Quite a performance yesterday. Steve Milloy is calling it the “Zapruder film” implying it was the day the AGW agenda got shot down. While that might not be a good choice of words, you have to admit they did a fantastic job of shooting down some of the ridiculous claims made by panelists prior to them. While this may not be a Zapruder moment, I’d say that it represented a major turning point.
Give props to both Roger and Roy.
Marc Morano reported:
‘Senate global warming hearing backfires on Democrats’ — Boxer’s Own Experts Contradict Obama! — ‘Skeptics & Roger Pielke Jr. totally dismantled warmism (scientifically, economically, rhetorically) — Climate Depot Round Up
‘Sen. Boxer’s Own Experts Contradict Obama on Climate Change’ — Warmists Asked: ‘Can any witnesses say they agree with Obama’s statement that warming has accelerated during the past 10 years?’ For several seconds, nobody said a word. Sitting just a few rows behind the expert witnesses, I thought I might have heard a few crickets chirping’
Video link and links to PDF of testimonies follow.
Here is the video link, in full HD:
http://www.senate.gov/isvp/?type=live&comm=epw&filename=epw071813
Dr. Spencer writes about his experience here and flips the title back at them:
The PDF’s of each person’s testimony can be accessed by click on their names below:
Panel 1
| Dr. Heidi Cullen
Chief Climatologist Climate Central |
| Mr. Frank Nutter
President Reinsurance Association of America |
| Mr. KC Golden
Policy Director Climate Solutions |
| Ms. Diana Furchtgott-Roth
Senior Fellow Manhattan Institute for Policy Research |
| Dr. Robert P. Murphy
Senior Economist Institute for Energy Research |
Panel 2
| Dr. Jennifer Francis
Research Professor Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences, Rutgers University |
| Dr. Scott Doney
Director, Ocean and Climate Change Institute Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution |
| Dr. Margaret Leinin
Executive Director, Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute Florida Atlantic University |
| Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr.
Professor, Center for Science and Technology Policy Research University of Colorado |
| Dr. Roy Spencer
Principal Research Scientist IV University of Alabama, Huntsville |
>>Did they also report our coldest spring in 2 generations?
P.S. Actually there is something to report here, and that is our changing weather patterns in the UK/Europe.
The UK’s winter jetstreams (Jan-Mar) have moved south into the Med, and left northern Europe with a blocking Arctic high that excluded Atlantic lows and left us with cold, dry and stable anticyclonic conditions.* But now, in the summer, the main jetstream has just jumped well to the north of the UK and has allowed an Azores high to establish, and bring very warm dry conditions from the Siberian east. So we now have a heatwave.
So rather than looking at thermometers, our pseudo-scientists of climate should be looking at the changing patterns of the jetstreams, and the resulting changing tropospheric pressure systems in Europe and N America. Take a look at some of these jetstream animations for 2010-2013. Select Jan-Feb-Mar and look at the path of the jetstreams running through the Mediterranean, instead of over the UK. Shame there is nothing here earlier than 2010 (when our recent cold winters started in the UK) for a comparison. Can anyone find a graphic of earlier years for comparison?
http://squall.sfsu.edu/scripts/jet_atl_archloop.html
This change makes northern Europe significantly more high pressure than previously, so why has northern Europe gone so anti-cyclonic, instead of cyclonic?** I bet a graph of UK surface pressure for Jan/Feb for 1980 to 2013 would show a rather nice hockey stick, as the pressure increases (but the uptick indicates cold conditions, not warm conditions). Why the obsession with temperature charts in climate research, when in UK temperatures are driven by surface pressure (and not viky-verky).
The data is out there somewhere, but it would have to be collated and graphed, because I cannot find a decadal graph of UK surface pressure. Plenty of temperature charts, but not one pressure chart.
http://www.worldclimate.com/cgi-bin/data.pl?ref=N51W000+4102+0367202G1
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* Anticyclonic conditions are no good for windelecs (wind turbines), by the way. We would freeze to death in a renewable economy.
** Some say that pressure drives the path of jetstreams, while I think the opposite is true.
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As a non-american I can only say: Wat an embarrassing spectacle and what weak performances by, especially Pielke but also Spencer. I was under the impression that they were, well sort of, sceptics. Clearly mild lukewarmers.. What a disappointment. Little better than zero impact from the pair of them. Of course most of the rest of what I watched made me wish for a barf-bag. Could not bear to watch it all, though.
A bit of context, Mark:
Pure water is more acidic than the oceans.
Pure water is more acidic than the oceans are forecast to become.
Even under the most pessimistic predictions.
Even if they were true.
Chairman Boxer, in the most partisan, shameful way tried to discredit the republician experts right at the start.
I’m paraphrasing, but hopefully I have captured the main points (from 1.49 on video):
“the 2 republician witnesses:… there’s nothing wrong with this… but it is important to note where the funding comes from…
Exxon Mobil foundation where one of the directors is also managing director for federal affairs at the Koch Brothers……
the manhattan Institute received nearly $2M from the Koch Foundation and large monies from Exxon….
“It can’t be overlooked…. 98% of scientists are saying one thing and 2% are saying another thing…. there is endless money behind the 2%
” The tobacco industry tried this…. they fought it, they took an oath to tell the truth… they lied, and eventually the truth came out, and the truth will come out her
The problem with Pielke and Spencer is that they haven’t yet accepted the fact that all the IPCC heat generation and transfer science is wrong and that the Earth adapts to ensure CO2-AGW is near zero.
1. The 3x positive feedback is a mistake, or a confidence trick, from 1981_Hansen_etal.pdf Look for the fals claim in para 2 that CO2 blocks 7-15 microns, wrong, also the claim that if there were no ghgs, the -18 deg C virtual emission temperature [it doesn’t exist in rarity] would be at the Earth’s surface. No ghgs mean no clouds or ice so 43% increase in temperature hence the real average surface temperature would be 4-5 deg C, a GHE of 11 K.
2. As the models use 33 k as calibration, they are plain wrong.
3. The way they are made apparently to work is to add in imaginary back radiation and then claim Kirchhoff’s Law of Radiation applies at ToA. This increases atmospheric heat absorption by 157.5/23 = 6.85. By heating up the sunlit oceans in the model, it increases evaporation. The excess temperature is then offset by double real low level cloud optical depth.
It’s a clever confidence trick.
PS the Earth operates as a whole to bypass the ‘OLR-bite’. This is the other part of the IPCC con, to implicitly assume that the rest of the OLR spectrum has to remain constant as CO2 level increases.
So the rest of the spectrum changes as does cloud area, a PID control system that minimises the radiative entropy generation rate as 5500 deg K SW is changed to 255 deg K LW.
No valid scientist should be a creationist as Spencer is! So anything else he claims should be doubted!
@ur momisugly blackadderthe4th No valid scientist should be a creationist as Spencer is! So anything else he claims should be doubted!
Oh please. I suppose you reject all the scientific work of Issac Newton then?
Let me make this clear for all the haters out there. I’m not interested in your views about Dr. Spencer’s views on religion here, and I’ll will snip anything further on the subject.
Argue the science, not the man.
Anthony Watts
As a Brit unused to watching Senate hearings, a very great surprise to me was the extraordinarily partisan stance of Chairman Boxer who, in that capacity, should be scrupulously impartial. It was unacceptable that she started off with a long, biased statement – “climate change a serious threat”, “overwhelming evidence …” ” predictions (from climate modelling) coming true before our eyes..”, and quoting Trenberth “extremes more frequent..”, “hurricanes more frequent” as if they were uncontested facts, and many other wrong statements. She should have been brought to book immediately by one of the Republican Senators on the panel. Even worse was her response to Sen. Infohe – “It’s the same song you’ve had all along..”, and “I don’t know what it would take to convince you, and the deniers, but I’m going the keep on trying”. Outrageous.
I was not especially impressed with Roy Spencer’s evidence or his responses, and it was difficult to tell what side Pielke was on.
A Word on Politics
A hearing in Congress is a political thing. The skeptics went into the Lions Den and did a credible job. The problem being that my paper (Orlando Sentinel) will carry none of it or will misrepresent what happened. Still, we do the best we can to plant seeds of doubt in the minds of the propagandized public wherever we can.
But let us keep our eye on the ball — discredit every new alarmist meme that comes along. Like the fact we have more Polar Bears than we have had in my lifetime. (and I am very old)
‘ the Earth adapts to ensure CO2-AGW is near zero’ so there has never been a ‘Snowball Earth’ or ‘Hothouse Earth’, because the Earth ‘adapts’, I think not!
CO2 300,000 ppm but snowball Earth.
“AlecM says:
July 20, 2013 at 3:44 am
It’s a clever confidence trick.”
And the tricksters are still playing the game, and are winning (For their payroll masters, the Banks).
“Watch yesterday’s blockbuster performance by Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. and Dr. Roy Spencer at Senate climate hearing.”
Yes. Dr. Roy Spencer was holding a graph, showing the global temperatures of the last 2000 years, but could not give any explanation of the spectra.
http://www.volker-doormann.org/images/dr_spencer_graph2000.jpg
Analysing 14 solar tide functions, the sum tells us that the variation of the climate is mainly related to the Sun:
http://www.volker-doormann.org/images/solar_tide14_2000.gif
V.
It helps to have a start point for those that don’t want to watch the full movie.
Spencer’s statement begins at about 03:04:45
If don’t get it after those 5 and 1/2 minutes, then you probably never will.
I have several comments. Firstly Heidi clearly lied about warming in the deep oceans, If average surface atmospheric temperatures are not rising then by exactly what mechanism is more heat than ever going into the oceans, is there not a contempt of parliament law in the USA?
Secondly, if all this energy is going into a 7% yes SEVEN apparently, rise in water flux through the atmosphere how the hell is there any energy left over to warm the atmosphere so dramatically!
Finally, @ur momisugly Leif
I think you are treading on thin ice, you are on the record in saying that TSI is insufficient to explain temperature correlations with sunspot numbers. I have to ask, do you therefore explicitly deny that here are any other coupling mechanisms between energetics of the Sun and earth climate. It would seem to me that pertubations in magnetic forces, solar wind and even tidal gravitational forces all have the potential to modulate weather on our world. For example I saw a recent paper at a conference that draws a striking correlation between lunar and solar apogee around the wet season and the Great floods of Queensland. It seems clear that there is insufficient information to exclude all the possibilities such as to make the assumption that direct radiation is the only factor directly affecting the temperature of the earths surface. Maybe there are several mechanisms related to sunspots that co-act on the earth to produce the observed minimums.
I am also don’t think that mankind knows everything there is to know, there may be forces or mechanisms at work about which we as yet have Zero understanding. For example, we know how gravity, and magnetism act but we know almost zero about how they come about. What Drives these forces. We don’t even really understand the redshift, what is powering the acceleration in the expansion of the universe. We are babes in the woods…
Is there any way to download these as mp3’s?
bobl says:
July 20, 2013 at 7:07 am
do you therefore explicitly deny that here are any other coupling mechanisms between energetics of the Sun and earth climate.
TSI is where the energy is, but it is simpler than that: There is no good evidence that solar activity is a major driver of climate. If it just a minor contributor, then solar activity is not of interest in the climate debate [in spite of its intrinsic interest as far as the Sun itself is concerned]. For example, we expect a 0.1 degree solar cycle variation and there does seem to be such a variation in climate, but that is not what the climate panic is about.
This was largely a propaganda event. Boxer et al gave their speeches and harangues then fled.
The room was largely empty when Pielke and Spencer gave their testimony.
They refuted the lies and misinformation presented by the hot earthers but there was no one there to listen.
David Borth says:
July 19, 2013 at 10:59 pm
I posted Dr. Spencer’s now-snipped article because commentators had been speculating about his beliefs. Why not let the man speak for himself? I was surprised that Anthony originally allowed it, since he’s right, it was religion & not science. Dr. Spencer’s religious beliefs are frequently cited by CACCAdvocates, so IMO are relevant, but it’s Anthony’s blog, so he’s free to rule out religion. So I’ll stick to science & public policy.
Intelligent Design in its current incarnation was hatched to try to sneak creationism into public schools after the courts barred its teaching in science classes, but it is if anything even less scientific than young Earth creationism, since it doesn’t even try to make testable predictions. The evidence to this effect was overwhelming in the Dover case, indeed embarrassing, but ID adherents are apparently shameless.
While you find Dr. Spencer’s faith-based beliefs about evolution coherent & compelling, they are in fact, to put it politely, easily demonstrated false. Transitional fossils abound. There is no genetic barrier in genomes keeping microevolution from becoming macroevolution, ie keeping fish from becoming tetrapods, for instance, or synapsid “reptiles” from becoming mammals. A single point mutation turns sugar-eating bacteria into nylon-eating microbes.
I respect Dr. Spencer’s atmospheric observational work & appreciate his drawing attention to the importance of oceanic oscillations in the climate system, for which contributions I thank him. But IMO it’s unfortunate the good doctor hasn’t stuck to the atmosphere in public pronouncements, whatever his private professions of faith. His anti-scientific beliefs about biology only give support to those who claim that skeptics of man-made global warming are participating in a “war on science”.
“Leif Svalgaard says:
July 20, 2013 at 7:58 am
There is no good evidence that solar activity is a major driver of climate.”
Really? I am surprised you have made such a, bold, statement.
Patrick says:
July 20, 2013 at 8:27 am
“There is no good evidence that solar activity is a major driver of climate.”
Really? I am surprised you have made such a, bold, statement.
If the evidence had been compelling, there would be no more discussion of the solar influence. It would be, like evolution, just a fact [contested only by crackpots and deniers of various stripes] and good science would be built on that firm foundation. However, that is not the case. To stay on topic: how many of the people testifying at the hearing showed the incontrovertible evidence that climate change was mainly controlled by solar activity? As I recall, that number is zero. Granted that there were weak mutterings about ‘natural variation’, but no evidence shown.
8 professional debaters…and 2 mealy mouthed lukewarmers
I thought everybody knew about natural variability and extreme weather.
I’ve heard no logical answers about CO2 causing CAGW and changing the climate but it does concern me that seemingly otherwise intelligent people would choose to ignore the benefits of CO2 and lie about the dangers.
In his own simple mind the senator thought he was ridiculing a real climate scientist for his religious beliefs thinking it would allow him to ignore his data and competing theory. (Wonder what the senator would have said if he had responded: ‘there is but one religion and Allah the one God’).
The CAGW religion encompasses a sort of witchcraft with a magic gas that is first evenly distributed in the atmosphere, then gets heated by the sun but somehow doesn’t warm the earth evenly but delivers it’s heat to the deep ocean and makes it snow in the UK.
There are literally hundreds of claimed impacts from CO2 but, where are the climate refugees, increased global diseases, endangered species corpses, 20 ft sea level rise, open Arctic Ocean, increased flooding, increased hurricanes, increased drought, no more snow skiing and any of the other disasters caused by Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming?
About the origin of life, I don’t know.
Is there a God? I don’t know.
But, neither does the enlightened senator.
I read the Climategate emails and the “harry read me file” so I know the CAGW religious theory is loaded with tricks and hiding evidence and it’s just another fight for the cause.
cn
I watched the whole video (skipping through the politician’s soliloquies). I was amused by the claim that global warming has left the atmosphere for the last 15 years (despite a significant increase in atmospheric CO2 in the same period) and gone to the deep ocean. Hmmm… I also found amusing the refusal to call a statistical flat line in warming a flat line. It made my head swim with the contradictions and unsupported innuendos from some of the witnesses. Roy on the other hand had a simple message. The climate is always changing, it has always changed and given that natural variability how can we possibly attribute a specific portion, all, none or some to AGW? Simple. We can’t. And yet the politicos still want to develop policies that will harm us and not measurably succeed in modifying the natural variability of our climate.
Moderator –
So you snipped me for, in essence, saying that the references to Dr. Spencer’s religious beliefs by alarmists are an ad hominem attack? I think you should reconsider.
‘Oh please. I suppose you reject all the scientific work of Issac Newton then?’ no because that is backed up with checkable calculations and experiments and stood the test of time! Remember they used Newtons laws to get a man on the moon! However ID is not checkable or stood any test of time! And anyhow to come out and say you were not a believer in the bible in his time, you took the risk of being strapped to a stake and burned alive! ‘He wrote many works that would now be classified as occult studies’ correct , as most people at the time believed in witches, goblins, magic, potions, etc, etc. Not to, no doubt meant a trip to the stake. Remember the ‘Witch Finder General’ about this time! Burned some thing like 300 people? For basically no reason at all, except the reward money!
‘ Argue the science, not the man’ and that is what I have done, because there is zero scientific evidence for ID!.
In arguing the science rather than the man, IMO the point is that a scientist’s conclusions in his area of expertise are not invalidated by his religious-based beliefs about a different discipline.
ID is indeed not science, but that doesn’t mean that Dr. Spencer’s understanding of the air & ocean are similarly bogus. In fact, quite the contrary with regard to his climate science.