s-station-dropout-does-not-have-a-warming-effect/
And another on station drop-out done by comparing satellite to surface records.
http://keithpickering.blogspot.com/2010/02/station-dropout-problem-more-non.html
And a histogram of adjustments to the global temperature record.
http://www.gilestro.tk/2009/lots-of-smoke-hardly-any-gun-do-climatologists-falsify-data/
(Corroborating the realclimate histogram from samples in the post I linked above)
As a side note, it would, at the least, be fair play for Anthony Watts and Joe D’Aleo to retract or modify their comments on warm bias in the adjusted global record – or else soon substantiate their criticism by crunching the numbers for the global data set. I cannot fathom why they did not perform this obviously necessary analysis before publishing their criticisms.
barry (22:20:12)
Can’t see a hockey stick in Jeff’s work.
Just a slight increase from another warmish peak in the 1850s as the world slowly and intermittently recovered from the LIA.
You miss the point, Stephen. Jeff ID clearly shows there is no warm bias in the adjusted global record. He shows that the trend after adjustments is actually cooler than raw. Same result at Lucia’s and Tamino’s, etc.
barry (01:32:40)
I don’t think it has all been unravelled properly yet so I’ll reserve judgement on that issue.
The raw data itself is suspect from UHI and siting issues.
I don’t see that the point gets you very far anyway. Demonstrating that there was no undue manipulation of the raw data (and the jury is still out on that) doesn’t help in justifying the creation of a hockey stick curve or speculating wildly about the scale of human contributions to a naturally changing climate.
barry (01:32:40) :
You miss the point, Stephen. Jeff ID clearly shows there is no warm bias in the adjusted global record. He shows that the trend after adjustments is actually cooler than raw. Same result at Lucia’s and Tamino’s, etc.
Of course they do, they are biased and use the same lousy Gridding tricks as the CRU.
Take a look at Chefio’s analysis of the Raw Data if you really want to be educated.
barry (22:20:12) :
Have you looked at all of the Independent temperature Analysis, i.e. people not working for an organisation involved with the IPCC, because all of the ones you quote are involved.