From Dr. Benny Peiser at The GWPF
Climate Scientists Get The Stratosphere Wrong
How did the Met Office get their data so wrong? Well there’s the rub. You see, the methodology used to develop the Met Office SSU product was never published in the peer-reviewed literature, and certain aspects of the original processing “remain unknown.” Evidently the boffins at the Met didn’t bother to write down exactly how they were massaging the raw data to get the results they reported. Indeed, those who did the data manipulation seem to have mostly retired. This is an egregious example of sloppy science, slipshod science, bad science. How other climate scientists blindly accepted the Met Office’s manufactured data, even when their models could not be reconciled with nature, leads one to question the scientific integrity of many of those in the field. This is not acceptable behavior in any realm of scientific endeavor. — Doug Hoffman, The Resilient Earth, 15 January 2013
The steady, relentless collapse of the climate campaign proceeds apace, notwithstanding the sugar high climate campaigners enjoyed after Hurricane Sandy and Obama’s re-election. And if the climate campaign wasn’t already in denial about being abandoned by The One, their media allies, and new carbon riches baron Al Gorezeera, a new report coming out this week from Harvard’s Theta Skocpol should really harsh their mellow. Skocpol, a prominent liberal political scientist, argues that environmentalists deserve most of the blame for the defeat of their agenda. — Steven Hayward, Power Line, 14 January 2013
In an area where I have expertise on, extremes and their impacts, the report by the US Global Change Research Program is well out of step with the scientific literature, including the very literature it cites and conclusions of the IPCC. Questions should (but probably won’t) be asked about how a major scientific assessment has apparently became captured as a tool of advocacy via misrepresentation of the scientific literature — a phenomena that occurs repeated in the area of extreme events. Given the strength of the science on this subject, the USGCRP must have gone to some effort to mischaracterize it by 180 degrees. How is it that it got things so wrong? —Roger Pielke Jr., 15 January 2013
But what if climate change isn’t the disaster we fear but instead one more obstacle that humans can meet, one that may spur innovation and creativity as well as demand ever more resilience? What if it ultimately improves life as we know it? –Zacharay Karabell, “Climate Change Doesn’t Have To Be All Bad”, Reuters, 14 January 2013
The gravest danger to Earth these days isn’t climate skepticism; it’s the broken, Malthusian and statist green policy imagination. Wedded to grandiose and unworkable “solutions”, greens feel they must push the panic button at every opportunity to stampede the world into embracing an unworkable and unsustainable policy agenda. It won’t work. The Al Gore path (alarmism, hypocrisy, dumb policy solutions, green pig lipsticking or corporate subsidies disguised as green breakthroughs) will not bend the curve. –Walter Russell Mead, Via Meadia, 12 January 2013
So long as the media is in the lap of special interests and politicians the CAGW/CC drum will continue to be beaten.
Yes unfortunately Rhonda, I believe you are right! Mainstream news stories on such issues can be deconstructed for journalism students to demonstrate a well-trodden story-telling template, where journalists depart from the usual fact checking and triangulation, so bringing generalization without substantiation. A radio story broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2012 can be cited to demonstrate. The news trigger was a serious bacterial outbreak after floods in Queensland. Instead of a bacteriologist as expert to the story, a climate scientist is sourced in the conclusion to discuss a looming public health emergency. However, heavy rain in the La Niña event of 2012 is the cause for recent record floods, similar to the wetter La Niña cycles in Australia in 1974, 1975 and 1976. In the interests of public health, this story should carry more information on leptospirosis, instead of building the unsubstantiated climate angle in this final section:
RACHEL CARBONELL: With climate scientists predicting more extreme weather events, some experts say [SIC] outbreaks of leptospirosis are likely to become more of a problem. Philip Weinstein is professor of ecosystem health at the Barbara Hardy Institute at the University of South Australia.
PHILIP WEINSTEIN: We’re likely to be seeing more and more of these events as more extreme climate events occur more frequently and as urban populations grow (Carbonell 2012).
David, normally I would agree with you but Philip Weinstein is not a climate scientist and was commenting precisely on his field of expertise: http://www.unisanet.unisa.edu.au/staff/homepage.asp?name=phil.weinstein
The boy who cried wolf has turned into the boy who cried mouse but the politicians still rush to stand on the chair. Such is the state of climatology .
Typo: I think you mean Theda Skocpol from Harvard, not Theta.
Item 1, the Thompson et al paper, might be very, very big. Basically it hits the Met Office models like a 5-megaton nuke, even though pretty plainly the authors never set out to do so, and generously express “puzzlement” (where terms like “amateurish bungling” or even “pure bullshittery” wouldn’t have been unjustified.
I agree with Bohemond, item one packs a punch. Attention is definitely shifting to the methods used (whatever they were) and secrets kept. As for the MSM, although the story of this global scam is not on the front page inflaming the population (yet), the truth is more widely discussed than before inside the pages. More and more people are taking a closer look – something the Green Activists hate to see. This is great stuff. I think headlines will follow, although how long we have to wait for them is something else again. Someone will want to be “first” at “breaking the news” to the general public. It would sell a lot of papers. 🙂
The Doug Hoffman piece is astounding and should get wider exposure.
http://theresilientearth.com/?q=content/science-gets-stratosphere-wrong
If the paper from NOAA is correct, it means that every CCM model in existence is predicated on bad data. Of course it could be that the NOAA paper is wrong, though I doubt it. Either way, they just shot someone’s feet off, we just don’t know who’s yet.
andyd says:
January 16, 2013 at 9:32 pm
David, normally I would agree with you but Philip Weinstein is not a climate scientist and was commenting precisely on his field of expertise:
So in order to connect climate to illness he doesn’t need to know about how the climate will change and yet predicts how it will change. Interesting .
… the methodology used to develop the Met Office SSU product was never published in the peer-reviewed literature, and certain aspects of the original processing “remain unknown.”
The same can be said of the SST processing. Despite a number of papers over the years the description of how the ICOADS data is reprocessed into a 5×5 degree gridded “product” is only explained in general terms, insufficient to be either reproduced or verified.
Much of disruption of the structure of the original data that was noted and discussed here:
http://judithcurry.com/2012/03/15/on-the-adjustments-to-the-hadsst3-data-set-2
was later found (thanks to input from Met Office’s John Kennedy) to have happened in the regridding process as much as by the “bias correction” adjustments.
No surprises here, situation normal for the last few decades, I am thinking a new paradigm is about to engulf us as the old one is dying. Wonder what it will be, some thing special no doubt like CO2 causes deformities in unborn children, that will take at least two decades to disprove.
I refer to the comment “… the boffins at the Met didn’t bother to write down exactly how they were massaging the raw data to get the results they reported.”
If we were talking about accounting figures instead, this would be fraud and those responsible would face a number of criminal charges not to mention punishment for putting into the public domain misleading and deceptive information.
But seeing this is climate related data, it seems it’s fine for officials to manipulate data in any way to achieve their objectives. We also saw this sort of thing with the CRU, and we also saw this in relation to the ‘Kiwigate’ scandal.
“This is an egregious example of sloppy science, slipshod science, bad science. ”
Don’t hold back. It could even be “Deliberately Fraudulent Science”
For the life of me I don’t understand why climate science doesn’t see the Volcano signal – subsequent Ozone destruction from the volcanic sulphates signal in the stratosphere temps. It is not GHGs, it is volcanoes.
We are going on 17 years now of stable or rising stratosphere temps since the effects of Pinatubo wore off.
http://s9.postimage.org/dn520h933/LStrat_Temps_Volc_Lines_Dec12.png
It just takes a certain amount of time for the Ozone to rebuild and, thankfully, stratospheric volcanic eruptions don’t happen that often – 4 to 6 times per century.
And then there is the issue of how much UV solar radiation is now getting to the surface whereas prior to the eruption, it was absorbed by Ozone in the stratosphere. The reduction in Ozone will lead to warming at the surface since more solar radiation is getting to the surface now.
http://s13.postimage.org/b7tirviyf/UAH_Daily_Lines_LStrat_LTrop_Dec12.png
Solution? Just deletenthenline of code in the Met Office system thatvsays: “add one degree to the temperature”.
Honestly, the guys in the Met Office were uber-Warmists, so it ould be this simple and this deliberate.
The Skocpol report referred to by Steven Hayward proposes alarmists adjust from supporting “cap and trade” to supporting “cap and dividend” after page after page of drivel assuming noble alarmists are right and in the pay of big oil skeptics are wrong.
http://www.scholarsstrategynetwork.org/sites/default/files/skocpol_captrade_report_january_2013_0.pdf
“A carefully organized drive for cap and dividend might well bring together environmental advocates, green businesses, and many unions and citizen associations to support the enactment of carbon-emissions caps and the subsequent ratcheting-up of the tax levels to ensure that the United States completes a transition to a green economy, with ordinary citizens reaping economic benefits along the way.”
Basically, since alarmism hasn’t been able to gain wide spread support through Zohnerism and illogical arguments plain old straight up bribery is the best shot for enacting irresponsible legislation.
Bill Inis says: http://s13.postimage.org/b7tirviyf/UAH_Daily_Lines_LStrat_LTrop_Dec12.png
Good point Bill. What is also pretty clear from this is that after the warming blip caused by the eruptions the stratosphere ends up cooler than when it started and TLT recovers in the 5 or 6 years that follows.
This is not just a resumption of an underlying AGW as can clearly be seen in stratosphere temps. There appears to be some sort of negative feedback happening , probably in the Troposphere, enabling the climate to auto-correct.
The reason why the orthodoxy is carefully ignoring this is that they require a strong cooling effect from volcanoes to justify inflating the CO2 effect to 2 or 3 times what the basic physics says it should be.
Without volcano cooling there is NO alarming CO2-based AGW.
The MSM doesn’t necessarily lean left or right, rather, they are lazy and sensationalistic. If the cannot find something to grab your attention, they cannot make money. Convincing the general populace the end is near, we’re all going to die, brings in more money than, this is natural, we’ll likely die of old age.
That, not Kevin T’s missing heat is the travesty.
Bill Inis says: http://s13.postimage.org/b7tirviyf/UAH_Daily_Lines_LStrat_LTrop_Dec12.png
Bill, any chance you could define the background colour to your graphs? Firefox takes ‘no background’ quite literally meaning it renders it black making it pretty much illegible.
I don’t know what software you use but it must be simple to define a background colour, which I presume you intended to be white.
Your posts are usually intelligent and worth reading but each time I have to fire up a different browser.
Thx.
I for one never understood the AGW explanation for a cooling stratosphere. At the concentrations that exist in the atmosphere today, most of the CO2 absorption/emission lines are saturated, thus at those wavelengths CO2 is absorbing/emitting all of the energy in those bands. As the concentration of CO2 increases in theory two things should happen. The first is that the width of the absorption lines should increase in the areas of the atmosphere where the lines are saturated. This is a very minor effect easily calculated by the gaussian-to-lorentz transformations for those wavebands. The second which can be calculated but are much better to be directly measured, is the desaturation altitude.
The equations governing CO2 absorption/emission are both pressure and temperature dependent, thus there is an altitude where the CO2 lines are no longer saturated. As the partial pressure increases of CO2 that altitude should increase, which would warm the stratosphere (assuming that it is in the stratosphere where the lines desaturate) rather than cool it.
The entire argument and computer models about stratospheric cooling has seemed extremely contrived to fit the data and not the other way around. Now that we know that this is wrong, how will it effect the models and the argument?
Greg Goodman says:
January 17, 2013 at 7:15 am
Bill, any chance you could define the background colour to your graphs? Firefox takes ‘no background’ quite literally meaning it renders it black making it pretty much illegible
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The Background is defined as white. Its not the first time I heard someone say the background is black. Firefox seems to be the problem. Switch to another browser or is there some setting in Firefox that can fix it.
With software this is common. The forecasting/modeling program over 10 or 20 years gets bigger and bigger and more and more complex. Turnover in managers and programmers insure that no one really knows how the whole thing works and yet they still have to get their tweeks in to try and compensate for some new theory and so their monthly report will say they did something. Each tweek increases its complexity .
What if the entire “Climate Warming by CO2” was put in place as a partial mechanism to stop WW3???
Look, we have “climate problems” that we can work together on: Let’s not have War!
2013 is getting better by the day, more popcorn,
The media are naked here, credibility thrown away.
The next phase of the climb down will be victim-hood.
Its not the political bureaucracies and their pet MSM editors fault, a new disease will be invented;
“We are unusually sensitive to wealth, comfort and healthy people, so we caught this disorder, which made us try to destroy wealth and seek to make every-one else poor”.
Or elevated levels of CO2 makes office dwellers even dumber than we can imagine, yeah thats it, irreducible office idiocy disorder. Not our fault, we were sick. Applications for permanent sick leave attached.
Bill Illis says:January 17, 2013 at 7:56 am
Greg Goodman says:
January 17, 2013 at 7:15 am
Bill, any chance you could define the background colour to your graphs? Firefox takes ‘no background’ quite literally meaning it renders it black making it pretty much illegible
———————————————
The Background is defined as white. Its not the first time I heard someone say the background is black. Firefox seems to be the problem. Switch to another browser or is there some setting in Firefox that can fix it.
Bill, I’m running Firefox 18.0, and your graph has a white background, no problem.
“Questions should (but probably won’t) be asked about how a major scientific assessment has apparently became captured as a tool of advocacy via misrepresentation of the scientific literature ”
It’s very simple. Nothing in the literature supported their agenda/claims, so they had to go elsewhere, the grey literature, to find support. And then they managed to generate all kinds of corrupted papers that are easily shown to be flawed and got them published in journals that have thrown away their scientific integrity. Estimates are that there are about 41 main individuals in this effort; I am reluctant to call them scientists as real scientists do not lie, alter, and obfuscate.
Dr. Lurtz says:
January 17, 2013 at 8:11 am
“What if the entire “Climate Warming by CO2″ was put in place as a partial mechanism to stop WW3???
Look, we have “climate problems” that we can work together on: Let’s not have War!”
Unlikely. It would have been easier to stop propping up the Soviet Union. It is more likely that it was set up to help a global power grab.