Guest post by Alan Caruba
Full disclosure: Years ago I received a small stipend from The Heartland Institute to help cover the costs of writing articles regarding the global warming hoax, well before it was exposed in 2009 when emails between its perpetrators—the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—revealed the total lack of real science involved. I have continued to expose the hoax without any support from Heartland or any other entity.
A total of six conferences on climate change have been sponsored by The Heartland Institute. I attended the first conference in New York City in 2008 and my initial observation was that virtually no one from the press was there and the meager coverage it received disparaged it.
This week, a major smear campaign against the Institute erupted as the result of an act of deception and thievery that may well result in criminal charges against its as yet unknown perpetrator.
The President of the Institute, Joe Bast, immediately informed its supporters, directors, donors and friends that someone pretending to be a board member had sent Heartland an email claiming to be a director and asking that documents regarding a January board meeting be re-sent.
A clever ruse, but the result was that elements of the confidential documents were then posted on a number of so-called climate blogs and from there to various members of the media who, with the exception of The Guardian, took no steps whatever to verify the authenticity of the documents, some of which Heartland says were either a concoction of lies or altered to convey inaccurate information.
The leading disseminator of the global warming hoax, The New York Times, published its version on Wednesday, February 15th, titled “Leak Offers Glimpse of Campaign Against Climate Science.”
Suffice to say, the “climate science” served up by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been a pack of lies from the day it first convened. Its “science” was based on computer models rigged by co-conspirators that include Michael Mann of Penn State University and Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia.
The original leak of their emails in November 2009 instantly revealed the extent of their efforts to spread the hoax and to suppress any expression of doubt regarding it. A second release in 2011 confirmed what anyone paying any attention already knew.
The “warmists”, a name applied to global warming hoaxers, launched into a paroxysm of denial that has not stopped to this day. Their respective universities have since engaged in every possible way to hide the documentation they claimed supported their claims. Suffice to say, the global warming hoax was the golden goose for everyone who received literally billions in public and private funding.
We have reached the point where the warmists have been claiming that global warming causes global cooling! Along the way the bogus warming has been blamed for thousands of utterly absurd events and trends. What really worried the perpetrators was the fact that the planet had entered a cooling cycle in 1998.
At the heart of the hoax was the claim that carbon dioxide (CO2) was causing the Earth to heat and that CO2 emissions must be reduced to save the Earth. Next to oxygen, CO2 is vital to all life on Earth as it sustains all vegetation which in turn sustains every creature that depends on it as a source of food. It represents a mere 0.033% of the Earth’s atmosphere and is referred to by warmists as a “greenhouse gas.” It is, as any meteorologist or climatologist will tell you, the atmosphere that protects the Earth from becoming a dissociated planet like Mars.
The New York Times article is a case study in bad journalism and bias on a scale for which this failing newspaper is renowned. The Times reported that “Leaked documents suggest that an organization known for attacking climate science is planning a new push to undermine the teaching of global warming in public schools, the latest indication that climate change is becoming part of the nation’s culture wars.”
Wrong, so wrong. Polls have demonstrated that global warming is last on a list of concerns by the public. It barely registers because the public has concluded that it is either a hoax or just not happening. Teaching global warming in the nation’s schools constitutes a crime against the truth and the students.
The Times article makes much of the amounts some donors to Heartland have contributed, but in each cited case, with one exception, the donations had nothing to do with its rebuttal of global warming science.
“It is in fact not a scientific controversy”, said the Times article. “The majority of climate scientists say that emissions generated by human beings are changing the climate and putting the planet at long-term risk, although they are uncertain about the exact magnitude of that risk.”
The exact magnitude is zero. Thousands of scientists have signed petitions denouncing global warming as a hoax. The Times lies.
A post at The Daily Bayonet on February 14th said it well, “What the Heartland documents show is how badly warmists have been beaten by those with a fraction of the resources they’ve enjoyed. Al Gore spent $300 million advertising the global warming hoax. Greenpeace, the WWF (World Wildlife Fund), the Sierra Club, the National Resources Defense Council, NASA, NOAA, the UN and nation states have collectively poured billions into climate research, alternative energies, and propaganda, supported along the way by most of the broadcast and print media.
The Times will continue to publish lies about global warming, as will others like Time and Newsweek magazines. The attacks on Heartland and the many scientists and others like myself who debunk this fraud will continue, but their efforts are just the dying gasp of the greatest hoax of the modern era.
There’s a reason the theme of Heartland’s sixth conference in 2011 was “Restoring the Scientific Method.” Real science does not depend on declaring “a consensus” before the hypothesis has been thoroughly tested, a process that often involves years of effort. Meanwhile, the planet continues to cool.
William M. Connolley says:
February 17, 2012 at 12:47 am
“Because you carefully avoided adding the trend line. Do so, and you’ll see that you’re wrong.”
Not even close. I did do the trend line. I just couldn’t make them both appear at once, for some reason. But, the trend over the last 12 years is decidedly down.
“Only if you ignore the data; see for counter example…”
Please stop quoting Tamino on this board. His credibility is less than zero.
“Only by very carefully selecting your dataset and time period.”
As you do here? Yet, you seem to block out the distinctive change in the slope from the period before your trendline.
Look, a linear trend is inappropriate for this data anyway. There is a pronounced ~60 year cycle which is readily evident. It all but leaps out of the page. To not see it, you have to not want to see it. And, that ~60 year cycle just peaked. We are heading down.
“…so, maybe 30 years”
That is absolutely the WORST time period to select. Because of the pronounced ~60 year cycle, when you do a trend on the upswing, you get the maximum upward bias. And, conversely on the down swing. Which is why we keep having alternating cooling and warming scares every 30 years. This is just stupid.
Man Bearpigg says:
February 17, 2012 at 12:23 am
“Wow, you have a perpetual motion machine there boy,”
Throw in everything cranked out by Doug Cotton here.
I hope you warmists are happy. This is what happens when you pervert the science for political ends. When your little AGW panic comes a cropper, pseudoscience like this will reign supreme. You people have set science back decades because of your obsessive-compulsive, mentally unbalanced crusade against modernity.
DesertYote says:
February 16, 2012 at 6:01 pm
The Pompous Git
February 16, 2012 at 5:15 pm
You talk about both sides of the political spectrum. What you mean is both sides, as in the terms left and right, which are just either end of the SOCIALIST spectrum as defined by lefties. Conservatives are learning to abandon the term “right” as it really is a trap designed by socialist and overloaded with meaning that is contrary to conservatism.
The greatest good for the greatest number of people has been made possible only because of a limited government with limited ability to intrude into the market. Socialist have to destroy that in order to bring about their great socialist utopia, which has little room for individual freedom. That is why ever single thing socialist do is target at destroying society and its infrastructure.
It was Stalin who created the term “right” as a term of abuse to distinquish his opponents within the Communist Party as “enemies of the poeple” and of “democracy” in USSR. Thus both ends of the “Socialist” sppectrum are, in reality, Fascists or Totalitarians. However, this is moving away from the purpose of this thread and thus this particular discussion has gone far enough.
>> No, the planet continues to warm; e.g. http://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/2011-temperature-roundup/
> You’re having a laugh!
Was that intended as a reasoned rebuttal? Well, I admit, your devastating logic defeats me. In which case, try http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1996/plot/uah/from:1996/trend instead.
> What do you read?
The Grauniad, of course, like any good left-winger. But I don’t get my science from there, as I said.
> Please stop quoting Tamino on this board. His credibility is less than zero.
You mean, you don’t like what he is saying and can’t refute it.
> the trend over the last 12 years is decidedly down
No, it isn’t. Lets use WFT, since you folks seem to like that: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1996/plot/uah/from:2000/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1996/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2000/trend
William M. Connolley says:
February 17, 2012 at 4:41 am
> carbon dioxide is fully part of the Water Cycle
Pardon?
You heard.
William M. Connolley says:
February 17, 2012 at 10:00 am
“You mean, you don’t like what he is saying and can’t refute it.”
Like you don’t like the Daily Mail and cannot refute it? Look, Grant Foster is not a scientist. His site is a joke. He alters and frames data to promote his points, he censors inconvenient posts, and he is caustic and offensive. I’m not going to debate it – it’s been amply documented in threads on WUWT and elsewhere. If your object is to convince me of anything, quoting Tamino detracts from that goal.
“Lets use WFT…”
I specified HADCRUT3 and 12 years. Let’s quit playing games with starting points and data sets for an inappropriate regression, shall we? READ MY PREVIOUS POST:
Bart says:
“…the trend over the last 12 years is decidedly down.”
That is a fact. Here is 2002 – 2009.
And enough of Connolley’s short term cherry-picking. Let’s look at the longest term trend [the green trend line] that Wood For Trees can provide; from 1840. It is crystal clear that the long term natural global warming trend is slowing, and that the modern rise in CO2 has done nothing measurable to accelerate temperatures. Thus, the CO2=CAGW conjecture touted by Connolley and his ilk is falsified.
In fact, the long term natural recovery from the Little Ice Age [one of the coldest episodes of the entire Holocene] is continuing, in fits and starts. But as shown conclusively in the graphs above, CO2 cannot be more than a bit player, if that. The natural warming trend has stayed within very specific parameters, without any acceleration. If a 40% increase in [harmless, beneficial] CO2 can’t cause more warming, then the alarmist crowd needs to work on a new conjecture, because their demonization of “carbon” has been decisively falsified.
An honest person would now admit that there is something seriously wrong with the repeatedly falsified claim that anthropogenic CO2 causes global warming. But as we see time after time, the alarmist crowd is not honest; they totally ignore the scientific method, and transparency, and the null hypothesis, and Occam’s Razor. The truth is simply not in them.
Smokey says:
February 17, 2012 at 10:59 am
And, mark you well that the ~60 year cycle, as I stated before, practically leaps out at you in all of Smokey’s plots. There are more than two whole cycles in the record. Only an idiot (like Tamino) would refuse to admit the significance of it.
@Ron House – “I agree with your disagreement, but not with your “respectfully”. ;-)”
Well I was trying to make a point regarding civility, so I felt that it warranted being so. But I understand your view. Feeding trolls is an exercise in futility (I have an analogy that involves wind and bodily fluid directed into it). However, not being familiar with the many commenters here, I will err on the side of being generous.
I did recognize the patronizing “…would do well…” I was up for an extended type, so ignored it.
But thanks for the comment. 🙂
I’m astounded how this thread has blown up with so many rabbit trails: moon temp, CO2, water cycle, lawyers, criminal lawyers, lawyers-who-might-be-criminals, so-and-so is a poopoo-head, etc. 😀
Thanks to the mods, you all have the patience of Job!
> Look, Grant Foster is not a scientist
You mean, you don’t like what he is saying. He meets all the usual definitions of scientist: he knows what he is talking about, has original ideas and is capable of publishing in high-quality journals. Whether he is caustic or not is irrelevant. If you don’t understand the concept of trying to understand an underlying trend by removing noise then, fair enough, but it means you’re in no position to understand his work, which means any criticism you make of it will be meaningless.
> I specified HADCRUT3 and 12 years
Yes, as I said, you can only see what you want if you carefully specify your endpoints. But even your carefully cherry-picked data fails you; it still shows warming, not cooling.
William M. Connolley said @ur momisugly February 17, 2012 at 4:41 am
Oh dear, fake statistics — whoda thunkit? Do you have a cite for this Mr Connolley?
David Jones says:
February 17, 2012 at 9:51 am
Stalin was involved in the post revolutionary government of France? Wowsers! Did Doctor Who take him there?
What makes you think that opposing coercion equates with totalitarian?
MarkW said @ur momisugly February 17, 2012 at 9:42 am
Australia has a public health system and lots of Europeans. What makes you believe that Australia is a communist state?
From an October 2008 email:
The Climategate emails are full of similar deceptive shenanigans. And the graphs I posted upthread show that global temperatures continue to decline. So who should we believe? Connolley? Or Planet Earth?
What is truly unconscionable is the fact that these unethical scientists clearly want the climate to cause widespread deaths – so they can say, “We were right!” And of course, so they can keep their snouts deep in the public trough. Unfortunately for their scam, the planet isn’t cooperating. They have been 100% wrong. About everything. Time to eliminate their funding.
Please get back on topic.
IMO People like Mr Connolley have their OWN place to play post-normal science…and distract from the topic.
William M. Connolley says:
He meets all the usual definitions of scientist: he knows what he is talking about, has original ideas and is capable of publishing in high-quality journals.
Those are all of the definitions of scientist?
Explains a lot.
R. Gates says:
February 17, 2012 at 9:05 am
The greenhouse properties of gases in the atmosphere has nothing at all to do with them radiating heat back to the surface, but rather slowing the rate at which the surface loses heat by altering the thermodynamic gradient between ground and sky, i.e. a warmer sky means the ground will cool more slowly.
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That is the “old” argument which the IPCC had to abandon because there was no empirical evidence. The atmosphere cools faster than the surface at night, for example, and is always colder even at the start of the night. So thermal energy cannot jump the gap and travel by convection, diffusion or conduction against the flow. At the surface interface it would be like water going up a waterfall..
If you catch up with your reading, you will find that they invented a process whereby they postulated that “backradiation” would warm the surface in the morning and slow its rate of cooling in the evening by adding thermal energy to the surface. They assumed it would do this because they assumed (wrongly) that any radiation striking the surface would do this no matter what the temperature of the source of the radiation. Well, the Sun’s radiation does, but not that from the atmosphere.
Firstly, “heat” does not get radiated. Electromagnetic radiation transfers energy. That energy (under certain circumstances) can be converted to thermal energy, just like some of the kinetic energy in your car will be converted to thermal energy when you prang it. When thermal energy is converted to radiating energy, it can then re-appear as thermal energy in another object if and only if that object is cooler than the source of the (spontaneous) radiation. Then we say we have observed heat transfer and such heat transfer is always from hot to cold as per the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
So, radiated energy is not always converted to thermal energy just because it strikes a target. If backradiation warmed a warmer target, you could warm your home at night with a few sky-heaters in your roof with funnels focussing radiation from warmed up plates on your roof onto smaller plates in your ceiling which you would assume would get even hotter than the ones on the roof, because they would get more radiation per square whatever of area. So you could make millions selling these sky-heaters. Indeed they would make your house hotter when the Sun shines, but not from radiation at night I’m afraid.
Just for my own satisfaction I have performed backyard experiments which prove to me at least that backradiation does not slow the rate of cooling of the surface at night. To do this yourself, buy two identical wide necked vacuum flasks and fill them to the brim with sand, leaving the lids off. Also buy a thermometer with a metal probe. Shield one flask from backradiation all night (using a couple of silver car windscreen screens suspended nearly, but not quite, horizontally, just above the flask) and check the temperature differences if any just before dawn.
I have explained in other posts exactly how and why radiation transfers thermal energy at a molecular level, due to the non-overlap of the higher frequencies in the spectrum radiated from the warmer body. Where there is overlap (as there always will be when the radiating body is cooler) then there is no conversion to thermal energy because all radiation merely resonates and gets scattered without leaving any energy behind.
Now, you seem to think that the rate of cooling can be slowed without the addition of extra thermal energy. That is not correct. To slow the rate at which the water level in a bath lowers when the plug is out you could add extra water by turning the tap on. You should also remember that the IPCC in effect claims backradiation converts to thermal energy day and night, so it would also have to be warming the surface even more when it is already being warmed on a sunny morning.
Sorry, but your arguments fail, as does the whole greenhouse conjecture which is contrary to the laws of physics.
For more information, refer to my funnel experiment wherein two plates at the same temperature are connected by a tapering funnel, one plate having, say, 10 times the surface area of the other. Hence there is net radiation towards the small plate, but such radiation cannot warm the plate because that would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. For computational proof of what happens read (if you can understand the mathematics) what a certain Professor of Applied Mathematics has published – links are on the Radiation page of my website.
William M. Connolley says:
February 17, 2012 at 12:50 pm
I specified HADCRUT3 and 12 years
Yes, as I said, you can only see what you want if you carefully specify your endpoints. But even your carefully cherry-picked data fails you; it still shows warming, not cooling.
I will confirm that William M. Connolley is correct here. The slope is #Time series (hadcrut3) from 1850 to 2012
#Selected data from 2000
#Least squares trend line; slope = 0.000850904 per year
Of course, once the January numbers are out, that may change, but at the moment, the slope is very slightly positive for the last 12 years of HadCrut3.
Following is the longest period of time (above10 years) where each of the 4 data sets is at least slightly negative (or flat for all practical purposes).
(By the way, even though HadCrut3 is negative for 14 years, 10 months, it IS positive for 12 years, 0 months due to the way the graphs and numbers work out.)
RSS: since December 1996 or 15 years, 2 months
HadCrut3: since March 1997 or 14 years, 10 months
GISS: since February 2001 or 11 years, 0 months
UAH: It never quite reaches a negative value but it might with the February or March numbers.
Combination of the above 4: December 2000 or 11 years, 1 month
Sea surface temperatures: February 1997 or 14 years, 11 months
See the graph below to show it all.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1980/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1997.17/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1980/plot/gistemp/from:2001.08/trend/plot/rss/from:1980/plot/rss/from:1996.92/trend/plot/wti/from:1980/plot/wti/from:2000.92/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1980/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1997.08/trend
@William Howard M. Connolley says:
WN: your original claim, unsourced, was “15 years was required to falsify”. Given that you’ve now provided a quote – but not a citation – I think its pretty obvious that your source isn’t the report itself, but http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2009/07/noaa-explains-global-temperature.html. But RP Jr isn’t a climatologist, and often gets this stuff badly wrong.
==========================
I didn’t quote any commentary of Pielke. And if you googled around you could have skipped Pielke’s blog which I never linked to anyway, and directly accessed the NOAA report in PDA format with small effort, which is what I directly quoted. Why attempt a poison the well tactic by rubbishing an academic who has nothing to do with what we were discussing?
Now I applaud Warmists who come here to “tackle the deniers head on” or whatever your thought processes on this are. It does make the comments sections of climate blogs more interesting, and it seems the Warmist “filter and ignore” strategy hasn’t worked out very well. But I do wish to remind you that you are a major representative of the Warmist side, so when many of your responses are obfuscations, dodges or logical fallacies, you’re not going to win many fence sitters who may be reading our exchanges. That’s the point of you posting here, right? Here is my suggestion: spend less time “making stuff up” and more time focusing on the science, and even if your claims are more modest in nature, you will win far more credibility than your current tactics.
Doug Cotton, do you have an exact explanation of why the radiative roof cooling doesn’t work as well on cloudy nights? http://www.ba-pirc.org/pubs/nightcool/ Your rough explanation is that all things aren’t equal, e.g. there is more ground level humidity on the cloudy night. But they account for dewpoint (table 3). They account for wind, emissivity of the roof surface, temperature, etc.
And they account for cloudiness in table 7. They say “A cloudy sky during nighttime hours is a known factor in reducing the potential for nocturnal cooling – a fact evident from the fact that frost or fog most readily occur following a clear night, but not often following those that are overcast. Clouds, particularly, low stratus and cumulus clouds, emit radiation through the entire long-wave spectrum so that under a completely overcast sky, nocturnal radiation is largely eliminated. On the other hand, clear sky conditions allows night sky radiation to reach its maximum potential, although also influenced by atmospheric moisture content.”
William M. Connolley says:
February 17, 2012 at 12:50 pm
“If you don’t understand the concept of trying to understand an underlying trend by removing noise…”
Considering it’s a large step down from what I do for a living, and I specialized in stochastic modeling during my PhD years, I rather think I understand it, and you do not. Apparently, you think it is valid to fit a straight line to any data set, calculate the confidence intervals based on an assumption of uncorrelated noise, and boom, you’re a scientist!
Run along. You’re wasting my time now.
Werner Brozek says:
February 17, 2012 at 2:57 pm
“I will confirm that William M. Connolley is correct here.”
I will confirm that it is meaningless, as there is an obvious ~60 year cyclical component in the data, and no basis for assuming it should evolve linearly. It’s worse than meaningless. It’s just plain dumb.
Eric: Just prior to the reference to “clear nights” they were talking about nights with high relative humidity, so perhaps their “clear nights” have lower relative humidity. It is well known that the moist adiabatic lapse rate is lower than the dry one, so the temperature gradient is less. Most of this is about weather conditions, not what we call climate.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the radiative roof cooling is that it does in fact cool better on clear nights – the very nights when you would expect all that hypothesised “backradiation” from the whole atmmosphere, not just the clouds, to be slowing the rate of cooling.
Whatever the reasons for whatever happens, they have nothing to do with radiation from the sky or clouds, because as I have explained and tested myself (and Prof Johnson has proved computationally and Prof Nahle has proved in a peer-reviewed published experiment done in September 2011) radiation from a cooler source cannot transfer thermal energy to a warmer target. To do so would be in violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
If anyone with tertiary background in physics wishes to debate this point, after reading my post above, then be all means do.
Doug Cotton says:
February 17, 2012 at 4:31 pm
“If anyone with tertiary background in physics wishes to debate this point, after reading my post above, then be all means do.”
I sure don’t. You’ve had the logical fallacy in your thinking pointed out on numerous occasions. Rather than coming to grips with it, you prefer to repeat over and over what everyone has already heard dozens of times from you and rejected. So, what’s the point?
Bart says:
February 17, 2012 at 4:58 pm
You’ve had the logical fallacy in your thinking pointed out on numerous occasions.
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Incorrect. I have demonstrated that all such reasoning was in itself incorrect.
If you can’t be more specific and you don’t understand the physics and mathematical computations involved, then please don’t bother to reply.
People, why do you talk to W. M. Connolley?
It’s like shaking Goebbels’ hand.