A link to where to download the new FOIA2011.zip file is posted below the fold – This will be a top post for a few days -NEW STORIES APPEAR BELOW THIS ONE -I’ve also reversed the order of the updates to be newest at top for better visibility – Anthony
UPDATE50: 1:15 PM PST 11/30 The genesis of RealClimate.org seems to have been found. Surprisingly, the BBC’s Roger Harrabin seems to have been involved in the genesis meeting.
UPDATE49: 10:00 AM PST 11/30 While not email related, just as Climategate breaks David Suzuki commits an egregious propaganda error second only to the 10:10 video where kids are blown up for not going along with carbon reduction schemes at school. He’s targeting kids and Santa Claus at Christmas – Santa’s home is melting.
UPDATE48: 9:20 AM PST 11/30 Dr. Phil Jones on the “lack of warming” -he may need a backup plan.
UPDATE47: 9AM PST 11/30 Fudge factor collection in the emails, or is climate modeling a social issue?
UPDATE46: A look at UEA/CRU’s email infrastructure and email systems in general suggests that the “deleted” emails to/from Phil Jones and others at CRU probably still exist and can be subject to FOIA.
UPDATE45: 1:30PM PST 11/29 If there was award for clueless timing, this would win it no contest: Penn State to lecture on “climate ethics”
UPDATE44: 9AM PST 11/29 Mike Mann reprises the role of Captain Queeg in The Cain Mutiny when seeing de Freitas being vindicated by the publisher of Climate Research (see the update in the article).
UPDATE43: 8AM PST 11/29 An Excel Spreadsheet with Climategate 1 and 2 emails ordered chronologically should be helpful in determining that supposedly missing”context”
UPDATE42: 7AM PST 11/29 The CRU crew says: “what we really meant was…”
UPDATE41: 4AM PST 11/29 James Padget schools Steve Zwick – Guide to Defending the Indefensible. Some people just can’t handle Climategate.
UPDATE40: 12AM PST 11/29 Penn State has the same “look the other way” problem with Climategate as they did with the Jerry Sandusky scandal.
UPDATE39: It seems “vexatious” is Dr. Phil Jones favorite new feeling word after summer 2009.
UPDATE38: Severinghaus says Mike Mann didn’t give a straight answer regarding why trees don’t work as thermometers after 1950
UPDATE37: Climate sensitivity can’t be quantified with the current data according to NCAR’s Wigley, with paleo data – even less so.
UPDATE36: Dr. Chris de Freitas responds to the ugly attempt by The Team at getting him fired.
UPDATE 35: “Stroppy” Dr Roger Pielke Sr. shows just how much a “old boys network” the peer review process is.
UPDATE34: More internal dissent of the hockey stick. Mann tries to beat down the concern over “hide the decline” while not letting the dissenting scientist know there was a decline.
UPDATE33: Gobsmacking! Rob Wilson proves McIntyre and McKittrick correct in an email to colleagues at CRU, showing that when random noise time series are fed into Mike Mann’s procedure, it makes “hockey sticks”. The confirmation that M&M is right never leaves the walls of CRU.
UPDATE32: 9:30PM PST 11/27 BREAKING – Canada to pull out of Kyoto protocol. Another Climategate fallout ?
UPDATE31: 4:30PM PST 11/27 BOMBSHELL An absolutely disgusting string of communications that shows the tribal attempt at getting an editor of a journal fired on made up issues – all because he allowed a publication that didn’t agree with “the Team”. This is ugly, disturbing, and wrong on every level.
UPDATE30: 9:45 AM PST 11/27 Newsbytes. Major crack in the warming wall at the UK prime minister’s office. BBC in collusion with Climategate scientists.
UPDATE29: 9AM PST 11/27 The saga of the missing station data at CRU and the “pants on fire” defense of it as told by Willis Eschenbach. Dr. Phil Jones is between a rock and a hard place, quite.
UPDATE 28: 1:30PM PST 11/26 An email shows the UNFCCC considers activists an essential tool saying “…organized and deeply committed environmental activism has long been an important part of the UNFCCC process…”
UPDATE27: 7AM PST 11/26 Climategate 2 features prominently in WUWT’s newest feature “Hits and Misses”
UPDATE26: 2:50 PM 11/25 Two separate examples show obstruction and collusion by members of “The Team” to prevent any dissenting science from being properly considered by the NRC in 2007.
UPDATE25: 2PM 11/25 Keith Briffa asks another colleague to delete email to avoid FOIA
UPDATE24: 1:30PM 11/25 New Climategate 1/2 combined search engine here
UPDATE23: 9AM PST 11/25 via bishop-hill, strange infighting:
#4101 – Edward Cook tells Phil Jones that Mike Mann is “serious enemy” and “vindictive”. Mike Mann had criticized his work.
Apparently Mann went “a little crazy” over a paper showing the MWP exists.
Details here
UPDATE22: 11AM PST 11/24 Am unsurprising admission from a BBC environmental reporter to Dr. Phil Jones that they really have no impartiality at all (ho ho) when it comes to climate issues.
UPDATE21: 9:50AM PST 11/24 “FOIA2011″ and Climategate – A Chinese-POTUS connection?
UPDATE20: 9:30AM PST 11/24 World renowned climatologist Phil Jones can’t even plot a temperature trend line in Excel. I’ve offered a solution that WUWT readers can help with.
UPDATE19: 9AM PST 11/24 Gail Combs finds some disturbing connections between the Team and The World Bank
UPDATE18: 1:45PM Scott Mandia, aka “Supermandia” wins the award for the silliest climategate rebuttal, ever. It’s like stupid on steroids.
UPDATE17: 12:55PM PST 11/23 Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. has an excellent piece on “Gatekeeping” related to Trenberth and the Pielke-Landsea hurricane paper and the IPCC. You may recall Landsea resigned from the IPCC over this. Pielke says: “The gatekeeping of the IPCC process is abundantly clear, and the shadowy suggestion that they can find out who the reviewers are from another colleague is a bit unsettling as well.” Trenberth looks particularly bad here.
UPDATE16: 11:30AM PST 11/23 Insider scientist at CRU says our “reaction to Mike Mann’s errors was not particularly honest” – story here
UPDATE15: 7:50AM 11/23 Ric Werme found an email from the late John L. Daly to Mike Mann and the team – it is well worth a read here
UPDATE14: 2:45 AM PST 11/23 Willis Eschenbach offers a guest post here explaining how his FOIA requests went astray. Mr. David Palmer was the Freedom of Information Officer for the CRU at the time. In the newly released emails, he expresses his frustration with the whole procedure.
UPDATE13: 12:05AM 11/23 Craig Stone writes:
I have published a searchable database of the emails at http://foia2011.org
All email addresses and phone numbers are automatically redacted. It’s extremely rudimentary right now, but I’ll be refining the functionality and improving the search capabilities and navigation over the course of the next week.
UPDATE 12: 9:30 PM PST We’ve known for some time that Al Gore made up a bunch of claims in his AIT movie that simply weren’t true. Now this revelation in the new email batch shows that in the case of Kilimanjaro’s disappearing snows, even Phil Jones and Dr. Lonnie Thompson don’t believe global warming is the cause, even though Thompson put out a press release nearly a year ago saying just that. Told ya so. Pants on fire and all that. Anything for “the cause” right?
UPDATE11: 4:45PM PST Kevin Trenberth gets all misty eyed and sing-songy at Christmas here
UPDATE10: 4:30PM PST Some thoughts on cracking the big remaining all.7z file here
UPDATE9: 2:25PM PST Josh weighs in with the first satirical cartoon here
UPDATE8: 140PM PST Mike Mann shows his true colors:
email 1680.txt
date: Wed, 29 Aug 2007 12:03:05 -0400
from: “Michael E. Mann”..
subject: Re: Something not to pass on
to: Phil Jones
Phil,
I would not respond to this. They will misrepresent and take out of context anything you give them. This is a set up. They will certainly publish this, and will ignore any evidence to the contrary that you provide. s They are going after Wei-Chyung because he’s U.S. and there is a higher threshold for establishing libel. Nonetheless, he should
consider filing a defamation lawsuit, perhaps you too.
I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre, and his thusfar unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests.Perhaps the same needs to be done w/ this Keenan guy.
I believe that the only way to stop these people is by exposing them and discrediting them….
UPDATE7: 1:20 PM PST Phil Jones and Tom Wigley calls another scientist (The former state climatologist of California) a “jerk” for publishing his UHI results.
UPDATE6: 12:08PM PST Here’s an email that collaborates a radio interview I did in Seattle with Thomas Peterson in summer 2007, yes these are 100% real emails, no doubt whatsoever now. More here: Climategate 2.0 – NCDC: “Mr. Watts gave a well reasoned position”
UPDATE 5: 11:00AM PST In a statement, UEA doesn’t deny these emails, but posts about the whitewash investigations of the past, like they matter now.
UPDATE4: 9:45 AM PST I’ve changed the headline from Climategate 2.0 to Climategate 2.0 emails – They’re real and they’re spectacular! with a hat tip to Jerry Seinfeld. The relevance of that headline is particularly interesting in the context of where Dr. James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has his office in NYC.
UPDATE3: 9:25 AM PST – Having read a number of emails, and seeing this quote from Mike Mann in the Guardian:
When asked if they were genuine, he said: “Well, they look like mine but I hardly see anything that appears damning at all, despite them having been taken out of context. I guess they had very little left to work with, having culled in the first round the emails that could most easily be taken out of context to try to make me look bad.”
I’m going to conclude they are the real deal. I’ve posted a BitTorrent link to the file below. One big difference between Climategate 1 and 2 is that in 1, it took days for the MSM to catch on, now they are on top of it.
UPDATE2: 8:45AM PST The Guardian has a story up by Leo Hickman, and this excerpt suggests they may be the real deal:
Norfolk police have said the new set of emails is “of interest” to their investigation to find the perpetrator of the initial email release who has not yet been identified.
The emails appear to be genuine, but this has yet to be confirmed by the University of East Anglia. One of the emailers, the climate scientist Prof Michael Mann, has confirmed that he believes they are his messages.
UPDATE1: 8:20 AM PST These emails have not been verified yet, and this story was posted by one of my moderating staff while I was asleep. Until such time they are verified, tread lightly because without knowing what is behind the rest of the zip file, for all we know it’s a bunch of recipes and collection of lorem ipsum text files. I’m working to authenticate these now and will report when I know more – Anthony Watts
===============================================================
Early this morning, history repeated itself. FOIA.org has produced an enormous zip file of 5,000 additional emails similar to those released two years ago in November 2009 and coined Climategate. There are almost 1/4 million additional emails locked behind a password, which the organization does not plan on releasing at this time.
The original link was dropped off in the Hurricane Kenneth thread at about 4 AM Eastern. It is still there.
Some initial snippets floating around the blogosphere:
<3373> Bradley: I’m sure you agree–the Mann/Jones GRL paper was truly pathetic and should never have been published. I don’t want to be associated with that 2000 year
“reconstruction”.
<3115> Mann: By the way, when is Tom C going to formally publish his roughly 1500 year
reconstruction??? It would help the cause to be able to refer to that
reconstruction as confirming Mann and Jones, etc.
<3940> Mann: They will (see below) allow us to provide some discussion of the synthetic
example, referring to the J. Cimate paper (which should be finally accepted
upon submission of the revised final draft), so that should help the cause a
bit.
<0810> Mann: I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she think’s she’s
doing, but its not helping the cause
<2440> Jones: I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the
process
<2094> Briffa: UEA does not hold the very vast majority of mine [potentially FOIable emails] anyway which I copied onto private storage after the completion of the IPCC
task.
JeffId has some initial reaction
From the ReadMe file:
/// FOIA 2011 — Background and Context ///
“Over 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day.”
“Every day nearly 16.000 children die from hunger and related causes.”
“One dollar can save a life” — the opposite must also be true.
“Poverty is a death sentence.”
“Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilize
greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels.”
Today’s decisions should be based on all the information we can get, not on
hiding the decline.
This archive contains some 5.000 emails picked from keyword searches. A few
remarks and redactions are marked with triple brackets.
The rest, some 220.000, are encrypted for various reasons. We are not planning
to publicly release the passphrase.
We could not read every one, but tried to cover the most relevant topics such
as…
==============================================================
Here’s one about UHI that is convincing:
cc: liqx@cma.xxx
date: Tue, 25 Sep 2007 11:16:37 +0800
from: =?gb2312?B?JUQ1JUM1JUMwJUYyJUMzJUY0IA==?= <limmy@xxx>
subject: Re:Re: thank you
to: p.jones@xxx
Dear Phil,
Again I find that the emails from my CMA mail boxes can not get to you.
From attaches please find the data of 42 urban stations and 42 rural stations (by your
list) and a reference of homogenization of the data. we have tested and adjusted the abrupt
discontinuities of the data during 1951-2001, but the following years (2002-2004) has only
been quality controled and added to the end of the series, but we found the relocation
during these 3 years have minor effects on the whole series in most of the stations.
I partly agree with what Prof. Ren said. and we have done some analysis on the urban heat
island effect in China during past years. The results are differnt with Ren’s. But I think
different methods, data, and selection of the urban and rural stations would be the most
important causes of this. So I think it is high time to give some new studies and graw some
conclusion in this topic. I hope we can make some new achives on this both on global scale
and in China.
Best
Qingxiang
—– Original Message —–
From: “Phil Jones” < p.jones@xxxx >
To: “Rean Guoyoo” < guoyoo@xxxx >
Cc: “%D5%C5%C0%F2%C3%F4” < limmy@xxx>, < liqx@cma.xxx >
Sent: 2007-09-24 16:25:59 +0800
Subject: Re: thank you
Dear Guoyu,
I think I emailed you from America last week. I am away again next week,
but here this week.
I do think that understanding urban influences are important. I will
wait for Dr Li Qingxiang to send some data, but there is no rush, as I am
quite busy the next few weeks.
Best Regards
Phil
At 00:59 20/09/2007, you wrote:
The following message was returned back when I sent via cma site. I send it again via
this site. I also forwarded this message to Dr, Li Qingxiang.
Regards,
Guoyu
Dear Phil,
Thank you for your message of Sept 11, 2007. I have just been back from the US. Sorry
for the delayed response.
I noted the discussion on blog sites. This is indeed a big issue in the studies of
climate change.
In the past years, we did some analyses of the urban warming effect on surface air
temperature trends in China, and we found the effect is pretty big in the areas we
analyzed. This is a little different from the result you obtained in 1990. I think there
might be at least three reasons for the difference: (1) the areas chosen in the analyses
are different; (2) the time periods analyzed are obviously varied, and the aft-1990
period is seeing a more rapid warming in most areas of China; (3) the rural stations
used for the analyses are different, and we used some stations which we think could be
more representative for the baseline change.
We have published a few of papers on this topic in Chinese. Unfortunately, when we sent
our comments to the IPCC AR4, they were mostly rejected.
It is my opinion that we need to re-assess the urbanization effect on surface air
temperature records for at least some regions of the continents. I am glad that you are
going to redo it using the updated dataset. I expect you to obtain the new outcome.
As for the dataset, I believe that Dr. Li Qingxiang could give you a hand. He and his
group conducted a lot work of detection and adjustment of the inhomogeneities in the
past years, and the adjusted and the raw datasets are all stored and managed in his
center. The datasets we used are also from his center.
I’d be happy to discuss some issues with you late, but I would not necessarily be as a
co-author because my contribution would be rather minor.
Best regards,
Guoyu
NCC, Beijing
Shape Yahoo! in your own image. [1]Join our Network Research Panel today!
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) 1603 xxxx
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) 1603 xxxxx
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@xxxxx
NR4 7TJ
UK
—————————————————————————-
=======================263ÌìÏÂÓÊ£ÐÅÀµÓÊ×Ôרҵ=======================
Attachment Converted: “c:\eudora\attach\Detecting and Adjusting Temporal Inhomogeneity in
Chinese Mean Surface Air Temperature Data.pdf” Attachment Converted: “c:\eudora\attach\To
Jones.rar”
====================================================================
Here’s a bit torrent link to the FOIA2011.zip file
You’ll need a bit torrent client
BETTER LINK:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ROCGBR37
Documentation Of A Cozy Interaction Between An AMS BAMS Editor And Phil Jones
Like this one at RC new respect for Gavin at least he seems to have a sense of humor hahahaha
Mann:
“the important thing is to make sure they’re loosing the PR battle. That’s what
the site [Real Climate] is about.”
How’s that working out for you?
[Response: Pretty well actually. Having somewhere people can go that isn’t being filtered by politicians or journalists, and where scientists can interact directly with the public, does actually make a difference. You might not like it, but lots of people do. – gavin]”
Comment by jryan — 22 Nov 2011 @ur momisugly 3:00 PM
As an ex formal debater, the only word that describes a physicist’s first constructive response to P.F.”s post would have to come from the current vernacular – fail.
First, when you are confronted with a salient position in a debate, you respond by going point by point and state your beliefs and why they differ from your opponent. Usually, he will then rebut your stance with evidence and provide evidence (full disclosure of sources is obviously required) to shore up the damage caused to his case by your initial statements. He also then “pulls” any points he made that you did not address in your first response. Not mentioning a point is tantamount to agreeing with it, evidenced by the inability to assail it logically and factually. These points are reinforced by your bypassing them rather than tackling them head on. (In a timed debate, this usually occurs when there are too many points to address before out of time, not necessarily due to inability – this sometimes avoids getting to the truth, but since this isn’t timed, it doesn’t apply)
Next, you do the same – rebuttal, evidence, repair. These 2 statements are also usually the last time new stances/points are made to avoid an ever widening battlefield. There should the be some evidentiary rebuttals back and forth, and then the judges make a decision.
Basically, you barely touched on any of the points P.F. made. I would say that he stated his positions clearly and with enough detail to give you solid targets (ie, solid positions rather than mercurial ones) and yet, nothing substantial from you other than “the ball’s in your court”. Even though I agree with P.F.’s stance, I could assault it effectively with an hour or two with Google, cut/paste and Wordpad.
Debate is a crucible for thoughts and ideas, burning off the impurities and attempting to leave a mostly pure product. A mathematical mind plus your obvious faith in you stance can create a much better showing.
I would suggest another nom de plume.
PS – I bet P.F. would be willing to let you have another 1st Constructive that hopefully has more bite and less bark.
Still no comment from Judith Curry.
LOL at “A Physicist”
No you’re not a “Physicist. You’re either:
1. A badly programmed robot, or
2. A stuck record, or
3. A chanting zombie
The common characteristic of each? A complete inability to think. Oh, in which case I should also add a number 4.
4. An AGW believer.
Physicist…what a joke.
He was sent here to dumb down the event don’t bother answering him/her its so bloody obvious they are really worried that this is IT.
A physicist says: November 23, 2011 at 2:43 pm
PF, like a magician, ain’cha already cherry-picked by choosing sea-level as your measure?
===
Again, you present Arctic sea ice volume data that goes only back to 1978. I’ll remind you, 1978 marks the end of the 1960s-1970s cooling. Remember the 1975 Newsweek article about the “cooling world”? You are resorting to the most obvious and egregious cherry picking — that which is almost pervasive in the AGW argument — by picking a 20th century low point on which to begin your data set, thus causing a misleading impression of what’s really going on. You are astonishingly disingenuous by using that point, twice now.
The challenge is to show that now is warmer than 1000 years ago.
Would you rather use temperature proxies? How about entomology? Geology? Anthropology? Botany? How about Medieval literature? All consistently show that now is cooler than 1000 years ago. Do you really want to go on sea ice extent? I’ll go there if you have an argument that shows now Arctic sea ice is less than 1000 years ago than now. You must, however, get off your pegging the data to the late 1970s. If you can’t you’ve lost the argument. Frankly, by your avoiding the core question, you are revealing that you really don’t have a good argument, do you..
“A physicist says:
November 23, 2011 at 6:38 am
Meanwhile, the rest of the planet is busy creating humanity’s future.”
Yes, of course. You and other like minded are “Creating Humanity’s Future”. Never mind the unknown and unintended consequences of “Creating Humanity’s Future” Right, Mr. Physicist. Our future may depend on more CO2 in the atmosphere. Who knows? Silly Me. CO2 drives the climate is not about Science is it? It’s about control. Control a energy, you control the Nations. Control food, control population. Right? And, of course “the means” always justifies the “end”. Right, Mr. Physicist. It’s people like you that cause wars and destruction. History has taught us that.
A physicist says:
November 23, 2011 at 2:03 pm
“Stephen Wilde says: Nothing yet observed is outside the normal range of natural variability.
Stephen, I’m sure you didn’t mean to say that! Gee, the levels of greenhouse gases that we’ve already injected are hugely outside the normal range of natural variability.”
There’s no proof of that in that NASA page, actually NASA doesn’t supply any evidence but references NOAA and IPCC AR4, from which we can exclude IPCC AR4 since per their statement doesn’t do science but dabbles in scenarios. From NOAA we can exclude pretty much all the ice cores not located in Antarctica and Greenland due to the lack of CO2 at 1000’s of meters higher elevation and lack of hundreds of thousands of years coverage. Greenland also has elevation issues but has at least sites that covers a hundred thousand year and a few more.
So, essentially, the whole 650 000 years coverage of average CO2 levels is just a handful of sites in Antarctica (Vostok only covers some 400 000 for instance) and Greenland, which as most rational people do know, isn’t exactly representative to the rest of the globe, what with CO2 not being evenly dispersed in the atmosphere but tends to be concentrated at lower elevations over land where green shit grows and where the CO2 molecule tend to fly it, apparently, takes the trade winds first and for most.
To waste so much time on trying to defuse the crippled cause and here we are not yet at the ten thousand email mark. Will you have strength left at the 210 000 email mark, or even time left, I wonder. :p
DSW, your evaluation isn’r all that surprising, for the simple reason that the practices of mathematics, science, engineering (and even medicine) do not resemble formal debating in the slightest.
For one thing, these disciplines begin not with a resolution specified ab initio by some external authority, but instead they begin with an internal creative impulse: “What is a good question to ask?” The point being, that creating good questions carries mathematicians, scientists, and engineers more than halfway to good answers.
That creative courage is what’s missing on this forum: the questions that WUTW is posing inspire solely the feeblest forms of skepticism: cherry-picking, witch-hunting, slogan-chanting.
It’s plain that WUWT should be asking questions that target stronger science and thus inspire rational skepticism. For example: what will Richard Muller’s Koch-funded BEST temperature records look like in 200 years? In 500 years? Are historians like Jared Diamond and John Toland correct in suggesting that we citizens of earth are perhaps either not smart enough to foresee this future, or else not brave enough to face it, or else not creative enough to forestall it?
Those are the kind of tough questions that WUWT’s brand of skepticism should be facing … and both science and skepticism would be better-off for it.
What I think people don’t appreciate is that at the maximum of the last glacial we got very close to the point where there wasn’t enough CO2 in the atmosphere for plants to survive. We are close to all time lows in atmospheric CO2 content when looked at over geological time.
If we DON’T put CO2 back into the atmosphere, we could be in severe trouble during the next glacial period which is due “any time now”.
A physicist says:
November 23, 2011 at 2:43 pm
“But I hafta advise yah, pretty much every shipping company CEO and navy admiral in the world thinks these warming trends aren’t gonna stop, but rather are going to accelerate. And the admirals in particular, are in posession of far better ice data even than the climate scientists, obtained by six decades of America, British, and Russian missile submarines on-patrol under that ice! :)”
==============
Not quite.
It is, for every “shipping company CEO and navy admiral”, essential that possible sea routes be examined for efficiencies of transport. Nothing more.
You say they think: “these warming trends aren’t gonna stop, but rather are going to accelerate.”
I say, they will capitalize on any situation that presents itself.
Which apparently is still being hampered by the ice.
Scary stories notwithstanding.
The longest interglacial was close to 30,000 years and ended about 395,000 years ago. It was much warmer than the current interglacial. There was a 15,000 year conifer optimum during that interglacial (compared to a 2,000 year optimum in this interglacial). Rainfall reconstructions at a location in Siberia during that period point to rainfall amounts of about 100mm/year higher than the Holocene (current interglacial). It was warmer and wetter and the atmosphere had a higher CO2 content than the pre-industrial Holocene. Forests grew in areas that are today tundra.
People generally have a very narrow view of climate and expect that the times in which they live are “normal”. But the “normal” state over the past couple of million years as been glaciation with periods such as this only a brief breath of fresh air that happens for only 10% of the time. People, seriously, CO2 is your friend, not your enemy.
A physicist says: Again, you present Arctic sea ice volume data that goes only back to 1978.
As sea-faring folks know, Russian records extending back to 1525 show no evidence of an ice-free Northern Sea Route … a sea-route that this year has opened wide to multiple record-smashing SUEZMAX supertanker passages.
The radical arctic warming that has enabled these record-smashing ship passages is yet another reason why hard-nosed shipping CEOs and naval strategists around the world are abandoning climate-change skepticism.
Humanity’s future? I’m going to make a prediction. In 2100, environmentalists will be hindering the access to the virtually infinite mineral and energy wealth of the solar system. Progressives my a**, ……………
A physicist says: November 23, 2011 at 3:14 pm
LOL … Robert, please let me break it to you gently…
Not bad, John; condescension, pedantry, a Soc101 grasp of organizational dynamics and an appeal to common sense all in one sentence, followed up by a quote from a historian that ascribes the sweep of historical events to “human nature”. So let’s see… the Climategate e-mailers are the ones defining the paradigm for climate science, have more publications in the field than anyone else, are called upon to testify before Congress and Parliament, give advice to governments, receive awards of recognition, are sought out by the media and those CEOs and Admirals you’ve been going on about… but they are not “the best”? It’s an interesting idea that there is an anonymous, self-less mass of much better scientists, toiling away in obscurity, but all unanimous in their support of the ideas and theories of their intellectual inferiors, who also have the power to make or break their careers. It is obvious you have no idea of Climategate was really about, and when people have lost faith in science and recognized how many scientists have sold themselves to the forces of oppression, you’ll fail to understand why the torch and pitchfork bearers have come for you.
‘A physicist’ answers Dave Wendt’s “What in your understanding is the residence time of a photon of infrared energy emitted from the earth which is absorbed by a molecule of CO2 in the atmosphere?” question by saying that it is too complicated to understand for anyone who hasn’t studied the right subjects in the right way, and that apparently there are planetary climatologists who have found it necessary to write book length answer attempts. ‘A physicist’ then directs the reader to Spencer Weart, a historian who is stupid enough to state “Here’s what all scientists agreed they knew by 1988…”
No doubt Weart quit physics for good reason.
LOL … people, seriously, CO2 is the friend of the sharks … whose fossil teeth blanket Florida … `cuz duh, Florida (South Carolina, Louisiana, coastal Texas, etc.) goes underwater whenever the icecaps melt! And becomes prime shark habitat.
Which is nice for sharks, yes. Nice for people, not so much.
“A physicist says: Again, you present Arctic sea ice volume data that goes only back to 1978.
As sea-faring folks know, Russian records extending back to 1525 show no evidence of an ice-free Northern Sea Route … a sea-route that this year has opened wide to multiple record-smashing SUEZMAX supertanker passages.”
Wow, you mean incomplete Russian records going back ALL the way until the beginning of the Little Ice Age show that? What do their records say from before the Little Ice Age?
Whoops, guess we don’t have that – let’s just declare a climate emergency.
A physicist says:
November 23, 2011 at 2:03 pm
Stephen Wilde says: “Nothing yet observed is outside the normal range of natural variability.”
Stephen, I’m sure you didn’t mean to say that! Gee, the levels of greenhouse gases that we’ve already injected are hugely outside the normal range of natural variability.
Ok, let’s assume that “the levels of greenhouse gases that we’ve already injected are hugely outside the normal range of natural variability,” which is actually more of a definition of the word “natural”, while CO2 levels themselves have indeed been much higher in the geological history of the Earth, injected or not.
But then as you yourself even seem to imply, nothing else in “climate” or “weather” is “outside the normal range of natural variability,” which is what Stephen Wilde was saying. Obviously, he was not saying that the CO2 “we’ve already injected” is not present, but instead the opposite insofar as CO2 concentrations are still increasing, and implying that Climate Science’s hypotheses, as embodied by its CO2 = CAGW, have not yielded even one correct relevant empirical prediction yet, and that there also is in fact nothing new in climate and weather “outside the normal range of natural variability” that even needs an additional explanation beyond Nature’s usual forces.
Since Climate Science says it cannot “explain” the past without using CO2 as a primary driver of climate and adjusting other factors to fit, but it cannot make any successful predictions with using CO2 as a primary driver of climate, its hypotheses are falsified, leaving natural forces, perhaps with a fairly low level of CO2 operative, completely sufficient to explain climate and weather.
Now there’s a vivid image … it’s straight outta Young Frankenstein … the “conservative war on science” come to life. 🙂
Don’t worry, Robert … me and the Pope … the world’s CEOs, admirals and military strategists … the Boone and Crockett Club together with Ducks Unlimited and the Audubon Socity … and plenty of young forlks from the World Scouting Organization … we’ll all put some shrimp on the barbie for yah! 🙂
Stephen Wilde says:
“…I couldn’t find any strong scientific evidence in favour of AGW. The strongest there is being the simple observations of Arrhenius but that tells us nothing of the system response to that which he observed. Everything since is just speculation unsupported by empirical data. Nothing yet observed is outside the normal range of natural variability.”
Arrhenius’ predictions were wrong. And you are correct, there is no evidence, either weak or strong, that proves the AGW conjecture, per the scientific method. That’s why AGW is a conjecture, and not a testable hypothesis.
In fact, after rising a hefty 40%, CO2 has caused no measurable warming. The trend line from the LIA is the same; warming has not accelerated, as was universally predicted by the alarmist crowd over the last few decades. Why were they so wrong in their predictions?
The answer is simple: the sensitivity to CO2 was vastly overstated. As it turns out, CO2 has very little if any effect on temperature. At most there might be about a 1°C rise for a doubling of CO2 – an extremely unlikely scenario, as there isn’t enough recoverable fossil fuel to double current CO2 levels. [And a 1 – 2 degree rise would be a net benefit, opening up millions of new arable acres in places like Siberia, Mongolia and Canada.]
These climategate 2.0 emails show that self-serving climate charlatans like Mann and his clique privately discussed the fact that their catastrophic AGW predictions weren’t panning out. They either couldn’t understand the simple answer that CO2 causes little or no warming, or they know – but their grant gravy train is too delicious to give up, so they continue to promote the CAGW lie.
I despise what they’re doing, but at least I can understand their ulterior motive for trading in their ethics and honesty for undeserved taxpayer loot. What I have a hard time with are the unpaid lemmings who comment at Pseudo-Skeptical Pseudo-Science and realclimatealarmism, and who still believe that runaway global warming is right around the corner, despite the lack of any real world evidence.
The fact is that CO2 is completely harmless, and it is verifiably beneficial. More is better, at current and projected concentrations. Yet the demonization of benign “carbon” continues …because there’s still big money in climate alarmism.
Marc Malone has some interesting comments on “A Physicist” here, from their interaction in the thread here.
It appears WUWT is not the only site he is infesting.
Best advice? DFTT, Don’t Feed The Trolls. “A Physicist” is beyond the reach of any life preserver of assistance or suasion that even the best intentioned might throw him, there’s nothing we can do to stop him from drowning in his monomania.
Let him blather on, his rants are amusing in a pathological kind of way, and just point and laugh when he goes off on another round of windmill-tilting. The amazing thing for me is, despite his leagues of perorations, he has yet to produce a single fact or item of substance. It’s uncanny! Most people can’t go anywhere near that long without slipping up and putting in at least one falsifiable claim. But A Physicist has an amazing staying power for prolonged substance-free vacuity that we mortals can only gape at in envy …
In any case, folks, how about a big round of applause for A Physicist, and our thanks for playing. And before you leave, here’s Bob Barker to tell you what you’ve won. Bob, what prize will A Physicist walk away with?
w.
Physicist, the ship specified in the article you have linked to, the “Vladimir Tikhonov” is an ice class 1A ice breaker. From the reference below, “Perseverance, STI Heritage and Vladimir Tikhonov are all ice class 1A tankers and all were on charter to Novatek, Russia’s second largest gas company, for their NSR voyages.”
And “Vladimir Tikhonov, with the assistance of two icebreaker escorts, sailed in the challenging high Arctic latitudes to the north of the Novosibirsk Islands along a sea lane where the Arctic Ocean water depths are amongst the greatest and ice conditions remain relatively harsh even in the summer.”
Many Russian transport ships are both ice breakers and transports. Additionally, you can see that these ships, and specifically the “Vladimir Tikhonov” did their crossing through the Arctic sea with the assistance of separate ice breaking vessels, in addition to their own ice breaking capabilities.
The “record breaking” part of this is that these crossings were specifically undertaken, with the assistance of multiple ice breakers, to make the crossing through the large ice sections faster than had been done previously.
The implication that ordinary ships just sailed across the Arctic in a record breaking event is false.
References
http://www.safety4sea.com/page/6574/9/setting-new-records-on-the-northern-sea-route (describes the Vladimir Tikhonov crossing)
http://www.marad.dot.gov/documents/Arctic_Presentation_MORTENSEN.pdf (explains the different ice classifications for ships)
That’s odd … the Pope’s Pontifical Academy totally disagrees … so hmmmm … those Vatican scientists must be all morons … or else … they’re witches!! 🙂
Seriously, JPeden, what *is* your explanation of the Vatican’s thinking in this matter? Feel free to omit all slogan-chanting, cherry-picking, and witch-hunting from your response. `Cuz these Vatican guys (1) are mighty smart, (2) take the long view and (3) aren’t in it for the money, yah know.
A physicist says:
November 23, 2011 at 4:46 pm
A physicist says: Again, you present Arctic sea ice volume data that goes only back to 1978.
As sea-faring folks know, Russian records extending back to 1525 show no evidence of an ice-free Northern Sea Route … a sea-route that this year has opened wide to multiple record-smashing SUEZMAX supertanker passages.
Ok, so now let’s assume that “an ice-free Norhern Sea Route” is new, although it’s extremely doubtful that it is new and you have given no evidence that it is or that it is due to rising CO2 levels. But assuming it’s true, the problem then is that A implies B does not mean that B implies A. Especially when A has been wrong 100% otherwise, and when C, a decrease in Antarctic sea ice should have also occurred given A, instead of the opposite, which seems to be a feature of Climate Science’s CO2 = CAGW “hypotheses”, which simply can’t be falsified, unlike the hypotheses of real science.
You and the Climate Scientists will simply not let your “hypotheses” be falsified and instead only persist with what is essentially only a massive “perception is reality” Propaganda Operation which you want to “win” politically, and in direct contradiction to reality. That’s not real science, and you should know it!