By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
The IPCC, having spent almost two months working out how to respond to my complaint about a notoriously bogus graph in its Fourth Assessment Report, has found itself not guilty. In doing so, it is wilfully perpetuating a fraud, which will now be reported to the prosecuting authorities.
My complaint was as follows:
“The graph purports to show, but does not show, that the rate of global warming has been accelerating and that the accelerated global warming is anthropogenic.”
The conclusion the IPCC draws by superimposing multiple trend-lines on the HadCRUt curve of global mean surface temperature anomalies since 1850 is that because the trend-lines starting more recently are steepest the world is warming ever faster and we are to blame. The caption to the graph makes this clear:
“Note that for shorter recent periods, the slope is greater, indicating accelerated warming. … increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases dominate the observed warming after the mid-1970s …”.
Dr. Pachauri, the IPCC’s climate-science chairman, drew the same two bogus conclusions from this graph in a lecture in New South Wales some years ago:
“… In recent years this graph has become much steeper. If you draw a line through the last 100 years, the slope is a 0.74 C° line. But if you look at the last 50 years, [it is] almost twice as steep as the total 100-year period. So it would be appropriate to conclude that … warming is taking place at a much faster rate, and clearly if we don’t bring about some changes we’d have much faster changes in future.”
I had invited the IPCC to reconsider its use of a technique so bogus that if one applies multiple trend-lines to a sine-wave (which has a zero trend) one can demonstrate either that the trend is ever more rapidly declining or that it is ever more rapidly increasing.
In fact, the global temperature trend is not increasing. In the 101 months since January 2005, the benchmark date for the IPCC’s forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), there has been no global warming.
The bright blue trend-line on the HadCRUt dataset shows cooling. Yet the bright red line showing the AR5 projections suggests that a rapid warming should be taking place. In little more than eight years the IPCC’s projection is already more than a quarter of a Celsius degree (or half a Fahrenheit degree) above observed reality:
The IPCC knows perfectly well that the two conclusions it invited readers to draw in the caption from the slopes of the multiple trend-lines in the graph are indefensible, misleading, and – let us not mince words – fraudulent. It avoids admitting its error by breaking down my complaint into five parts, of which only the first two go to the substance of my complaint. And, even with these two, the IPCC carefully avoids addressing the substance of my complaint:
1. M of B complaint: the graph “purports to show that the rate of global warming has been accelerating”.
IPCC response: “The indicated trends on the two figures are factually correct. They are correctly determined and clearly indicated on the legend accompanying these figures. … Therefore, the claim is not warranted.”
But I had not complained that the trend-lines had been incorrectly determined. Indeed, I had demonstrated that correctly-calculated trend-lines applied to a sine-wave could produce false conclusions very similar to that of the IPCC. The inaccuracy about which I had complained lay in the drawing of improper conclusions from the trend-lines.
2. M of B: the graph “purports to show that the accelerated global warming is anthropogenic”.
IPCC: “The figures were not used to make a statement on the causes of a possible increase in trend. … Detection and attribution assessments are based on a comprehensive evaluation of detection and attribution research that is presented in AR4 Chapter 9. That chapter’s assessments are not based on evidence of differences in linear trends between different periods. Therefore, the claim is not warranted.”
But the IPCC’s caption plainly attributes the rapid warming from the 1970s onward to Man. So the graphs were used, and explicitly used, “to make a statement on the causes of a possible increase in trend”. Besides, if Chapter 9 had already reached its assessment by other means, what was the purpose of the bogus graph, except to mislead?
3. M of B (subsidiary point): I had understood that the graph was and altered version of what had appeared in the scientists final draft.
IPCC: “The figures in question appeared in the Final Drafts of Chapter 3 and of the Technical Summary with the same numbering as in the published versions. The trends, including the detailed legend with the numerical values and the uncertainties were included in the Final Draft as in the published version, except for copy-editing changes. Trends were added in the Final Draft versions of these figures in response to comments on the Second Order Draft … Therefore, the claim is not warranted.”
Score half a point for the IPCC here. The graph with the bogus trend-lines had appeared in the final draft. However, it had appeared without the trend-lines in all versions that preceded the final draft. Someone had added the trend-lines, but should not have done so.
4. M of B (subsidiary point): The text accompanying the defective graph says: “An increasing rate of warming has taken place over the last 25 years, …”.
IPCC: From the context it is clear that the authors emphasize that the global mean is not the complete picture (“ … with important regional variations”) and that trends are not smooth (“… has occurred in two phases …”, and “… more strongly from the 1970s …”), and that all these statements are factually correct and discuss in words what is visible in the graph. “Therefore, the claim is not warranted.”
But my complaint is not about what may have been said elsewhere in the report, nor about whether what was said elsewhere in the report was factually correct. It is about the bogus graph, whose accompanying text must be read first and foremost in the context of the graph that it accompanies. The fact that “the global mean is not the complete picture” has nothing whatever to do with whether or not it is appropriate to draw inaccurate conclusions from the relative slopes of multiple arbitrarily-chosen trend-lines.
5. M of B (subsidiary point): the text accompanying the graph says, “The rate of warming averaged over the last 50 years (0.13°C ± 0.03°C per decade) is nearly twice that for the last 100 years.”
IPCC: The quoted words “are factually correct. Therefore the claim is not warranted. In conclusion, the Co-Chairs of WGI and the WGI Bureau find that no action is warranted in response to this claim.”
But I had nowhere asserted that the quoted words were not factually correct. I had stated that it was not appropriate for the IPCC to draw from the relative slopes of the various trend lines the unjustifiable conclusion that the rate of global warming was accelerating and that we were to blame.
It would not be difficult to persuade a jury that the IPCC’s assertion that various data were “factually correct”, when I had at no point challenged the factual correctness, merely the inappropriate conclusions that had been drawn, was evidence of its continuing attempt to mislead the public.
I have shown the bogus graph to hundreds of audiences all around the world. Recently I have been asking them to imagine that they were a fraud jury. All have voted to convict – and, on almost every occasion, the votes have been unanimous.
The difficulty, though, is that the IPCC, as one of a proliferating number of supranational agencies, is not answerable to any jurisdiction, except possibly that of Switzerland, where it is headquartered.
If the IPCC were answerable to the British courts, I should invite the police to prosecute and then, if they did not act, I should go before the magistrates myself. I have done it before. If the case is sound, a summons will be issued against the accused. I once hauled the British Secret Police (delicately called the “Crime Agency”) before the beaks, got a summons, and forced these thugs into a humiliating climbdown. But that is another story.
The Swiss authorities have established a specialist bureau to investigate frauds, the Bureau de l’Escroquerie. Its expertise is considerable, and it is well used to dealing with frauds a great deal more complex than those of the IPCC.
Whether the Swiss authorities will act on my complaint to them remains to be seen. Don’t hold your breath. However, now that the IPCC knows that a formal complaint has been submitted, it had better tread more carefully. If the Swiss police were to receive multiple complaints about different aspects of the IPCC’s misconduct – the Himalayan glaciers affair, for instance – they would not be able to look the other way indefinitely.
So, if the IPCC wishes to survive (and, frankly, it has had its day), it will have to be a great deal more careful in future to comply with the scientific method – and with the criminal law.
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“When you surround an army, leave an outlet free.”
Sun Tzu
——-
Trying really hard, few takers of the outlet.
A deliberate attempt to deceive is criminal. The problem something like nobel cause corruption. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_corruption#.22Noble_Cause_Corruption.22_and_Police These jokers believe so much in their cause that they think any lie or dirty trick is justified.
Go get ’em, milord. As one punishment, perhaps make them draw the trend line for the last 12.5 years on the AR5 chart – since they start with 150, go to 100, then 50 and finally 25 years in their trend-drawing exercise – and have them explain that (what, we took a nap? The heat has wiggled into the cold ocean depths, awaiting a dark, moonless night to reappear? Obama’s magic has actually cooled the skies and caused the tides to recede?). As another punishment, throw as many of these bums into jail for a long as possible.
First, the entire graph is worthless because it artificially excludes accurately known temperature trends and throws in imaginary outliers. That said, they have no idea how to represent a graph of temperature history without destroying information. The correct way to represent a temperature graph is to overlay a semi-transparent band that does not destroy the underlying temperature changes. It should be broad enough to cover most of the fuzz that looks random. It is caused by cloudiness variations. This also limits the amplitude of the fuzz and if there are unexplained peaks that exceed the average they are most likely of anthropogenic origin. Once you have this broad transparent band in place put a dot in the center of every line joining an El Nino peak with its adjacent La Nina valley. Connecting these dots gives you the best estimate of how the mean temperature for that section behaves. All this must be done by hand, forget computer manipulation entirely. I did this for the satellite era in my book “What Warming?” in 2010. Connecting the dots immediately showed me that global temperature in the eighties and nineties did not increase until the super El Nino of 1998 showed up (see Figure 15 in the book). That means that we had an eighteen year temperature standstill in the eighties and nineties. Add this to the current standstill that is supposed to have lasted either 15 or 17 or 13 years according to different sources and you have very little of the satellite era left to show any warming. It is a window just wide enough to accommodate the super El Nino of 1998 and its associated step warming. This means that there has been no greenhouse warming at all since the beginning of the satellite era in 1979. That is 34 greenhouse-free years. Knowing this fact, what is the likelihood that any earlier warming was greenhouse warming? Answer: zero. But now comes the really crazy part. It turns out that the eighties and nineties where satellites report no warming is shown as a steady warming called “the late twentieth century warming.” That warming is phony and this is how I said it in the book: ‘The conclusion that temperature curves showing the “late twentieth century warming” are faked and cannot be trusted is strongly reiterated and an investigation into the origin of that fake warming is suggested.’ This is putting it as strongly as I could but nothing happened for two years. None of their people even admitted seeing the book. But suddenly, last fall, three big name temperature databases – GISTEMP, HadCRUT, and NCDC – all suddenly dropped showing that fake warming and aligned their eighties and nineties values with satellite data. It was done secretly and no explanation was offered. I regard this joint action as tantamount to an admission that they all knew it was fake. Checking the miserable excuse for temperature curve in AR4 reveals that this bogus warming is shown as part of the data for the yellow inclined line alleged to show warming. There are probably numerous other articles using that same graph as confirmation of AGW. They should all be withdrawn.
So the IPCC contention is that CO2 and the human generated element of atmospheric CO2 is causing this accelerating global temperature rise.
Why then does not global temperature track the CO2 rise? Why does it diverge? If the IPCC can not answer this question the the science is NOT settled, and as Lord Monckton of Brenchley says the IPCC is fraudulent in their claim.
The UN/IPCC is 100 percent politics. Therefore anything the IPCC claims is 100 percent false.
Why anyone wastes their time listening to political raving is beyond me.
If you don’t like what the IPCC is doing, stop feeding it money.
[I am sure I’m not the only one who would like to be informed of what slurs you are referring to. — mod.]
Well since you asked there are three (1) that the Swiss were, in any way complicit with the NAZIs, we hated them and mostly dislike Chermans, (2) that we sheltered the NAZI confiscated funds, try much harder and you are led to Juan Domingo Peron and the German influence in Argentina and Uraguray aka Operation Phoenix, which still exists today [snip], (3) that we host a shit-load of phony NGOs, UNXXX, and private entities … no we have the now OLD FASHIONED idea that if you want a place, and behave, obeying our law, you should be free.
Nowhere ARE YOU OUT OF BUSINESS AND EXPELLED FASTER THAN SWITZERLAND even \after you have paid your CHF 20,0 fee to register your scam.
MFG, omb
Sorry dude, I must disagree. If no harm is to come to a person’s life, liberty or property and, the IPCC has already affected all 3, then they’re guilty and fully accountable.
For several years, I have recommended that we mount an effort to sue the EPA for fraud in its declaration that CO2 is a pollutant. Additionally I recommended that we mount an effort to get the Supreme Court to rescind its ruling that the EPA has the authority to issue regulations on CO2, when there is no sound evidence that CO2 concentration from human activity is having a measurable effect on climate. Also there were politics within the EPA, which suppressed an internal report recommending that the EPA do its own research instead of parroting the IPCC.
Finally, some in Congress say they have no control over the EPA, which is issuing all of these needless regulations. Hog Wash! Congress funds the EPA. Shut off the money and activity ends. Where does President Obama get the authority to issue executive orders to the EPA, shutting out Congress?
TallDave says:
June 28, 2013 at 7:07 pm
I’m not comfortable with this line of attack. Even really, really bad science shouldn’t be criminalized.
Cut their budgets to zero, but don’t charge them with a criminal act. That’s James Hansen talk.
===========================
The scientists that are guilty of supporting this scientific fraud should be made well aware that in future administrations, charges will be likely and at the very least they will be involved in depositions regarding why they went along with the Trenberth, Mann, Hansen, Marcott Lysenkoism and, have they too caused monetary damages for which they are liable in civil litigation.
I hope the IPCC authors are reading this, because if they think that Big Brother can save them from civil litigation, they need to guess again. When US Law Firms smell a good Class Action suit it’s gonna get ugly ….
… or fun, depending on your POV.
Whether the cause of action succeeds or not, it is definitely worth trying — even if only for the attention it draws to the underlying facts of the matter.
However…. the elements of Fraud in Swiss law may differ from those in the U.S., but, here, at least (inter alia):
1. intent to deceive must be proven by the plaintiff. The IPCC may successfully argue that it was merely mistaken and had no intention to deceive;
2. the victim-plaintiff must be held to have not “known or reasonably should have known” of the falsity of the defendant’s claims; and
3. damages must be proven — must be an “injured party” who has standing to sue (i.e., to be the Plaintiff) and what the damages were must be specifically shown. The mere fact that one told a lie is evil, but not actionable absent a special statutory requirement (e.g., Martha Stewart while not convicted of the underlying crime was convicted of having lied to a federal agent because there is a law that makes such a lie a crime.).
That is to say, DO TRY, but, if the Fraud statute in Switzerland is like that in the U.S., expect the IPCC to find at least one element of Fraud unmet.
Good for you, Christopher Monckton!
And, you ARE a hero — whether the world acknowledges that fact or not.
Thank you.
I believe the 25-year line is now shallower than the 50-year line. Someone should draw a graph showing this and hoist them on their own petard.
Well done, Lord Monckton. I so hope others in a position to do so will follow your lead and bring forward more complaints against the IPCC. The IPCC is doing nothing but damage, serious damage now, and costing the world billions in faulty policy that continues to make the situation worse. If authorities don’t take control, sooner or later the people will, and that will not be pleasant for anybody.
Here is their analysis updated with data up to 2012 – see graph here.
Would the IPCC agree that their “analysis” now shows that global warming is decelerating ?
WWF is behind this?
The IPCC seems to cling on to the good old times when global warming was a fact: 15 years ago. They are clearly not up to date any more.
Capitulation: The end of the climate wars. We are in the championship rounds in the climate wars. There is the first observational evidence of physical cooling of the planet. It appears the sun will be anomalous spotless by the end of the year.
The regions that experienced the most warming in the last 70 years (the Northern Hemisphere, particularly high latitude Northern Hemisphere) will experience the most cooling, due to the sudden solar magnetic cycle change. Unequivocal planetary cooling will bring climate `science` into crisis, which is acknowledgement that a field of science`s paradigms cannot explain what is observed. The warmists have admirably given their best effort to come up with a logical explanation for a period of no warming of 16 years. There is no need however to dwell on how to explain the lack of warming phase as the planet is starting to cool. A cooling planet is a game change for the climate wars.
The CO2 forcing, if the mechanism was not saturated, should always be on. CO2 forcing, if it worked in accordance with the theory, does not turn on for a couple of years and then hideaway for 16 years. If the CO2 forcing mechanism was not saturated what we would expect to observe due to the increase in atmospheric CO2 is a wiggly increase in planetary temperature. The wiggles, being caused by internal forcings and changes of the climate system and the gradual increase in planetary temperature, being caused by the increase in atmospheric CO2.
There were observational indications the CO2 mechanism does not work, that the CO2 mechanism is saturated. The warmists of course ignored observational evidence that their theory was incorrect such as the fact that there was no observed tropical tropospheric hot spot. The warmists also ignored the fact that the latitudinal pattern of warming in the last 70 years matched the past cycles of warming and cooling that correlate with solar magnetic cycle changes. There has been nine periods of cyclic warming and cooling during the current interglacial period all of the past warming periods correlate with an increase in the solar magnetic cycle followed by a Maunder like minimum at which time the planet cools for 100 to 150 years. As the sun is abruptly moving towards a Maunder minimum it is not surprise the planet is now starting to cool.
Greenland ice temperature, last 11,000 years determined from ice core analysis, Richard Alley’s paper.
http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif
If the warming majority of the warming was caused by solar magnetic cycle changes rather than the increase in atmospheric CO2 the warming could be reversed, the planet could cool.
Comments:
Hansen’s proposal that Chinese aerosols could be the cause of the lack of warming has one of the first valiant attempts, until some scaly wag pointed out the Northern Hemisphere has warmed four times more than the tropics and twice as much as the world as whole. The problem is atmospheric CO2 varies only roughly 4% by latitude so the potential for a CO2 forcing change should be roughly the same throughout the planet. Aerosols emitted in the Northern Hemisphere would cause cooling in the Northern hemisphere yet the Northern hemisphere has warmed the most. The problem is explaining the lack of warming in the tropics where there is the most amount of radiation being emitted off to space. The latest attempt to explain the lack of warming is the `heat hiding in the ocean mistruth` which is helped along by the GRACE measurement error. One of physical consequences of the solar magnetic cycle change is charge unbalance on the surface of the planet as the ice sheets are insulators, the oceans conductive, and the continents slightly conductive. The change in charge on the vicinity of the earth is the physical explanation for why the ionosphere abruptly dropped in height and why there is observed gamma radiation at the top of some clouds. This is also the explanation as to why the solar wind continues to drop in speed as the anomalous solar cycle 24 precedes.
http://phys.org/news/2010-11-satellites-reveal-differences-sea.html#jCp
According to the new results, the annual world average sea level rise is about 1 millimeter, or about 0.04 of an inch. In some areas, such as the Pacific Ocean near the equator and the waters offshore from India and north of the Amazon River, the rise is larger. In some areas, such as the east coast of the United States, the sea level has actually dropped a bit over the past decade.
GRACE
The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE for short, consists of a pair of satellites moving in an orbit that takes them over the South and North Poles. The two craft, nicknamed Tom and Jerry after the television cartoon characters, send constant signals to each other to determine their relative spacing to about 10 microns — one-tenth the width of a human hair — over a distance of 130 miles. If the first craft flies above a slightly more weighty area of the Earths’ surface — like a mountain range — it will be tugged a bit out of place, an effect picked up by a change in the relative spacing of the craft.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/30/finally-jpl-intends-to-get-a-grasp-on-accurate-sea-level-and-ice-measurements/
We are now observing the start of capitulation of the climate wars as climate `science` moves towards the crisis phase.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/20/if-things-continue-as-they-have-been-in-five-years-at-the-latest-we-will-need-to-acknowledge-that-something-is-fundamentally-wrong-with-our-climate-models/
J Bryan Kramer writes of this interview with IPCC lead author Hans Van Storch in SPIEGEL.
SPIEGEL: Just since the turn of the millennium, humanity has emitted another 400 billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, yet temperatures haven’t risen in nearly 15 years. What can explain this?
Storch: So far, no one has been able to provide a compelling answer to why climate change seems to be taking a break. We’re facing a puzzle. Recent CO2 emissions have actually risen even more steeply than we feared. As a result, according to most climate models, we should have seen temperatures rise by around 0.25 degrees Celsius (0.45 degrees Fahrenheit) over the past 10 years. That hasn’t happened. In fact, the increase over the last 15 years was just 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.11 degrees Fahrenheit) — a value very close to zero. This is a serious scientific problem that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will have to confront when it presents its next Assessment Report late next year.
SPIEGEL: Despite all these problem areas, do you still believe global warming will continue?
William: We do not need to ask IPCC lead authors what their instinct is. The IPCC ignored obvious observational evidence that indicated the CO2 mechanism saturates, that the majority of the warming in the last 70 years has caused by the sun. The surprise will be global cooling.
Storch: Yes, we are certainly going to see an increase of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) or more — and by the end of this century, mind you. That’s what my instinct tells me, since I don’t know exactly how emission levels will develop. Other climate researchers might have a different instinct. Our models certainly include a great number of highly subjective assumptions. Natural science is also a social process, and one far more influenced by the spirit of the times than non-scientists can imagine. You can expect many more surprises.
Mahatma Gandhi: An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.
Arthur Schopenhauer: All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Buddha: There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.
Go for it Lord MoB. The impact of this fraud, deliberate of not, is so wide reaching and damaging it must be stopped. The trillion dollars spent on ridiculous water melon schemes could easily have been used to house the homeless, feed the starving, provide cheap power to those that need it, and fund the development of improved gas and coal power station efficiency, with a stack left over to fund medical research into improving our quality of life.
Take the legal action whilst at the same time creating a community of like minded individuals to demonstrate the support you have. Why not start an e-petition in the UK with the aim of getting this firmly on the agenda in government? I know this is a soft action, but it is legitimate and it is measured.
Great work sir, keep it up please.
Lord Monckton I hope you succeed. Given that 7,800 people die during winter because they can’t afford to heat their homes properly according to the Independent.
ALSO SEE: Fuel poverty and human health: A review of recent evidence. and Academics wrangle over fuel poverty and winter deaths “Professor John Hills of the London School of Economics in his review of fuel poverty for the Government. His final report is not yet published, but his interim report which came out in October 2011 concludes that 2,700 deaths a year are related to fuel poverty.” There is also a letter allegedly from Christine Liddell and John Hills published in the Independent that says the Independent misrepresented Christine Liddell’s statement to them. (If they can not agree on or can not figure out how many people died from the cold, how can they figure out the climate?)
Which ever numbers you use you have at least 2,700 ‘excess’ deaths a year so “#3. damages must be proven” can certainly be proven.
“#1. intent to deceive must be proven “
The IPCC’s own words show their intentions were not to determine what causes ‘Climate Change’ but to provide evidence that ‘It’s the humans wot done it’ and to come up with potential impacts and options for mitigation and adaptation.
To me that reads the IPCC had a completely political and not scientific objective from the very start and goes towards ‘Intent to decieve’ Then add in the Climategate e-mails. The gate keeping in journals and I think you have a pretty good case.
#2. the victim-plaintiff must be held to have not “known or reasonably should have known” of the falsity of the defendant’s claims
Again the Climategate e-mails.
“…I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow, even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” — Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, July 8, 2004
“I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is no quite so simple.” — Dr. Keith Briffa, Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Sep. 22, 1999
“…it would be nice to try to ‘contain’ the putative ‘MWP’ [Medieval Warm Period]…” — Dr. Michael Mann, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, June 4, 2003
“By the way, when is Tom C [Crowley] 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.”
—Dr. Michael Mann, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Aug. 3, 2004
“Also we have applied a completely artificial adjustment to the data after 1960, so they look closer to observed temperatures than the tree-ring data actually were…” — Dr. Tim Osborn, Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Dec. 20, 2006
“…If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s warming blip (as I’m sure you know). So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say 0.15 deg C, then this would be significant for the global mean—but we’d still have to explain the land blip…” — Dr. Tom Wigley, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, on adjusting global temperature data, disclosed Climategate e-mail to Phil Jones, Sep. 28, 2008
In response to FOIA requests:
“You might want to check with the IPCC Bureau. I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 [the upcoming IPCC Fifth Assessment Report] would be to delete all e-mails at the end of the process. Hard to do, as not everybody will remember it.” — Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, on avoiding Freedom of Information requirements, disclosed Climategate e-mail, May 12, 2009
“Mike [Mann], can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith [Trenberth] re AR4? Keith will do likewise…Can you also e-mail Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his e-mail address…We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.” — Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, May 29, 2008
Quotes stolen from HERE (Many thanks to FOIA who threw a large road bump into the path of the IPCC.)
There are also the scientists who resigned from the IPCC over the misuse of science.
My 1995 Resignation Letter From The IPCC (Roger Pielke sr.)
Chris Landsea’s Resignation From The IPCC (2005)
A collection of resignations HERE
That is just from a quicky look around the internet. I think Lord Monckton can build a much better case if he can find a venue for a trial.
Even if a real trial can not be done, It might be worth it to hold a ‘Mock Trial’ on TV Invite the Climate Scientists even pay their way. If Jones, Mann et al will not show up to defend their actions and science that is an admission of guilt is it not?
As ever m’lord to the point and precise.
Dear Lord Monckton,
Attempting to “criminalise” this disagreement makes you sound bitter, nasty, and quite a lot crazy. Anthony Watts’ decision to publish this does similar things to himself and to his blog. It’s just the same as those trying to criminalise the Heartland Institute, and in the realm of Michael Mann craziness.
I hope the post is removed & apologised for.
Best regards,
Alex
Why not add to the legal complaint the abuse of statistical methodology clearly evident in the formation of means and standard deviations formed (averaged over) various climate models as if they were independent and identically distributed exemplars drawn from a fixed distribution and then using the result as if it has predictive force in its fraudulent statements of probability (if CO_2 does this or that, it is thus and such likely that global average temperatures will increase by so and so amount) made directly to policy makers? See if they can defend these probabilities using anything like honest statistics. They cannot. In the end, the numbers they have policy makers are just made up — they have no defensible numerical justification.
A correct application of statistics to the GCMs would be to formulate the null hypothesis “this model is correct” (one at a time!), generate a Monte Carlo spread of results for that model to sample the effect of chaos, generate the mean (per model!) and deciles away from the mean (per model!) and note that reality is in every single case in the last decile (or worse) of the model envelopes, and that the models without exception (one at a time!) exaggerate the warming. One would then systematically reject the null hypothesis “this model is correct”, one at a time, for all of the models that contributed to AR4, and conclude that we have very little idea what is going to happen to the climate in 100 years because we do not understand and cannot predict what the climate is doing right now.
rgb
I’m not comfortable with this line of attack. Even really, really bad science shouldn’t be criminalized.
Cut their budgets to zero, but don’t charge them with a criminal act. That’s James Hansen talk.
I tend to agree, but bear in mind that the AR Summary to Policy Makers are not science, it is an abomination. They are politics dressed up in the guise of science, being presented to an audience that a) will use the summary to make policy decisions that can benefit or damage the entire population of the world according to how well or poorly those decisions are made; and b) who are utterly incapable of detecting statistical fraud, that is, lying with statistics, and who are not terribly capable of reading the actual scientific sections one at a time to assess how seriously to take the policy recommendations. The only possible defensible (bad) science is bias in the individual scientific sections, but there all the actual participating scientists know better than to take even their own work TOO seriously and generally acknowledge a much higher level of doubt than that presented to policy makers.
So absolutely, do not charge scientists who were working — biased or not — in good faith. From what I understand, however, the AR summaries were not written by all of the actual scientists contributing to the report — they were written by a carefully selected group that presented the “scientific” conclusions as frighteningly as possible. The problem is, as Monckton points out, that they didn’t just bend the rules of scientific discourse in defensible ways, they utterly broke them, and given the political nature of the document and the fact that (we hope!) the breakers aren’t that incompetent in statistics, one has to assume that they were broken deliberately and with a certain malice aforethought. The alternative (and yes, it is always an attractive one in science) is that the writers of the AR4 Summary for Policy Makers are utterly incompetent in statistics.
Monckton has identified one problem with the report — presenting a visual graphic that shows, on the usual utterly exaggerated temperature scale produced by plotting only “the anomaly”, with “decadal error bars” that are so utterly unbelievable that they literally beggar the imagination (We knew global mean temperature to within 0.1 to 0.2 C in 1880? Really? Curiously, we supposedly only know it within 0.1 C today according to an equally fraudulent presentation from AR5.) and then accentuating a supposed “acceleration” at the end of it that is supposedly due to human causes.
Suppose that one presented the entire thermal history of the Holocene instead of this curve (still as an “anomaly”)? Hmm, that would be quite different. Temperature goes up, temperature goes down. The unshown start of the warming trend presented above, the low point in the LIA, was the coldest single century in the entire Holocene, and nearly all of the “warming” in figure above is a) not anthropogenic at all; and b) regression to some sort of warmer mean from this 12,000 year minimum. We are still well short of the Holocene Optimum — achieved without the benefit of human derived CO_2; c) and finally, we do not know and cannot compute or explain either the past history of global climate or what the current global average temperature “should” be with or without CO_2, so we cannot ascribe causes in a quantitative way to any part of the observed warming “anomaly”. The implication of the figure is that humans caused allof the warming evident in the figure with their building of an industrial civilization, even though CO_2 did not significantly increase due to industrialization until post WW2. The secondary implication is that (for the slightly more sophisticated reader) we can somehow linearly extrapolate the trend from 1945 to the present and observe a “human derived” component by subtraction — this is the “accelerating” part — in spite of the fact that the global average temperature has never had a meaningful linear trend on any timescale because it is a reflection of an underlying chaotic, nonlinear process that we cannot begin to compute!
As I’ve pointed out, this isn’t even the worst abuse in AR4. The presentation of GCM results with a mean and standard deviation and the inversion of hypothesis testing in science wherein the mean of the GCMs is treated as a reliable predictive truth complete with error-function derived probabilities goes beyond mere incompetence.
The fundamental problem with these diversions and abuses is that they are highly lethal in and of themselves. If Obama’s plan to “control” the uncontrollable production of CO_2 resulting from breathing, driving cars, producing electricity, making concrete, and all of the other activities associated with human civilization goes into effect, it will increase the cost of all forms of energy dramatically. This, in turn, will cause directly and indirectly the deaths of millions of humans a year as it slows the creation of a truly global civilization, condemning the world’s poorest people to a life of continuing 17th century energy poverty in the 21st century. Most damnably, it will do so without more than inconveniencing people living in the first world instead of the third world, because they will still jet all over the world to climate conferences and come home to their centrally heated and air conditioned houses to wash their clothes in a washing machine while sipping a refrigerated beverage before driving their kids 1000 miles to the beach in their oh-so-politically-correct Prius.
In the meantime, in India there will be a child that is born in a mud hut, fed food cooked on dried animal dung, who wears filthy rags (if they wear anything at all) and urinates and excretes into the dust outside of the hut like an animal who dies of utterly preventable dysentary before their fifth year of life. I have lived there, I have seen it. It is true. It is true in India, in Africa, in South America. I’m certain that it is still true in parts of Australia and China and the rest of Southeast Asia. Obama might as well be holding a gun to their heads and pulling the trigger.
So it is not correct to state that AR4’s Summary for Policy Makers was without effect. It has been the proximate or indirect cause of the deaths of millions of people over the last five years, and is poised to become the cause of millions more over the next because the policy makers trusted the scientists to present mathematically defensible conclusions in the report, not graphs that they just made up and presented to tell a story that they thought was true but could not prove (which includes the unprovable statements of estimated probabilities for future temperature ranges).
Time for some elementary economics. One cannot increase or decrease the cost of energy by fiat. Energy cost sets the scale of the value of the currency used to purchase it, not the other way around. Energy is used in the production and delivery of every single good or service in civilization above the level of an 18th century agrarian “ideal” that, in fact, never existed except in the rural southern US and in a fantasy world of European colonialism and then only on the back of slavery as a cheap source of energy. The only way we use less energy in the world — and I mean significantly less, enough less to affect the “projections” of the IPCC — is to regress civilization to the 18th century reality of massive poverty, de facto slavery (wage and otherwise), poor health, starvation, and — because the world’s population is pushing on towards 8 billion instead of the less than 1 billion alive in the actual 18th century — a global kill-off of some enormous fraction of the world’s population and the deconstruction of its cities.
Cities and industrial production centers live and die on energy. Read Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank if you think otherwise — it is a novel written in the 60’s presenting the “depression” that would have followed an apocalyptic nuclear war. The worst part of that apocalypse wasn’t just the incineration of a comparative handful of cities — it was the complete breakdown of the delicate web of transportation and production upon which our comfortable 21st century lives rely.
There is precisely one energy alternative that is technologically feasible now — not in twenty years, now — that would permit us to scale back on carbon-based energy and preserve civilization itself while allowing it to continue to extend into the third world to uplift the saddest, poorest of the world’s citizens to the level of comfort and security we take for granted. That is nuclear power. If Obama had wanted my attention, he would have left carbon based energy completely alone, and would have called for the aggressive promotion of safe nuclear power. He would have announced an aggressive government initiative into the development in LESS than 20 years of even safer nuclear energy — liquid salt thorium reactors — where North Carolina alone has enough thorium mixed in with equally valuable rare earth metals to fuel the entire US for (IIRC) 17,000 years. In the meantime, solar will probably be ready for prime time as an economically viable energy alternative for much of the world (especially if glued together with LFTR reactors to cover the times that the sun doesn’t shine) within the next 20 years as well (it is marginal to profitable in certain places already but cannot stand alone) to eke out nuclear in the longer run and sure, to partially displace the burning of carbon and make it CHEAPER to burn carbon to help the third world BOOTSTRAP their way to 21st century civilization.
We are dealing with a bizarre social contradiction. Modern civilization is (unsurprisingly) unsatisfying to many of the people who enjoy its comforts. They descry the overpopulation problem (even though they personally do not experience the “problem” at all). They worry about ecological disasters (with some merit — there is every reason to want to preserve and protect the global ecology in sensible ways). They neurose over “the end of oil” even though rumors of the demise of oil appear to have been greatly exaggerated, probably by the very people that profit from the higher energy prices associated with the anthropogenic global warming scam (as opposed to the unproven, uncomputable, but plausible hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming). They long for an utterly fictional rural past where everybody lived in balance with nature and in clean, white, small towns where families talked instead of watching television and June Cleaver’s biggest problem with keeping that scamp, Beaver, out of completely non-lethal non-drug-related trouble. They attribute all of their problems to some sort of society of Illuminati that own, and run, everything and that secretly have space aliens tucked away at Roswell and tap all of the phone lines and put fluorine in water to destroy our purity of essence (joke, joke, see “Dr. Strangelove”:-).
They hate civilization even as they themselves would no more give up any of its comforts like some sort of modern day Thoreau than Thoreau really did. Periodically in North Carolina we get hit with category 3 hurricanes that wipe out electrical power for a week, or ice storms ditto. Life in the 19th century ain’t what its cracked up to be, let me assure you (19th because we will had clean water, flush toilets, cars, access to food we did not grow ourselves, gasoline generators, batteries, electrical lights, and modern health care not to mention stable communications). If it is hot outside then you are hot. If it gets too hot, you die. If it is cold outside then you are cold. If it gets too cold, you die. You are sick and/or uncomfortable nearly all the time either way (unless you already live in the 18th or 19th century, e.g. on an Amish farm).
They would like the entire world, basically, to be Amish. A world with only a few hundred million people in it, preferrably, living surrounded by primal wilderness. They hate the human species itself.
I honestly think this is the root cause of a lot of the mass killings, the “going postal” we observe with increasing frequency.
What the world lacks is any sort of global vision — a vision of where we, as a civilization, want to be in the year 2100. Personally, I’d like a vision that doesn’t involve the killing off of 3/4 or more of the world’s population to get there, and I have no patience with the Amish. I love electrical lights, clean clothes, delicious and varied foods, instant personal transportation, excellent and readily accessible heath care, and all the other trappings not even of wealth, but mere ordinary existence in the first world, things that are available in some measure to even the poorest in our society. I’d like those same things to be equally available to that poor child in the mud hut in India, the poor woman living in a village deep in Brazil near the Amazon, to a peasant in Tibet, to a man living in a crude hut in Africa. Perhaps they would reject these gifts. Perhaps they wish to continue as they are, like the Amish, trapped in the wrong century and hence subject to all of the inconveniences and dangers of an energy poor life.
But I doubt it.
Is it a criminal offense to condemn two to three billion people to a continuation of a life of poverty with all of its inconveniences and dangers? No. If it was, we’d have to prosecute the other half of the world, because there is competition for scarce economic resources and there is the vast weight of history to overcome. The only way to alleviate this is to eliminate the scarcity and fairly deliberately work to overcome history, to educate, to uplift, to help out, to encourage, to recognize this as the fundamental problem that the 21st century should address. Not AGW, AGP — Anthropogenic Global Poverty. Unlike AGW, AGP is easily demonstrable — a trip to any of 2/3 of the countries of the world followed by a walk down what passes for the street would do it. Walk a mile in those shoes — stay in a genuine mud hut for a year, eating what the poor eat, cooking as they cook, drinking as they drink, shitting as they shit. If you survive, come back and then campaign for solving the hypothetical and unproven AGW problem before the real and demonstrable AGP problem.
I dare you.
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Hats off Dr.Brown, an absolutely truthful and stunning narrative.
The likes of people who wantonly support such a scam are the real criminals here, They are the ones who bend over backwards to justify such malpractices.
We all know who the culprits are atleast in this board.
Philip Bradley says:
It’s a condition of joining the UN that employees of the UN and its agencies are exempt from all of a country’s laws. The UN itself has no laws. Thus fraud (and everything else we consider a crime) is perfectly legal if you are a United Nations employee.
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So, if there’s no oversight, no auditing and legal acountability, it may not be such a good idea to set up a $100bn per year fund and let them have control over it,.
It would be like giving your savings to someone who you know has lied and tricked you in the past and hoping they won’t do it again.
That would be stupid. Wouldn’t it?