Guest post by Dr. J Storrs Hall
A bit over a year ago, in the wake of Climategate, I put up a blog post over at the Foresight Institute which got picked up and run here at WUWT. The essence of the post was that there was lots of natural variation in the ice core record of climate, so that it was reasonable to be skeptical of scientists who claimed that recent CO2 variations were “the only thing that could account for the recent warming trend” (quoting myself).
Apparently that got enough exposure — and was persuasive enough — that over a year later the alarmists still feel the urge to “debunk” it. Most recently, Rob Honeycutt at the “SkepticalScience” alarmist fanboi blog weighed in with this: Crux of a Core, Part 1 – addressing J Storrs Hall. Now the thing about this particular piece that jumped out at me at first was the fact that he associated me with a graph I never used, and he calls me “Mr. Hall” to make me sound less qualified than other sources such as “Dr. Alley” he refers to. It’s Dr. Hall (and yes, I am a scientist, not a nanotech engineer as he claims), a fact that he could have discovered in 3 seconds with Google. That told me about all I needed to know about Honeycutt’s bona fides (in the original Latin sense of acting in good faith).
The only substantive point in the post is that GISP2 (or any specific ice core) is a local as opposed to global temperature record. Is it misrepresentation to use it as a proxy for global climate? Well, the inconvenient truth is that I’m hardly the first person to use ice cores as climate proxies in popular presentations:
… but, on the other hand, it’s actually an interesting question and one worth looking at.
How Ice Cores Record a History of Climate
That’s not my title, it’s from this page at the GISP2 site. Not “a history of local temperature,” — of climate. Here are some quotes from the abstracts of papers by GISP2 authors:
“Ice cores provide high-resolution, multi-parameter records of changes in climate and environmental conditions spanning two or more full glacial- interglacial cycles. …”
“Polar ice contains a unique record of past climate variations; …”
“One of the most dramatic climate events observed in marine and ice core records is the Younger Dryas (YD), … High resolution, continuous glaciochemical records, newly retrieved from central Greenland, record the chemical composition of the Arctic atmosphere at this time. This record shows that both onset and termination of the YD occurred within 10-20 years …”
“The Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) core can enhance our understanding of the relationship between parameters measured in the ice in central Greenland and variability in the ocean, atmosphere, and cryosphere of the North Atlantic Ocean and adjacent land masses. …”
“High-resolution, continuous multivariate chemical records from a central Greenland ice core provide a sensitive measure of climate change…”
“The accumulation record from the GISP2 core as an indicator of climate change throughout the Holocene” (paper title)
So, sure, a single ice core is not a global average temperature record; but it is quite a bit more than one thermometer. It’s just mud-slinging to claim that using it for a climate proxy is “misinformation”.
… especially when I didn’t just use one ice core in my post but two, and the other one was from Antarctica. One way to cut past the verbiage is simply to look at a comparison of the Greenland and Antarctic data and see how well they correlate:
(This is GISP2 in green, NGRIP, another Greenland core, in cyan, and the Vostok Antarctic core in blue. The Vostok has been scaled and shifted for a best match with the others; the temperature in Antarctica is colder, with smaller variations, than in Greenland. Furthermore, there are some time-scaling issues — note the temporal divergence of the two Greenland records before about 40 kya. It’s possible that NH/SH actually match better than this plot indicates. Look here for data.)
Nowhere near a perfect match, but it’s pretty clear that these are all from the same planet. Even Vostok shows the Younger Dryas, which is generally believed to be a mostly northern-hemisphere event. The NH has more variability in ice ages, notably the Dansgaard-Oeschger events, but the SH more, on a relative scale, in the Holocene.
The GISP2 people also compared their core’s record with Antarctic ones; on this page they say that it “shows close correlation between GISP2 and Vostok in the delta 18O of air in these ice cores.” (That’s a key temperature proxy.) On this page they say “Holocene climate is characterized by rapid climate change events and considerable complexity. GISP2 Holocene ¶18O (proxy for temperature) (Grootes, et al., 1993) and EOF1 (composite measure of major chemistry representing atmospheric circulation) show parallel behavior for the Early Holocene but not for the Late Holocene (O’Brien, et al., 1995).”
Note that bit about “rapid climate change events.” In the words of Jeffrey Masters here, “The historical records shows us that abrupt climate change is not only possible–it is the normal state of affairs. The present warm, stable climate is a rare anomaly.” (And he’s talking specifically about the lessons of GISP2 — although alas he takes home the wrong lesson from it.) See also this recent post here by Don Easterbrook.
Does GISP2 — or any other paleoclimate record — show us that climate change isn’t happening? No, of course not. It shows us that climate change always happens. The 20th-century warming was hardly unprecedented, and doesn’t call for unusual explanations.
BA claims “That’s one sign that they’re tending to get better as more
data come available and improved methods are applied.”
Just one more example of why lying about Mann’s mistakes is not the right route. Until the team comes clean and explains the mistakes in a full academic paper, there is no reason to take anything they or you say seriously.
BA says:
“When new data supercede the old, as Mann (2008) does Mann (1998), that does not mean the old data were a ‘fabricated lie.’ It’s the normal progress of science.”
Michael Mann lies. Honesty is not in him.
MBH98/99 deliberately and mendaciously hid data that would have falsified the Hokey Stick [which has since been falsified]. Mann hid the data in an ftp file labeled “censored“. That is plainly dishonest. Had Mann used the ‘censored’ data the result would have been declining temperatures, as you can see. So he deliberately hid that data and cherry-picked only the data that showed fictitious warming.
In Mann ’08 he used the Tiljander proxy, which he had been informed, prior to publication, that it was corrupted from road work which had turned the sediments upside down.
Mann used the Tiljander proxy anyway, knowing it was false data. He used it because it gave him the hockey stick shape he wanted. Now Mann is backing and filling, trying to explain that the Tiljander proxy didn’t matter. If so, why did he use it anyway, when he knew it was corrupted?
Michael Mann is a serial liar, and it astonishes me that you are blind to that verifiable fact.
Maren says:
March 2, 2011 at 3:44 am
I really do recommend you look more closely at the Greenland ice core records and read up on Dansgaard-Oeschger events. Dr Alley is among many scientists who have published work on these abrupt climate changes. The papers on this are truly fascinating, especially if you read them in order of their publication date, as you will witness the gradual acceptance that these Dansgaard-Oeschger events are indeed a marker for widespread, likely hemispheric, if not global climate disruptions. What causes these events is hotly contested as well as the proposed cyclicity of 1470 years. I favour the suggestion that they are caused by atmospheric-oceanic mechanisms we do not yet fully understand.
Whatever causes them, whatever they might signify, at the very very least, one can conclude at a bare minimum, that these rapid warming events put paid to any claim that Greenland has experienced “unusual” or as often claimed unprecedented warming in the last 100 years.
The last D O event ocurred 11,000 years ago. This kind of event is unusual in human history as is the climate change we are experiencing today. There is no indication that I have read that the current warming is a D O event. Certainly the expert, Dr Alley doesn’t believe this. Here is what he says about your argument that the current change in climate is nothing unusual.
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/richard-alley-on-old-ice-climate-and-co2/
Thirdly, demonstration that there have been large climate changes in the past without humans in no way demonstrates that humans are not now responsible. Many people have died naturally but murder still exists; it is up to the police to learn whether a given mortality was natural or not, and up to climate science to learn what is causing ongoing changes (and we have good confidence that most of what is happening to climatic global average surface temperature is being caused by humanity now). Similarly, demonstration that life, and humans, survived warmer temperatures in the past in no way shows that warmer temperatures in the future are good for us. If you don’t care about humans and other things with us here, making a big change in climate might be an interesting experiment. Evolution does respond to climate change and produce novel results. I just happen to have a personal bias (shared, I believe, by the majority of the six-plus billion people on the planet) that we should ask what is best for humanity, and pursue that. An opinion, surely, and not purely scientific, but that’s my bias.
The first recourse of a weak mind, “kill the messenger”. The second is little better, “burn the message without reading and considering what it says”. Willis recently wrote a piece about trashing the messenger and not considering his message. We live in a lopsided, idiotic, wicked time. Probably something to do with all the junk they add to food these days.
PS: Regarding the North Pole-South Pole time and temp difference, sounds like a natural.
Lucy Skywalker says: March 1, 2011 at 12:57 pm
…………..
a) with some difficulty
b) impossible
but thanks for the invite.
See update: http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/gms.htm
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says: reply to: citizenschallenge on March 1, 2011 at 10:25 pm:
“How can one know that Communism doesn’t work if they haven’t read The Communist Manifesto?
How can one claim the political system of Germany during WWII was evil and wrong without reading Mein Kampf?, etc”
~ ~ ~
Oh so this is all about politics and not about science !
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Gary Hladik guess I shouldn’t have deleted including that 78% nitrogen. But my bigger screw up was using 1% instead of 5%. sorry… but my actual point being that trying to characterize CO2 as totally benign is just another rhetorical trick to keep us preoccupied with distractions.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
http://www.inspectapedia.com/hazmat/CO2_Exposure_Limits.htm
In summary, OSHA, NIOSH, and ACGIH occupational exposure standards are 0.5% CO2 (5,000 ppm) averaged over a 40 hour week, 0.3% (3,000 ppm) average for a short-term (15 minute) exposure [we discuss and define “short term exposure limits” STEL below], and 4% (40,000 ppm) as the maximum instantaneous limit considered immediately dangerous to life and health. All three of these exposure limit conditions must be satisfied, always and together.
~ ~ ~
http://docs.google.com/ Toxic Chemical Fact Sheets: CO2
• 2,000 – 5,000 ppm – level associated with headaches, sleepiness, and
stagnant, stale, stuffy air. Poor concentration, loss of attention, increased heart
rate and slight nausea may also be present.
• >5,000 ppm – Exposure may lead to serious oxygen deprivation resulting in
permanent brain damage, coma and even death.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
My actual point being that trying to characterize CO2 as totally benign is just another rhetorical trick to keep us preoccupied with distractions rather than serious examination of the situation at hand.
citizenschallenge says:
“…trying to characterize CO2 as totally benign is just another rhetorical trick to keep us preoccupied with distractions.”
Show us, with convincing empirical evidence, that CO2 has caused global harm. Because that is the claim of the alarmist crowd. If you can not show convincing evidence of global harm from CO2, then it is you who are using ‘rhetorical tricks.’
If I claim that beach sand is increasing, and that it is a hazard to vacationers, then the onus is on me to show convincingly that increased beach sand is causing harm.
Same with CO2. Where is your evidence?
Next, you are posting misinformation, whether deliberately or inadvertantly:
That is wrong. Here is some real world evidence:
My boy was a nuclear reactor technician on the USS Helena, a nuclear powered attack submarine, for six years. We discussed this issue several times. He told me that the crew could operate in up to 5,000 ppm CO2 for months at a time. There is no way the Navy would allow a CO2 concentration in a nuclear sub that caused “poor concentration” and “loss of attention.”
Here are some selected CO2 concentrations taken from a reliable source:
You are posting the misinformation of others. I’m happy to have the opportunity to set the record straight.
BA says:
March 1, 2011 at 7:42 pm
@John, “Good golly Miss Molly…
“CO2 is well-mixed throughout the atmosphere. ” <– not on planet Earth that I've ever seen. The mix lag NH to SH is 12-18 months."
Mean Vostok temporal resolution is on the order of decades to centuries, not months. An 18-month lag between NH and SH CO2 has nothing to do with the 1,800 year offset between the Antarctic cooling event and the Younger Dryas. Dana's point is valid.
=========
Thanks BA,
Mean Vostok temporal resolution is on the order of decades to centuries, not months.
Exactly, so why are they presenting charts and graphs implying some linear understanding of past events?
There isn’t any linear understanding, its simply missing data and circumstantial assumptions that connect the sample points or am I missing the “point”?
BA:
I’ve never met a scientist who wants to run my life, my country, or the whole world. Movie villains do that.
And:
When new data supercede the old, as Mann (2008) does Mann (1998), that does not mean the old data were a ‘fabricated lie.’ It’s the normal progress of science.
So, BA, you think you’ve proven via your mere denialistic postulate that only movie villians want to control people and/or the world? BA, please get serious. Even if you have no knowledge or memory of Hitler’s Nazi Socialism or the previous “Soviet Union’s” enlsaving Communism, both also having designs on ruling the World, have you not at least noticed what’s going on right now in North Africa and the Mideast? Not to mention Communism’s impressive “equality” of enslavement and abject poverty persistently existent, apparent, and well documented in North Korea?
Then you also think you’ve proven that Mann’s bizarre Hockeystick concoction was not “fabricated” in some important sense, just because it was possible, before having been proven to be so, that it was not fabricated, which to you entirely magically or wishfully proves that Mann’t Hockeystick “science” was even a wonderous achievement without which science couldn’t have progressed?
Attn., BA! The Hockeystick “science” and the CO2=CAGW Climate Science “climate change” Propaganda Operation which it serves, specifically avoid using the scientific method and its principles, and instead offer up only a littany of illogical, nonrational, and nonscientific-“fact” tactics avoiding reality – just like you did to serve your severe denial – but in its/their case in order to manipulate people so that they can be controlled and parasatized, instead of either helping them or at least furthering science’s and people’s understanding.
BA, wake up! They want to control and either loot or enslave you, too. And so far you seem to be a great fit for that! On the other hand, Climate Science, enc., does need people like you for it to “work”. So it appears you’ve got a choice to make, that is, unless you simply desperately need to be controlled, or that’s just your nature such that you couldn’t make it anyway without essentially being enslaved or told what to do for your whole life, and you instinctively know it as a congenital groupist, groupthink included.
But if you want to join up with Climate Science, enc., could you at least leave the rest of us safely out of your personal Utopia? After all, it does seem to already exist elsewhere!
Regarding the Greenland Ice Core data….I read what Dr Alley said in the NY Times, and he really skirts around the central issue: which is that the periodicity of recent warming periods on Greenland would point to another such period at about this time – roughly 1000 years after the last. He accepts that the natural causes of such warmings are not known – but there is plenty in the literature to suggest they may be linked to solar UV cycles. The solar cycles peaked at the end of the 20th century at the same time as the Greenland temperatures.
There is a lot of uncertainty in the carbon dioxide model – the relation of computed Radiative Forcing (at 10km altitude and measured in watts/sq metre) and actual temperatures at the surface is not known exactly – you can find factors ranging from 0.4 to 0.8 for conversion of 1 watt to degrees C. All honest climate scientists will admit this (though not all know about it!). Thus, if you have, say, an RF of 1.6 watts/sq m – (and the forcings are of this order), you get a range from o.64 to 1.28 C at the surface. It is difficult to know which factor applies because the oceans cause a time lag. The 0.4 factor corresponds to a temperature rise of 0.7 C over the 20th century for a net 1.6 watts forcing and this does not allow for the unknown solar contributions (via UV or cosmic rays on clouds or any other mechanism, nor for ocean cycles). That is to say – this factor of 0.4 is very likely still too high.
The expected Radiative Forcing by 2050 for all GHGs is of the order of 4 watts, and that would give a gross calculation 1.6 C (i.e. another 0.9 to go) ….and no scary climate story; if the IPCC higher factor operates, then you have 3.2 C….which as a global average, is definitely going to disrupt things. There is a lot of scientific discussion about this factor, but I think the evidence points to below 0.4 and it has been doing for some time, with the IPCC in denial, because they are on record as preferring 0.8.
That’s the basic science in a nutshell. On the one hand you have a lot of scientists with very little interest in proving the 0.8 hypothesis wrong…so they don’t. A few scientists pursue truth – even within the IPCC and have advocated the 0.4 figure (even within the IPCC!).
What is interesting about the GISP core is that there have been studies to correlate the changes in temperature with global CO2 over the last 10,000 years that found no correlation. The Vostok cores show correlation but with huge time-lags of about 1000 years – with changes in temperature preceding changes in CO2.
So – there is a major natural climate mechanism that is cyclic and so far has escaped explanation. The Holocene peaks correlate well to solar cycles – and much work is now looking at UV mechanisms, stratospheric heating and the movement of the Arctic vortex with impacts upon the jetstream – any significant long term shift would impact climate.
The GISP cores are remarkable in that the warming is VERY sudden. To my mind, too quick for many of the proposed mechanisms relating to ocean circulation. It looks to me like rapid shifts in winds – some are in as little as one year and recorded in dust level increases. The big swings in temperature (8 dgrees C) occur within decades and decay more slowly in a saw-tooth pattern.
If you look at the duration of each warming period – then for the core data I have seen (from 50,000 to 30,000 BP) you can see that averaging the periodicity obscures an important part of the pattern. There are 8-10 peaks (some are more distinct – the ealrier part of the cycle) in two distinct cycles and you could just about fit an 8:5:3:2:1 ratio to the duration…a Fibonacci series. This spiral mathematics points to an unusual climate mechanism – some would argue for stochastic resonance within the system; but I would look to the Sun, where spiral mathematics rules, at least in relation to the transfer of angular momentum.
Finally – the last 10,000 years of the Holocene does not show any D/O events as such, but there is a faint hint of the series from the Holocene Optimum onwards. The amplitude is less (2-3 degrees C), but the peaks are getting lower and the troughs deeper. We seem to be at the end of the series…so there will be a short trough, and then another major rise…or maybe not, if there is some kind of threshold or the Sun does something we cannot predict and it spirals on down.
The irony of all this is that you can make out a convincing scientific case for global cooling since 8000 BP (in cycles) – not good for global food production; and that what little effect CO2 has, will ameliorate (or hide) that decline. But whatever you do, don’t tell my friends in Greenpeace I said that!
My own sense of the GHG effect is that it is not really discernible from the ‘noise’ (natural variability/cycles), but looking at data across all disciplines (oceanography, radiation fluxes from satellite data, cloud cover etc.) there could be a 10-20% carbon dioxide effect to add to the peaks and take away from the troughs.
From a policy perspective (probably too late now to have any influence), that means halving the emissions by 2050 will deal with 5-10% of the driving force. And as a shameless plug…much of this is in my book…’Chill: a reassessment of global warming theory’! (2009)
Bill Illis says:
March 1, 2011 at 5:41 pm
“If someone wants, I can give you any timeframe back to 635 Mya.”
My interest in paleo data extends only to bone fide time-series with a constant sampling rate and some assurance that aliasing is not a problem. If you have a pair of such series other than GISP2 that goes back at least through the Holocene, I’d more than grateful for the plain-text data file.
eadler says:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/richard-alley-on-old-ice-climate-and-co2/
Richard Alley,
I just happen to have a personal bias (shared, I believe, by the majority of the six-plus billion people on the planet) that we should ask what is best for humanity, and pursue that.
Wonderful, Richard! But ipcc Climate Science, enc., did in fact exclude countries containing ~5 billion of the Earth’s 6.5+ billion people from having to follow its own alleged cure to its own alleged disease as comprised by the restrictive Kyoto Protocols. Therefore, eadlers and Alley’s of the world, it appears that ipcc Climate Science does not even believe its own CO2=CAGW “science”.
Even more, where the rubber meets the road, India and China have judged that the ipcc’s alleged cause of its alleged disease, fossil fuel burning in turn producing CO2, is instead the cure to their very real disease disaster, underdevelopment, by producing what they need for their people to progress and be cured of their current disease, electricity power.
It is clear that the ipcc Climate Science does not prove, and doesn’t even try to prove, that its alleged “cure” to its [still only] alleged “disease” is not in fact worse than its still only alleged disease, which it patently is; even as judged by the ipcc, enc.’s, own acts as above and likewise as per the judgment of China and India, as above, who have embarked upon a massive campaign to construct probably as many coal-fired electricity plants as they can.
eadlers of the World, you are so far behind the curve that it seems to be your intention to aggressively get as far behind the curve as possible. The ipcc CO2=CAGW Climate Science Propaganda Operation simply does not care about the wellbeing of the people of the World. Because what it in effect otherwise recommends in practice, dedevelopment or underdevelopment, is already established as a bona fide disease disaster.
If you don’t care about humans and other things with us here, making a big change in
climatepeople’s fossil fuel use might be aninterestingalready “been there, done that”experimentdisease disaster. Evolution does respond toclimate changethe superimposition of a Totalitarian caused disease andproduce novel resultsthat’s what it is doing right now in rejecting the ipcc, enc.’s, CO2=CAGW Climate Science Propaganda Operation’s retrogressive, veritable evolutionary throw-back Totalitarianism. [Alley, edited to make sense…]Analysis of quoted Dr. Alley section, provided by eadler on March 2, 2011 at 6:59 am:
There is a forest. Trees have been falling down due to natural reasons for millenia in this forest, and for no other reasons. One more falls over. That trees have been falling over due to natural reasons for millenia does not demonstrate that this last one did not fall down due to human intervention. But it does yield the requirement of conclusive evidence that this last one fell over due to actions of humans, instead of the natural reasons that have been the only reasons that trees have been falling in this forest for millenia, before it can properly be said that humans caused that last tree to fall.
Television and movies aside, it is doctors who determine whether a death was natural or not. Usually a physician treating a person makes that determination, sometimes a forensic pathologist does so in conjunction with an autopsy. Saying “it is up to the police” is rather silly, people die all the time without any sort of police investigation. Is Dr. Alley implying the police are shirking their duty? Moreover the general presumption is that a death is natural unless there is evidence that may indicate otherwise thus further investigation is warranted.
They have “good confidence” that what is happening to the “climatic global average surface temperature” is mostly humanity’s fault? Can you imagine how that would play out in a criminal court with the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard? Besides, what is currently happening is cooling. How is humanity responsible for the cooling?
Generally speaking, this indicates the “guilty until proven innocent” mindset among (C)AGW proponents.
We have an entire planet with many areas having different normal temperature ranges. Why can’t we determine if life will improve if one area becomes as warm as another is currently?
Thus we note the proposals to combat “global warming” by various geo-engineering ideas designed to cool the planet.
Note also the assumption that not only do humans have the ability to make a big change in global climate, we are currently doing so.
Thus we face the mandate of evolution, adapt or die. I think we humans can adapt to climate change quite well, especially if things get warmer.
The majority of the six-plus billion people on this planet live in poverty, that which is caused and/or exacerbated by a lack of affordable energy, and will be greatly benefited by sources of cheap energy. What is best for humanity is cheap energy, available where it is needed. Predominantly that will involve an easily-transportable energy source, which contains carbon, either a solid form like coal or similar (coke, petroleum coke, charcoal), or a hydrocarbon that is liquid at normal ambient conditions without compression (diesel, gasoline, etc). This will be converted to beneficial forms of energy, like heat and electricity.
With the change from energy poverty to energy wealth, will come the growth of real wealth. A significant increase in real wealth will be necessary to afford adaption to climate change.
And adaptation is required. Peer-Reviewed Climate Science says that even with drastic reductions in CO2 emissions to levels before the Industrial Revolution, it’ll still take “at least” a millenia to reverse the climate change effect that has already taken hold (reference). Other Peer-Reviewed Climate Science predicts the same even if we shut down civilization and stop all our CO2 emissions immediately (reference).
Thus what is clearly best for humanity, is lots of cheap energy now, which of necessity will come overwhelmingly from carbon-based energy sources for about another century or so, and then dealing with whatever consequences shall come after we are able to afford whatever adaptation is required.
From citizenschallenge on March 2, 2011 at 10:40 am:
Yes! (C)AGW is all about politics, not about science!
You are finally getting it! There is hope for you yet!
☺
Smokey says:
It is interesting that someone calling someone else a serial liar would himself make such factually-challenged claims. In fact, in the supplemental materials to the very article that you are talking about see http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2008/09/02/0805721105.DCSupplemental/0805721105SI.pdf ), Mann noted the potential issues that had been raised about the Tiljander proxies (and some other data) and showed what the reconstruction would look like if these data were left out of them:
So, Mann did exactly the right thing in this situation: He did not start arbitrarily eliminating proxies that passed their automated criteria for determining if they correlate with temperature, but in the case where there were serious data quality issues he did re-run his procedures leaving those proxies out to see how much difference it makes to the results and presented this to the scientific community.
It leaves one wondering about the motivations and veracity of those who have made a big deal out of this more than those of Michael Mann!
Joel Shore,
My 5:15 post raised a couple of issues. Naturally as a Mann apologist you’re going to believe his incredible explanation. But the fact is that Mann was told before he published that the Tiljander proxy was NFG. He used it anyway – and he made no notation or footnote of the problems at the time. That is scientific misconduct.
But it is minor compared with Mann’s deliberately mendacious hiding of the “censored” file which, had he used the data, would have shown declining temperatures instead of rising temperatures. Go ahead, look at it.
Go, Cuccinelli!
Smokey,
No…What I am believing is my own eyes…what my eyes, your eyes, or anybody else’s eyes can read by clicking on the link that I provided to the supplemental materials at the PNAS website. What you are believing is a version of reality carefully constructed by those who agree with you.
As for the whole “censored” thing, as I understand it, this is just work relating to Mann’s 1999 paper here: http://www.ltrr.arizona.edu/webhome/aprilc/data/my%20stuff/MBH1999.pdf :
Usually, the best strategy for censoring something that you don’t want others to find out about does not involve talking about it in GRL (although a colleague of mine tells his students that he would advise the government to hide their top nuclear secrets in our laboratory manuals since it appears that these never actually get read by the students).
Again, the fact that so much has been made of this says a lot more about the crowd that you trust than about Michael Mann.
Joel Shore,
I’m not going to get into an endless debate with someone hopelessly afflicted with cognitive dissonance. So you get to have your last Michael Mann apologia.
Mann was completely uncooperative regarding the censored data. Where is the scientific method?? Answer: there is none with Mann. He is a devious charlatan pushing a self-serving agenda. Like any charlatan he hides out from scrutiny. Al Gore’s refusal to debate his position has nothing on Michael Mann, who only pontificates from the safety of his ivory tower. If he believed the horse manure he was shoveling he would argue it with all comers. Instead, he hides.
And this isn’t about nuclear secrets, as you allude; this is climate and weather data that Mann deliberately hid. Paid for by the taxpaying public.
I read your PNAS link. It is dated 2010. Mann’s paper, hand-waved through pal review, was published in 2008. His 2010 excuses were ginned up because Mann was caught passing off a corrupted proxy – after he was caught. Now, he improbably claims that he never really needed to use that proxy. If you believe that I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you. You can collect tolls from it forever. I promise.
Richard Alley:
Many people have died naturally but murder still exists; it is up to the police to learn whether a given mortality was natural or not,[GLo’ P] and up to climate science to learn what is causing ongoing changes (and we have good confidence that most of what is happening to climatic global average surface temperature is being caused by humanity now).
GLo’P = Great Leap of Pea, right into another world where “I say it, therefore, it is true”, far from the previous one where “murder” is always caused by humans, by definition, and as “unnatural” in that sense; but where hardly anyone denies that murder has existed for a long time, even “naturally”..
If Alley thinks that overtly “begging the question” jump even makes a valid analogy which proves his case, let’s be charitable and conceed that he must have grown up surrounded by Mexican Jumping Beans.
citizenschallenge says (March 2, 2011 at 10:40 am): ” but my actual point being that trying to characterize CO2 as totally benign is just another rhetorical trick to keep us preoccupied with distractions.”
Well, to my mind, when we’re discussing CO2 as a so-called “greenhouse gas”, bringing up its toxicity counts as a “distraction”, especially since it’s not toxic at atmospheric levels reachable by burning fossile fuels. Don’t get me wrong, I quite enjoy the topical excursions typical of WUWT comment threads, but anyone who doesn’t probably shouldn’t add to the problem.
JPeden says:
March 2, 2011 at 1:31 pm
eadler says:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/richard-alley-on-old-ice-climate-and-co2/
Richard Alley,
“I just happen to have a personal bias (shared, I believe, by the majority of the six-plus billion people on the planet) that we should ask what is best for humanity, and pursue that.”
Wonderful, Richard! But ipcc Climate Science, enc., did in fact exclude countries containing ~5 billion of the Earth’s 6.5+ billion people from having to follow its own alleged cure to its own alleged disease as comprised by the restrictive Kyoto Protocols. Therefore, eadlers and Alley’s of the world, it appears that ipcc Climate Science does not even believe its own CO2=CAGW “science”.
Rpeden,
Your rant regarding the IPCC is incorrect. The IPCC has recommended mitigation activities, but no countries are specifically excluded or included. You are talking about the Kyoto Protocol, which is a political agreement. Scientists had nothing to do with inclusion or exclusion of countries from any obligations under the protocol.
Even more, where the rubber meets the road, India and China have judged that the ipcc’s alleged cause of its alleged disease, fossil fuel burning in turn producing CO2, is instead the cure to their very real disease disaster, underdevelopment, by producing what they need for their people to progress and be cured of their current disease, electricity power.
This is clearly a trade off between tackling long term and short term problems. Short term wins out because the public doesn’t have the vision to see the long term. If the public doesn’t have the understanding and the foresight to buy into solving the long term problem, the politicians won’t do it.
In fact, the Chinese recognize the importance of clean energy technology, while they are building coal plants. They are in the forefront in the development of solar, wind and thorium nuclear reactors. The US is way behind the curve on all of these.
Smokey says:
March 2, 2011 at 11:24 am
citizenschallenge says:
“…trying to characterize CO2 as totally benign is just another rhetorical trick to keep us preoccupied with distractions.”
~ ~ ~
Show us, with convincing empirical evidence, that CO2 has caused global harm. Because that is the claim of the alarmist crowd. If you can not show convincing evidence of global harm from CO2, then it is you who are using ‘rhetorical tricks.’
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Tragically It is impossible to show you and your friends that information ~ since you refuse to look at it in good-faith!
The evidence is there!
But it’s on the other side of that political line you folks seem to have drawn and refuse to look beyond.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
March 2, 2011 at 2:11 pm
From citizenschallenge on March 2, 2011 at 10:40 am:
Oh so this is all about politics and not about science !
Yes! (C)AGW is all about politics, not about science!
You are finally getting it! There is hope for you yet!
☺
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Now it’ll be a really great day when you figure out which side has the science and which is a well oiled propaganda machine.
😉
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
March 2, 2011 at 1:34 pm
Analysis of quoted Dr. Alley section, provided by eadler on March 2, 2011 at 6:59 am:
“Thirdly, demonstration that there have been large climate changes in the past without humans in no way demonstrates that humans are not now responsible.”
There is a forest. Trees have been falling down due to natural reasons for millenia in this forest, and for no other reasons. One more falls over. That trees have been falling over due to natural reasons for millenia does not demonstrate that this last one did not fall down due to human intervention. But it does yield the requirement of conclusive evidence that this last one fell over due to actions of humans, instead of the natural reasons that have been the only reasons that trees have been falling in this forest for millenia, before it can properly be said that humans caused that last tree to fall.
The argument that past climate change being natural does not prove that current climate change is not due to humans is clearly logical and correct. The argument does not make a judgment about whether or not humans are responsible. In this investigation into the cause of death, the coroners have determined that humans are the culprit in the case of the current climate change. Based on 2 polls of active climate science researchers, 97% of them believe that the earth is warming and humans are responsible.
There are some people who don’t want to believe it, but the experts have spoken.
I’ve followed Dr Alley’s work for some time now. In the early days, before AGW attracted really enormous amounts of money, his rational was very scientific but in the last 10-15 years he has begun his shift to the dark side. What I find interesting is that he gets to the logic where “past climate change has been greater and more volatile than present without CO²” and then immediately shift to another logic which says “but that doesn’t mean mankind is not causing this latest warming”. It’s the same mantra that eminates from all the trolls here. If climate has change rapidly in the past, more rapidly than now and during periods of higher CO² then how in hell’s name can you attribute the recent warming (before 2000, 10 years ago) to man? This is plain stupid or fraudulent. You choose which.