Guest essay by Dr. Tim Ball
Attempts to understand climate are stalled. The standstill parallels the pre-Copernican state when the Ptolemaic model had held sway for 2000 years but no longer fit the data. The Catholic church perpetuated Ptolemy similar to the religious adherence of climate science to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Their model is inadequate like the Ptolemaic model because new data doesn’t fit their model. The Copernican debate involved re-examination of planetary cycles and required Tycho Brahe’s long detailed records for confirmation.
Brahe’s data fit the Copernican model (heliocentric), but not the religiously supported 2000 year old Ptolemaic model (geocentric). A chapter titled Climate Theory versus Models and Metaphors in Essex and McKitrick’s excellent book Taken By Storm has a section titled “Marooned Halfway up Mount Climate Theory”. They identify the limitations facing official climate science including; working from averages, an inability to deal with turbulence and Navier-Stokes, and chaos. They conclude “Global climate is not treatable by conventional means.” These are internal functions.
The recent WUWT article by Luedecke and Weiss addressed the issue of climate cycles and generated the usual divisions and arguments. It is a debate essentially ignored by the IPCC. Part of the reason for both the article and the IPCC ignoring cycles is because neither generally looks at records of adequate lengths to determine most climate cycles. For example the Milankovitch cycles are not included in IPCC models because they considered the time scales are too long. Another reason is the lack of records with adequate length to detect cycles through spectral analysis. There is also the historic division on climate between the west and the east ( in Cold War terms).
There are certain real measures of success rarely officially acknowledged. In climate one measure is to be mentioned negatively in the leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU). On May 22, 2008 Phil Jones to Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt.
PPS Our web server has found this piece of garbage – so wrong it is unbelievable that Tim Ball wrote a decent paper in Climate Since AD 1500. I sometimes wish I’d never said this about the land stations in an email. Referring to Alex von Storch just shows how up to date he is.
He refers to a book edited by Raymond Bradley and Phil Jones published in 1992. In other words it preceded the shift into corrupted, manipulated, politicized climate science publicly manifest in the 1995 IPCC Report. Benjamin Santer’s unsupported insertion of the phrase “discernible human influence” was clear evidence of what was happening. It is pathetic to see him now claiming the victim’s role. Part of the IPCC problem was to offset material in the 1990 Report that contradicted their new agenda. Chief among these was the graph (7c) showing the Medieval Warm Period. The book appears to indicate the CRU gang still recognized that lack of long term data was a problem, as Lamb identified. Instead they chose to play with a broken hockey stick.
Content of the book illustrates how much climate changes through time and provides extensive data and analysis from different sources and regions. My chapter in the historical climate section is titled “Historical and Instrumental Evidence: Central Canada, 1714-1850”. One valuable benefit was the editors required each author review another chapter. (Is that a form of peer review?). I had the privilege of reviewing the chapter by E.P. Borisenkov “Documentary evidence from the U.S.S.R”. His major source was the Russian Chronicles, a collective of weather and crop conditions essentially from 1000 AD in conjunction with arrival of Vikings in what is now Moscow and the beginning of the Romanov regime. Borisenkov and Pasetsky (1983) established the occurrence of 350 “hungry” years in the intervening1000 years. They identified a long term awareness of the relationship between weather, crop conditions and peasant unrest.
During the time I was reviewing Borisenkov’s work I was also working with the Canadian Wheat Board and Chinese climatologist who sought help regarding increasing crop production. China realized that just as the US seeks energy independence they needed food supply independence. They were already producing triple crops in most of China south of the Yangtze river. The river is a very significant divide in China, especially with regards precipitation. The greatest potential for expanding food production was north of the river, but involved grains other than rice. Canada was a logical case study. They were successful as production data shows (Figure 1).
Figure 1
I was aware of Chinese climatology and their lengthy records because I gave a paper at a climate conference in Bologna Italy in 1988.[2] Several papers given at the conference illustrated the extent and potential of their historic record. Another example was the vast Vatican archives just beginning to be examined. However, the most impressive was the length and extent of the Chinese records. Emperors knew food production failures created potential for social unrest so, like the Tsars, they kept detailed weather and crop records.
Development of climate as a vehicle for political control was achieved through various meetings that culminated in Rio 1992 at which Agenda 21 established the political agenda and the UNFCCC set up the IPCC to predetermine the scientific proof that CO2 was causing global warming. An underlying division emerged that few recognized or understood that is very important in today’s debate.
Eastern nations led by the Soviets and Chinese argued that the weather patterns (climate) were cyclical. A factor in learning about Soviet science occurred because Jewish people escaped and set up translation services in Israel of material not previously available. The west led by the US and Europe could not allow the idea that weather and climate is cyclical so they pushed chaos theory. They ignored the contradiction created by claiming weather was chaotic and unpredictable and then making predictions (projections). The public understood the contradiction because they had a low opinion of weather forecasting and knew they had little or no skill beyond 72 hours. The response was that there is a difference between weather and climate predictions, which ignores that climate is the average of the weather. Essex and McKitrick note “The truth is, we have much less reason to ascribe certainty to climate models than we do to weather models.”
Throughout the Kyoto Protocol negotiations Russia and China kept their own counsel based on a much better understanding of the science. Putin said Russia would not ratify Kyoto. The Russian vote was critical. It was the only remaining country with sufficient carbon dioxide production to achieve the 55 countries producing 55 percent minimum. It produced 17.4 percent of emissions in 1990 bringing the total to 61.6 percent. Russia actively promoted its rejection as President Putin’s economic adviser Andrei Illarionov gave first class public presentations on why Kyoto was unnecessary and wouldn’t work. Suddenly Putin announced he would ratify – Illarionov resigned. Putin publicly explained that EU members persuaded him they would support Russian application to the World Trade Organization (WTO) only if Russia ratified Kyoto. Russian joined in November 2004 and was admitted to the WTO in 2012 after 18 years of trying.
Despite this Russian climate scientists maintained perspective. Yury Izrael, Director, Global Climate and Ecology Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences and IPCC Vice President said in 2005 there was no evidence of a human signal. Remember this is 10 years after Santer had altered the 1995 Summary for Policymakers to say there was a discernible signal. This was a Science Academy that rejected the political campaign deliberately orchestrated by the Royal Society in England and fully supported by the US Academy of Science to push AGW.
The difference in analyzing climate science patterns and mechanisms between the IPCC approach and climate cycles is a false scientific difference. The IPCC has influenced and controlled the thinking to promote their political climate science. If they acknowledge there are cycles they have to abandon the simplistic linear trend approach developed in The Limits to Growth and applied in their computer models ever since. Failure of the IPCC approach was accentuated by their disregard of the scientific method. Instead of disproving the hypothesis that human CO2 was causing global warming they only considered material that appeared to prove it. They we’re able to manipulate data, method and models to apparently accommodate what was happening. They led the public to believe their models worked by constantly changing terminology – failed predictions became projections and global warming became climate change. Finally, they lost the ability to manipulate the temperature data when satellite data became available. After 2000 the natural cycle, mainly dictated by the sun, asserted itself and the gap between their model projections and reality widened.
The IPCC kept climate science marooned half way up Mount Climate Theory. Meanwhile those not caught up in the deliberate corruption, like the Russians and Chinese and a few brave mostly unfunded western scientists pursued the cyclical pattern of climate. The IPCC made chaos out of climate science so it got stuck on the mountain where it remains today. It will stay there until the IPCC is disbanded and the proper scientific method includes re-examining the hypothesis when the data doesn’t fit and consideration of the null hypothesis is allowed.
References:
[1] “Climatic Change, Droughts and Their Social Impact: Central Canada, 1811-20, a classic example.” In C.R.Harington (ed) The Year Without a Summer? World Climate in 1816. 1992, National Museum of Natural Sciences, Canadian Museum of Nature, Ottawa
[2] “Historical and Instrumental Evidence of Extreme Climatic Conditions in Central Canada: 1770-1820”, Annales Geophysicae, Proceedings of the Annual Geophysical Society General Assembly, Bologna, March 1988, p. 84
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Tim Ball: ‘Brahe’s data fit the Copernican model (heliocentric)’
No it didn’t. And Kepler couldn’t make it fit, no matter how hard he tried.
It was only when he considered the possibility of elliptical planetary motions,
with two foci (of which the sun was but one) that Brahe’s data fitted the theory.
Tim Ball says, “After 2000 the natural cycle, mainly dictated by the sun, asserted itself and the gap between their model projections and reality widened.”
http://www.sharepointdan.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/dilbert-104572.strip_.print_.gif
“Copernicus and Galileo get far more credit than they deserve for their broken celestial mechanics … ”
Copernicus’s great achievement was the paradigm shift against all the opposition, exactly what IPCC-sponsored science needs right now.
Tim Ball’s new book is also available from,
http://www.stairwaypress.com/bookstore/the-deliberate-corruption-of-climate-science/
This is not a radical book. It is a very easily understood read, however, the information and chronology, and yes the obvious deliberately perpetrated fraud by the few over the many will be hard to read for many of the many. Therein lies the problem, Dr. Ball lays out quite succinctly who did what, why, when, and the results of the actions. Most will know, or have heard enough to know, what he relays is accurate and correct. For those that doubt, they can check the public record, Dr. Ball’s account will stand up to scrutiny.
But that is not going to be the problem the book presents to many of it’s readers. The problem will be people will not want to accept what he describes because of their political views / beliefs, and their received (but incorrect) understandings of “the science”. Some will already know when Dr. Tim Ball describes the problems, and the deliberate frauds of the Hockey Stick, computer climate modelling, and the (near) surface temperature records that he is correct. Most will also know he is correct as he describes the timeline of the bureaucracy built up at the UN by Maurice Strong. Most will know he is correct when he describes the formation of the IPCC to find a human signal by Maurice Strong, in spite of the science method (actually abandoning the scientific method). Most too will also be aware he is correct in his description of the who, the when, and the why the peer review process was deliberately corrupted. So, what does this book present that so many will have a problem accepting?
Government funded science, usurped by the UN’s IPCC and geo-politics have combined to make what was a one man scam in to a global scientific, bureaucratic and political cock up of hither to unknown proportions in human history. In short, Maurice Strong started, very deliberately, a ball rolling, he re-packaged environmentalism, but the ball became an unstoppable gravy train that all have jumped aboard.
Strong’s original intention was to bring down the developed West, make a bit of money along the way, and hopefully have a less populated planet for the few rich people left to enjoy, “sustainably” of course. But, the gravy train had developed a life of it’s own, way beyond anything he could have imagined, or controlled. The catalyst for the transformation from a rolling stone to an unstoppable PC gravy train was James Hansen’s 1988 presentation, he successfully sold AGW to the politicians. Hansen also sold AGW to the career minded scientists and academics, by his own meteoric rise, from unknown to world famous overnight. The rest as they say is history. However, it is a history of deliberate corruption, regardless of the scientific method, regardless of the truth of the matter, regardless of honesty, and most importantly regardless of the cost to the rest of humanity. All because of the environmental dictate that the end justifies the means. It does not. We will have to pay for this, if the IPCC, AGW, and all the related bureaucratic, political, and academic fraud is not exposed and thrown out wholesale asap. There will be many egos, reputations, fortunes, and pensions, lost as the scam collapses, but, and this is the problem the reader is left with, what the cost if we do? What the cost if we do not?
It is a catch 22, the corrupted science has been made too big to fail, but fail it must. Dr. Tim Ball’s book is probably the most easily understood explanation of this to date. It will not be the last. It is arguably not the first book either, that accolade may well be best given to Green Hell by Steven Milloy. There will have to be future books by other authors in regards to the (political and bureaucratic) dangers geo-politics poses to the nations and peoples of this world, that we all seem so naive about at present.
As I have tried to communicate, this book is an easy read, but, what it contains is not an easy read in what it understandably exposes to the reader.
Tim,
it isn’t just their modelling that is poor. It is their ethical standards that are the problemhttp://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/heatwave-one-of-the-most-significant-on-record-says-bureau-of-meteorology-20140120-314od.html
Note with contempt this statement.
“”Melbourne’s average temperature on Thursday was 35.45 degrees, narrowly eclipsing the previous high of 35.4 set on January 30, 2009.””
and of course our own Southern Pravda lap it up like dogs at a bowl.
regards.
Robin says: @ur momisugly January 20, 2014 at 11:09 am
…If we ignore the declarations of political intent, we are wide-open to extraordinarily pernicious ideas.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Robin you missed these declarations of political intent. (You might be interested on this article for teachers: Web of Interdependence and Common Core lesson plans aimed to promote globalization and interdependence )
So politicial leaders have been planing a world government since the 1930’s. A key point is interdependence. This bring us to
So the Progressives like Al Gore and Bill Clinton have bet the farm on the theory that interdependence DECREASES the probability of war. Base on this assumption Clinton handed US technology including military technology to China. See Chasing the Dragon: Clinton’s China Policy
The big problem is can you trust China to go along with the idea of Interdependence? Geopolitics, Currency and Trade Wars: Why The Risk of World War Is Rising Also this is from “The China and Latin America blog features news and commentary from the China and Latin America Program at the Inter-American Dialogue, a leading U.S. center for policy analysis, exchange, and communication on issues in Western Hemisphere affairs.”
Clinton on food interdependence:
Comments by Al Gore on Interdependence:
The Earth Charter is referred to as the Declaration of Interdependence by many. Note how it makes a mockery of the Declaration of Independence.
More on the interdependence:
http://www.interdependencemovement.org/news_archive.php
Interdependence and the Luxury of War
http://www.eagleforum.org/psr/2000/sept00/psrsept00.html
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/plans.htm
Dr. Ball brings up the point there are two theories. Chaos Theory and Climate Cycles. As Dr. Brown has pointed out you get a bistable/multistable system and whether you are talking chaos (Dr.Brown) of Climate cycles you get the climate oscillating between bounds. In neither of these theories do you have a run-away system minus feedbacks aka CAGW.
Ken Coffman says:
January 20, 2014 at 10:36 am
Only if you’re Phil Jones or Michael Mann.
The rest of us appreciate the news.
Good review of the poliSci of climate. One reason more that there was no attention paid by IPCC to long series, of course, is that CAGW was only to have been going on for 1/2 a century. They only began to back into the 19th century when the cycles there appeared to mimic the present ones. Since, they have had to back up AGW to the LIA because they could no longer bury it. Some author, I forget who, even saw significant AGW developing from pre-historic man. Soon, the apes will be culpable, too.
“Attempts to understand climate are stalled.”
No. Attempts to NOT understand climate are stalled. Those trying to understand it are still working hard.
Also, since we touch on chaos theory, which I know is favored muchly, apparently by both sides of the debate, I would say if the climate is cycling over 100s of thousands of years between two well established highs and lows only several degrees apart, the “chaos” is in the details only. If an event takes 5 minutes, there is probably millions of nanoseconds we can’t really describe or predict in between, so chaos would seem to be a matter of the degree of graininess we are prepared to contemplate.
Chaos, like the usual use of the word reflects frustration of full understanding. Quantum mechanics is statistics dealing with the impossible and unnecessary task of accounting for all the details of what is going on. Chaos is a throwing up of hands.
Mods my post from over an hour a go disappeared. please fish it out of the ether. Thanks
Luther Bl’t says:
January 20, 2014 at 11:43 am
Galileo’s observation of the phases of Venus falsified Ptolemy without necessarily vindicating Copernicus. It didn’t rule out Tycho’s revised geocentric system, for instance. But it did have the effect of advancing heliocentric thought.
What finally convinced hold-out geocentric astronomers to adopt heliocentrism was Newton’s 1687 theory of gravitation, which explained Kepler’s elliptical orbits, derived from Tycho’s observations. But the Copernican model had already grown in favor throughout the 17th century, during the 54 years since Galileo’s heresy trial.
The Church in 1758 removed from its Index of Forbidden Books the overall prohibition of works advocating heliocentrism. But it didn’t rescind the 1633 judgments of the Inquisition against Galileo nor permit uncensored versions of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus or Galileo’s Dialogue. In 1820 the Church’s censor refused to license a book by a canon (same church position as held by Copernicus) which treated heliocentrism as physical fact. The canon appealed to Pope Pius VII. The Congregation of the Index & the Holy Office then overturned the censor’s decision. Thus, when the next edition of the Index came out in 1835, Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus and Galileo’s Dialogue were finally omitted from it.
As a norwegian:
A: Dr. Tim Ball .Yyour reasoning might be the lack of my english skills or just top shelf
B: When the russian bear is grunting you need to pay attention. They might be ruthless enough to disregard human life to the extent of being the first and only nation to put an nuclear powered aircraft in the air. Nevermind the pilots flying a nuclear reactor with no shielding. Stupid americans. But when they do science, we should not run to our professors or concensus should we?
No matter what you believe, if the russians speak up, you better pay attention
Chaos and cycles are not necessarily in conflict. As Ed Lorentz first elegantly showed, chaotic systems will cycle reliably around their strange attractors (like warming and cooling) until flipped from one to the other (as by a simple bifurcation event). (there maynof course be any number of strange attractors innthe state space depending onnthe complexity of the model). In such systems, the precise specifics of any future state cannot be determined, but the general behavior around the attractors in N-1 Poincare space can still be reliably described. Since any nonlinear (meaning feedbacks) dynamic (meaning the feedbacks have time lags) system is by definition mathematically chaotic (meaning among other things sensitive dependence on initial conditions), it is trivial to the point of axiomatic that climate is chaotic. That does not mean it cannot be reliably modelled. It does mean it cannot be modeled with great numerical precision, that this imprecision will increase with time, and that other systems descriptions should also be employed to characterize the behavior.
False dichotomies do not advance the credibility of skeptics.
Christopher Hanley says:
January 20, 2014 at 12:28 pm
Catholic Church canon Copernicus waited until the end of his life to publish the theory on which he had been working for over 30 years. He was finally persuaded to do so by a Lutheran student, who arranged to have the book printed. Darwin waited only a little over 20 years before being forced into print by Wallace’s potential scooping of him.
To what extent Copernicus’ delay was from fear of Church disapproval or from the desire to support his theory well cannot be known. He dedicated it to Pope Paul III.
He held a copy of On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres just before he died. So while heliocentrism did have to fight for acceptance against the authorities’ support for geocentrism, as climate skeptics do today,, Copernicus himself died at the moment when the struggle began.
Rud Istvan says: @ur momisugly January 20, 2014 at 2:18 pm
Chaos and cycles are not necessarily in conflict….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Thanks for that. Saves me from the trouble of trying to articulate the same thought (with less elegance).
(And thanks mods :>) )
Gail Combs:
I think you know I like your posts and I follow them with interest, so I am sure you will recognise the sincerity of this post.
I am concerned that you are still at your keyboard with your migrane attack. Please consider your health and wellbeing.
Richard
Talking of Russia and China.
lt looks like there will to be a very interesting weather pattern setting up in that part of the world over the coming week. Because looking at the jet stream forecast charts am expecting some ice age like weather in that part of the world over this week. As warm moist air gets drawn up from the south and then flows along in the Arctic circle and then it comes back down south again across Russia as a “arctic blast”. So expect heavy snow and some very low temps turning up in northern asia over the coming week.
Gkell1 says:
January 20, 2014 at 11:51 am
I don’t get your point.
I am familiar with Augustine’s “De Genesi ad literam”, often translated as “On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis”. He wrote it to persuade his colleagues among the Early Church Fathers to quit taking all of the Bible literally, thus arguing for a flat earth covered by a solid dome or tent-like structure, ie the firmament (Jerome’s Latin firmamentum from Hebrew raqiya’ via Septuagint Greek stereoma).
He felt that such literalism discouraged the propagation of the faith, which was his main concern. Once the Church adopted the Ptolemaic system of earth-centered spheres as consistent with the Bible, this problem was solved, until a churchman over 1100 years later proposed a sun-centered model.
Gail Combs says:
January 20, 2014 at 1:28 pm
Dr. Ball brings up the point there are two theories. Chaos Theory and Climate Cycles.
===============
They are not mutually exclusive. Earth’s ocean tides are chaotic. Any attempt to calculate them forward in time using first principles would suffer the same problems as climate models.
Yet, we are able to calculate the tides for thousands of harbors for years in advance with a high degree of accuracy using cycles. Which when you think about it, it rather amazing. Here we have a problem that on one hand science tells us cannot be solved, yet the real world tells us there is a solution.
And even more amazingly, the solution to the ocean tides rests on Astrology. We observe the tides at a specific harbor and also the position of the sun, moon and planets in the heavens. Any when the pattern of the heavens repeats, so do the tides.
So, if there is any possibility to forecast climate, as Dr. Brown tells us, chaos dictates that it cannot be calculated from physical laws. On the other hand, as Dr. Bell tells us, the only known method to calculate future behavior of chaotic systems is by decomposition into cycles.
Thus, why waste time on climate models – they are doomed to fail. This was established by the IPCC years ago. The only technique that we know of that might work is decomposition into cycles. True, there is no guarantee of success, but that isn’t the same as a guarantee of failure. Not the same by a long shot.
David G says:
January 20, 2014 at 12:01 pm
Gkelli didn’t say that. I did.
I wonder what you think Galileo was wrong about? The issue at his trial was Copernicanism, ie the theory that the earth goes around the sun. About that GG was right. He was wrong about circular orbits (about which Kepler was right) & that the sun lies at the center of the universe, but then just about everyone in 1633 was wrong about that.
The pope & the Church in general would have let GG publish if he hadn’t put the pope’s own arguments in the mouth of his character Simplicio, whose position is in effect ridiculed in the Dialogues. So I agree that GG brought the Inquisition down on his own head to some extent.
Rud Istvan says:
January 20, 2014 at 2:18 pm
Chaos and cycles are not necessarily in conflict.
===========
An elegant description. Quite correct, chaotic systems can be calculated. And the calculated result is guaranteed to diverge from reality over time, no matter how precise your work. No matter how hard you try, errors will creep in and overwhelm the answer.
Joe says:
January 20, 2014 at 11:42 am
Dr. Ball wrote about the Galileo affair, not the whole history of Christianity & science. In that case, the Church was wrong & GG right. The earth does go around the sun, while turning on its axis & wobbling. It is not at rest at the center of the universe, as advocated by the Church in 1633.
Of course you’re right about Christianity & science in general. Any list of the ten greatest scientists might well include eight devout Catholics, Orthodox or Protestants. Regrettably members of some ostensibly Christian sects today do reject science, but the denominations with the largest number of adherents don’t, to include the Roman Catholic Church.
I note that Mr. Ball’s plot of wheat production in China shows a maximum in 1997 or 1998. I note that this period was a very warm period. While it seems unlikely that the increased warmth directly influenced wheat production, it’s certainly possible, though a myriad of other factors could easily be more influential.
I think it would be worthwhile, whenever possible, to point out the many benefits of a warmer planet. I for one think that the overall effect of warmer temperatures would be quite positive.