The following report is from Benny Peiser’s blog The Global Warming Policy Foundation:
It is a year since the so-called Climategate e-mails were leaked. Since then, we have had freezing winters in Europe and the US, and revelations of gross misrepresentations from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The lasting impression is of massive corruption of science.
Leaked from the Climate Research Unit in England, the e-mails showed the scientists behind the climate scare plotting to: hide, delete and manipulate data; to denigrate scientists presenting different views; to force journals to publish only papers promoting climate alarm; to subvert “peer review” into “pal review”; and make the reports of the IPCC nothing but alarmist propaganda. The corruption spread through governments, universities, scientific societies and journals. You have to look back to the Lysenko episode in the Soviet Union in the 1940s (when a crank persuaded the Soviet establishment that agriculture did not follow Darwinian evolution) to find such perversion of science.
The worst nonsense after the scandal was this: “Well, some climate scientists committed a few minor transgressions but the basic science is sound.” In fact, the basic science is nonexistent.
There is no evidence that mankind is changing the climate in a dangerous way. The slight warming of the past 150 years is no different from previous natural warming periods, such as the worldwide medieval warm period from about 900 to 1200AD… [Read the rest here]
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I don’t think the problem is corruption, as much as incompetence.
My take is that far too much is being read into, and far too many conclusions being drawn from the incredibly short data series that is the modern temperature record.
The Earth is 4500 million years old. The modern temperature record 150 years at best.
To put this into perspective, if you scale down the geological history to a single year, we would have been recording temperature data for A SINGLE SECOND.
And THAT is sufficient to conclude that the “science is settled”?
I think not…….
From the article: “In the 19th century, CO2 levels were about 280ppm, extraordinarily low, putting stress on green plants. Man, by burning fossil fuels and through deforestation, has pushed the levels up to 390ppm.”
What deforestation? In an otherwise fairly reasonable argument, the author throws in a stinking glob of falsehood.
It may be news to the hubris-filled, self-absorbed, post-modern world, but globally there are more forested acres with more trees today than there were 500 years ago. That’s a fact; inconvenient perhaps, but a fact nonetheless.
Indeed, it might have been the elimination of landscape-scale anthropogenic burning and subsequent continental-scale afforestation that induced the Little Ice Age. See
http://tinyurl.com/26b3lj5
Robert A. Dull, Richard J. Nevle, William I. Woods, Dennis K. Bird, Shiri Avnery, and William M. Denevan. 2010. The Columbian Encounter and the Little Ice Age: Abrupt Land Use Change, Fire, and Greenhouse Forcing. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 100(4) 2010, pp. 1–17.
The hypothesis offered in that (peer-reviewed, journal published) article depends on CO2 forcing and is thus questionable to me, but the rebounding of forests after the near-elimination of the indigenous populations of the America’s (and on other continents such as Australia) is solid.
But Science marches backwards (I agree with that contention), so what was once common knowledge is now lost. Might as well burn the libraries. Hello the New Dark Ages.
PS – to be fair, the author claims zero expertise in forest history, so his throw-away line about deforestation must taken with a truck load of salt.
Henry@Sharper00
here, we have been all through those arguments about the carbon dioxide
1) Co2 causes cooling by re-radiating some sunshine
2) CO2 causes warming by re-radiating some earth shine
3) CO2 causes cooling by taking part in photo synthesis. This process extracts heat from its surrounding. (did you ever see a forrest grow where it is very cold?)
the question is: what is the net effect of all of that? It seems to be zero or very close to zero.
for example, see my posting here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/03/a-year-after-climategate-the-corruption-of-science-persists/#comment-543008
why did you not respond to this?
Why don’t just go back to your favorite site and “cook” some more books.
Wind Rider says:
December 3, 2010 at 9:00 am
“[The sorry state of industrial strength science is] also an issue in other fields, with much more immediacy, such as the field of medicine, as described in this piece from The Atlantic magazine, which details findings that followers of the Climategate mess will find all too hauntingly familiar.”
And maybe by now only a voice from the grave, check out this quote concerning our old Post Normal Climate Science nemesis, the “given truth” warrant allegedly deriving from a publication’s Peer Review process:
Nature, the grande dame of science journals, stated in a 2006 editorial, “Scientists understand that peer review per se provides only a minimal assurance of quality, and that the public conception of peer review as a stamp of authentication is far from the truth.”
Offer a man the Dollar and he will do or say anything you wish. When the paymaster is government, and the US government has spent $32Bn over the past ten years to prove AGW, then this makes more sense given larger sums of dollars.
I do not think that the US government has spent any of that vast sum wisely since they have still to make any connection between human activity and climate that makes any sense.
Mike,
You keep claiming that there is evidence that mankind is changing the climate in a dangerous way. Yet failed to show any evidence to support this, why is that then?
Phil,
Like above there is no evidence if you can’t even make one point that supports this.
First thing you both need to consider is what is the sensitivty of CO2 to climate and show this represented in global temperatures taking natural factors into account. If you don’t know the sensitivty, then you can’t claim there is evidence mankind is changing the climate in dangerous way.
The facts are that most of recent global temperatures have increased in short sudden bursts. That means for CO2 to have caused this the sensitivty must be high, but a stable period shows that this is not true. This period has shown that natural cycles of global temperatures are responsible for most of the warming with El Nino’s and ocean cycles the key players. Therefore the CO2 senstivity must be low, but most of the increase has occured in bursts so that leaves very little room for warming from CO2. That is sound evidence along with other weather events (hurricanes, droughts, floods etc) not getting any worse over recent 100 years, that there is no evidence to support a dangerous climate ahead caused by man made CO2.
And according to a link from climatedepot to financial post opinion piece by Lawrence Solomon: Hockey stick coverup, a sequel
UVA has admitted it lied and thus covered up, and are apparently still refusing to hand over the information requested by law, so essentially they’re still then breaking the law.
The trend of not wanting to come clean with the original information is ongoing on an upwards slope it seems, so bad an upward slope they’re actually willing to break the law over and over to not have to come clean.
David, UK says:
December 3, 2010 at 9:45 am
the UK and USA couldn’t possibly have turned into corrupt, totalitarian states like 1930s Germany or the USSR, could they?
How could you even think such a thing?
The BBC only ever reports the truth and nothing but the truth.
Please report to your nearest re-education centre on Monday morning.
RE sharper00 says:
December 3, 2010 at 2:41 pm
The article you linked to was fine for C)2 induced warming of the atmosphere, however this statement at the end of it was not fine…”And of course the result of this energy imbalance is the accumulation of heat over the last 40 years.”
The energy imbalance would only necessarily be in the “atmosphere” not in earth’s energy budget. If LWR induces atmospheric heat and increases the hydrologic cycle, and therefore cloud cover, which decrease SWR entering the oceans where any change in radiation has a GREATER effect over the long term, then overall the planet may not warm at all.
Enneagram says:
December 3, 2010 at 8:54 am
Question: What happened to Satellite-Gate?
Answer: Ask no questions – Hear no lies.
Smokey said:
They have failed, because they rely on computer climate models rather than on raw, testable data. Their models have been repeatedly falsified. Their models cannot predict the future. And the planet itself falsifies their AGW hypothesis: there are no verifiable measurements showing the fraction of warming, if any, attributable to the very minor 0.7° warming over the past century and a half.
There’s the alternative hypothesis of UHI effects being responsible for such observations. Cities have certainly increased in size over that time period as have machines which put emit heat, which you also tend to find concentrated in urban areas. With an effect so small it’s also necessary to consider accuracy and calibration of the data in the first place.
If testable evidence is ever produced showing how much warming the increase in CO2 causes, out of the total of natural climate variability, and such putative evidence withstands falsification, that would be evidence of AGW. But so far, the claims of CO2-induced warming is all conjecture.
The observed temperature fluctuations are minor, and they are well within the parameters of past variability. According to the scientific method you cannot simply assume that the cause of the 0.7° rise is due to CO2, when much greater rises and declines have happened naturally, prior to the industrial revolution.
It would also be necessary to show that any rise in atmospheric CO2 is due to human activities. This also being something which has varied due to natural causes.
Even if there was a foolproof method of identifying CO2 from human use of fossil fuels (as opposed to the likes of Burning Mountain in Australia) you’d still need to show that this actually raises the amount in the atmosphere. Adding more directly to the atmosphere may simply mean that the same amount which would have otherwise gone from the oceans into the atmosphere has stayed in the oceans.
Jeremy said
When compared against the extremes possible in known planetary bodies, Earth’s climate is *amazingly* stable within bounds.
If this wasn’t the case we most likely wouldn’t be here to discuss it in the first place. It’s also a reasonable hypothesis that the climate mechanism has negative feedback mechanisms for this to be the case. Yet the AGW doomsday senarios require positive feedback.
Smokey says:
I suppose that if I were unable to intelligently address the actual scientific points that someone was making, I might be desperate enough to resort to quoting them out of context too, although I would hope that I would still have higher standards than that.
I think I have rarely run into someone who has such high standards for the conduct of others whose views he disagrees with (as he discusses here http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/03/a-year-after-climategate-the-corruption-of-science-persists/#comment-542920 ) while having such abysmally low standards for his own conduct (and of those who agree with him).
Aynsley Kellow says:
I’ll give you two other reasons:
(1) Because the subject that I was addressing was estimates of climate sensitivity from paleoclimate data and Penner et al. is not discussing paleoclimate data and what it says about climate sensitivity AT ALL.
(2) Because, irregardless of that, you have GROSSLY distorted what Penner et al. ( http://xweb.geos.ed.ac.uk/~dstevens/publications/penner_ngeo10.pdf ) have actually said. First of all, saying that methane, tropospheric ozone and black carbon have “augment[ed] the radiative forcing of carbon dioxide by 65%” is not the same thing mathematically as saying that CO2 is responsible for only 35% of the forcing. What it means is that if the CO2 forcing is, say, 1 W/m^2 then that due to the others is an additional 0.65 W/m^2, which means that CO2 is responsible for ~61% of the forcing due to all of these factors. Second of all, you completely neglect the inconvenient fact that Penner et al. also note in the very next sentence that “Others — such as sulphate, nitrate and organic aerosols — cause a negative radiative forcing, offsetting a fraction of the warming owing to carbon dioxide and that there basic conclusion in regards to climate sensitivity is simply that “at present impossible to accurately determine climate sensitivity” using the past instrumental temperature record. This is precisely why the best constraints on climate sensitivity come from paleoclimate data, response of temperatures to the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, and other things besides simply the instrumental temperature record.
From my calculations, if Dec 10 is over .394 anomaly, we’ll have a new record….
Henry@ur momisugly MattN
it seems we are going in circles here. Nobody denies that warming is happening. The question is: is it natural or is it man made. The evidence points to natural,
1st because it has happened naturally like that in the past, as Andrew Kenny has explained, and
2nd if you study the pattern of the warming, for example, here, we have some average temperature data since 1946,
http://img502.imageshack.us/img502/8705/navacerrada.gif
This is in Spain, which I think is pretty much average as avarage goes for a place to stay on earth! The station has been very accurate in its recordings and only one day’s recordings are missing. Note that the average minimum temps. since 1980 have stayed constant. If green house gasses were to blame for the warming (the trapping of heat), you would think that it should have been minimum temps that would show the increase (of modern warming). But that line is completely straight…..So it cannot be greenhouse gasses that caused modern warming.
So it must be something else that is causing warming…..natural causes…obviously
The nexy question is: do we want (natural) warming to stop?
No!!
Warming is good for the planet as it stimulates growth
http://www.businessday.co.za/Articles/Content.aspx?id=128438
I am enjoying a blessed afternoon at our pool….my brother is complaining about the snow…. please help my brother….stop complaining about the warming….
HenryP says:
December 3, 2010 at 11:32 am
Andrew Kenny is a fellow citizen of mine in South Africa
His publication in Business Day and interview on radio is a major breakthrough here.
It is the first time ever here that sceptics have been given an opportunity to speak.
+++++++++++
I am pretty sure Prof Philip Lloyd, chemistry professor, a notable and informed sceptic and devoted reader of WUWT, was loud and clear in Business Day. I am not worried about who was first, just that Business Day, which is widely circulated, gives a platform for reasoned comment. Good on them! It is always a good read whatever the topic.
Joel Shore,
Thanx, me boi, for linking to my statement. It can’t be repeated often enough that the alarmist crowd runs and hides from the Scientific Method like Dracula runs and hides from the dawn. They are both evil, eh? The corruption of climate science is what the article is about, and as usual you hide from that central fact.
And the real world laughs at the models you worship. BTW, when are you gonna write that article for WUWT? You can explain to us yokels how your computer models trump the real world.☺
Good article.
Thanks, Anthony!
Joel Shore 5.40
Come on Joel, its unusual for you to be so snarky. This from Taminos open mind blog;
“There’s a crucial point in that sentence: as I mentioned in this post, “One drawback of local records is that they tend to show much larger scatter than global/hemispheric averages.” Compared to global, hemispheric, or even regional averages, the noise level in individual station records is huge. You can’t expect to be able to “see” what the long-term behavior is just by looking at graphs of individual station data, especially with trend-squashing y-axis scales.”
We have the double problem that individual stations-because of instrumentation and methodology etc- have not in the past produced basic data that is any more accurate than to within 1 to 1.5 degrees. Add to to that the frequency with which the parameters of an individual station alters- a station physically moves, trees grow around it, it is urbanised, figures are not collected for five years and are ‘interpolated’ 100 years later etc etc and inaccuracies are piled on inaccuracies.
So individually the data is highly dubious, but add them together to create a global construct and suddenly the basic data is supposed to become fantastically accurate!
In any discipline except climate science everyone would accept that multiplying bad data many fold merely makes the resultant problems greater.
From that melange of nonsensical data computer modellers then like to parse results acurate to three decimal places. Are they Harry Potter? How did this magic occur?
Do you seriously believe for example that we can know that the global temperature (whatever that is supposed to mean) is say.561C warmer than in 1887 when the inacuracies are greater than the result they are computing?
tonyb
Four, actually.
Henry@Crispin in Ulaanbaatar
Pray do tell: where is Ulaanbaatar? Cannot be near Silverton, I cannot get a Business Day here….except via the internet
Also worried about the all the money that has been bet on “green”, then? Keeping a low proifile. Very sensible, as I explained to Andrew earlier.
Did you read my letter in Business day:
http://www.businessday.co.za/Articles/Content.aspx?id=128438
You say:
“I am pretty sure Prof Philip Lloyd, chemistry professor, a notable and informed sceptic and devoted reader of WUWT, was loud and clear in Business Day”.
I don’t know who was first. If he is a great man, he should hire me. I was here even a few months before Climate Gate started/ and I learned a lot here… other websites like Sceptical Science are wilfully trying to mislead people….
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok
tonyb: Good to hear from you. Yeah, that may have been a little snarky, but I get annoyed when Smokey quotes me out of context.
As for the rest of your post:
(1) Actually, it is well-understood that when you have randomly-distributed errors, you can in fact get an average to a greater precision than the individual measurements.
(2) As for the 3 decimal places: The temperature data sets come with errorbars (see, for example, http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif ) and they are usually careful to note when the difference in temperature between two years is not statistically-significant.
Joel Shore
December 3, 2010 at 3:13 pm
Well, if you had clicked on the link in this post, you would have discovered that this whole post is from an article by Andrew Kenny. But don’t let that minor fact stand in the way of your “theory”.
###
Mia cuplpa, mia culpa, mia supra culpa!
I actually did, immediately after posting my comment. I posted another comment right after, requesting the mods to scratch that knee-jerk comment, because it was the result of reading things too fast while at lunch, but they did not do so. They only scratched my comment requesting the dumb one be nixed.
OTH, mike is a troll and what I accused him of is a technique that trolls are starting to use to disrupt and high-jack threads. I was just wrong and an ass in this case.
[Reply: I intended to delete your comment per your request, and got sidetracked. My sincere apologies. That post has now been removed. ~dbs, mod.]
Smokey:
“You can explain to us yokels how your computer models trump the real world…”
Well, I hope he can at least write down ALL the differential equations, initial, and boundary conditions, and auxiliary source term models that purportedly govern the climate system and the numerical methods employed for solving them (I’m not holding out any hope for that, however. Modelers seem to run for the hills when there are equations to document…). For extra credit, he can prove that the resulting set of equations is solvable, consistent, and well-posed.