By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
The campaign by certain rent-seeking scientific societies to push a single, narrow view of the climate question continued in Scotland today with a meeting coyly entitled Climate Change: Science and Society at the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland’s once-famous, once-scientific society.
Your correspondent, following a tip-off from “rms”, a WUWT commenter, tootled round from Queen Street and sat through this gag-reflex-tweaking propaganda event.
This was the first meeting at any scientific society at which not only did I hear a member of the audience demand less science but the rest of the audience actually applauded.
We’ll come to that. But I’m not surprised. An eminent Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh suggested to its then president almost ten years ago that I should be asked to address the Society on the climate question so that the Fellows could hear both sides. He was told, in no uncertain terms, that any opinion but that one would be welcome.
Professor David Sugden, FRSE, who chaired today’s event, opened with the usual pietism about climate change being “one of the biggest problems facing humankind”. He was disappointed that climate change had not been mentioned in the recent UK election (actually it had, in UKIP’s manifesto, which promised near-complete desubsidization of the climate nonsense, and UKIP gained more votes than any other party).
Professor Sugden, a smooth, murmuring perpetrator of effortless pietisms akin to the waffling bureaucrat Wither in C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, also said the forthcoming world-government conference in Paris was the world’s “last-chance saloon”. Pass the sick-bucket, Alice! (as my Australian brother is prone to put it).
Professor Gabriele Hegerl, FRSE, an IPCC activist from the [University of Edinburgh], presented a summary of the two-year-old Fifth ASSessment Report. The report was “science based on publications,” she burbled, as her PowerPoint presentation showed a picture of an IPCC scientist very obviously asleep during one of the “working” sessions.
We were not told, of course, that of 11,944 climate-science “publications” in the 21 years 1991-2011 only 41, or 0.3%, had even gone so far as to say most of the global warming since 1950 was manmade. In the IPCC’s ASSessment Report, this 0.3% “science based on publications” became “95% confidence”. Bozhe moi.
Professor Hegerl hoped that this year’s el Nino would be a big one, “beating the world record by how much?” We were not told this would be just in time for Paris, before the countervailing la Nina kicks in.
Next, some cherry-picking. Springtime snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere was declining (we were not told that annual northern-hemisphere snow cover shows no change throughout the satellite era).
Professor Hegerl mentioned Antarctic as well as Arctic sea-ice extent, but said the former had increased only “slightly”. We were not told that the increase in Antarctic sea ice now largely compensates for the loss of Arctic sea ice, and for several months it has been showing its greatest seasonal extent in the satellite era.
We were told that upper ocean temperature had “increased linearly”. We were not told its warming rate is equivalent to 0.23 degrees per [century]. What with the sky not falling and the sea not really rising, whatever shall we do?
We were told that it was “66% likely” that 20th-century warming had made current temperatures the warmest in at least 1400 years. We were not told that that modelling estimate is at variance with just about every peer-reviewed proxy record. Our good friends at CO2science.org have a collection of around 500 papers based on measurements showing that the medieval warm period was real, was global and was at least as warm as the present almost everywhere, and in some places warmer by up to 3 degrees.
We were told the ocean was “acidifying”. We were not told by how much. Not surprising, really, because no global measurement has ever been taken. All we have are a few transects and one or two local records. We were not told that the ocean was actually acid 55 million years ago, and yet the calcite corals that evolved 550 million years ago and the aragonites that first achieved algal symbiosis 175 million years ago somehow survived, and here we all are.
Professor Hegerl said observed temperatures had exceeded predictions in the 1990s. She heard me growling at this and reiterated it. However, the warming from January 1990 to December 1999, even on the average of the three much-adjusted and exaggerated surface temperature datasets, was 0.22 degrees, compared with the IPCC’s prediction of 0.28 degrees per decade over the medium term in its 1990 First ASSessment Report.
However, Professor Hegerl admitted that the Pause had not been predicted.
We were told that more water in the atmosphere because of global warming would lead to more rainfall. We were not told that not all records show this; nor were we told that the linear trend on the Met Office rainfall record, the longest in the world, shows an increase in rainfall of just 2 inches a year compared with almost a quarter of a millennium ago.
Professor Hegerl expressed considerable interest in what she said was a new finding of the IPCC: that there was a linear relationship between cumulative CO2 emissions and global temperature change. We were not told that in the last 18 years 5 months that “linear relationship” had broken down, with CO2 emissions and concentration continuing to rise at rates not seen in more than 800,000 years, and yet global temperatures showing no change at all over the period.
Besides, the CO2 forcing function is not linear but logarithmic. A possible mistake somewhere, one felt.
I asked Professor Hegerl about the now embarrassingly large discrepancy between the IPCC’s medium-term interval of temperature predictions made in 1990 and the observed outturn in the subsequent quarter of a century, which was only half the IPCC’s central estimate. The IPCC had accordingly halved its predicted interval of medium-term warming from [0.2, 0.4] degrees per decade in 1990 to [0.1, 0.2] degrees per decade in 2013. Outturn since 1979, on all measures, had been closer to 0.1 than 0.2 degrees per decade.
The satellite datasets had shown no warming for 18 years 4 months (UAH) or 18 years 5 months (RSS), and the ocean, perhaps the best indicator of the underlying warming rate, had been warming at a rate equivalent to less than a quarter of a degree per [century] across the entire 11-year run of bathythermograph data.
The Professor winced. There is no doubt about it: the pause is getting to them. She began her answer by saying that the IPCC had made no medium-term predictions in 1990: only predictions to 2100. I quickly interjected that it had predicted 1 degree of warming to 2025 and 1.8 degrees to 2030, against an outturn to date of not much more than a third of a degree in a quarter of a century.
Professor Sugden interrupted to tell me to let Professor Hegerl answer the question, but by then I’d made my point. Professor Hegerl, flustered at having been caught out on the content of the IPCC reports, speculated on some of the possible causes of what she called the “anomalously low warming” over the past decade or two. We were not told that anomalously high warming predictions might be a large part of the problem.
She mentioned relatively active volcanism. We were not told that since Pinatubo there has been no eruption of global significance. Less implausibly, she referred to the slowdown in solar activity: yet the IPCC has attributed so little forcing to solar changes that that pretext, too, fell short.
Next, she said that Professor Richard Lindzen’s negative feedback had not been observed and that, therefore, the very least we could expect from a doubling of CO2 concentration was 1.5 degrees’ warming. “The present slowdown in warming does not affect the prediction at all.” No, it doesn’t, and that, precisely is the problem: full steam ahead and damn the factedoes. We weren’t told, for instance, that Professor Lindzen’s negative feedback was actually derived from observation.
She concluded that the present el Nino would put warming back on track. We were not told that (alas, after the Paris pifflefest) the subsequent la Nina may well put the pause back on track.
A member of the audience, in that hectoring, bossy whine that is the hallmark of the climate campaigner everywhere, interjected that we shouldn’t be discussing “trivial quibbles about science” at all. All this talk of tenths of a degree was irrelevant.
The audience of “scientists” applauded rapturously. Actually, Miss, those tenths of a degree are relevant, because the warming to date is indeed only in tenths of a degree, and considerably fewer tenths than had been predicted.
While the next speaker was getting his act together, I had a look at the attendance register to find out why the audience had so ecstatically applauded the climate campaigner who had suggested that a scientific society should not concern itself with science.
As I had suspected, about three-quarters of the 70 people present were there either because they were on the taxpayer’s dime as academics, bureaucrats or students or because they were climate campaigners.
Even the members of what was once a distinguished scientific society no longer seemed to care about science. They seemed to care about money. As long as panicky governments were handing the stuff out by the barrow-load, they would pay not the slightest attention to the abyss now set between prediction and outturn.
Next, Professor Stuart Haszeldine, OBE, FRSE, said we were emitting “carbon” into the atmosphere “and there isn’t enough space”. Actually, we’re emitting carbon dioxide and there’s plenty of space, but people who live in towns seldom see the stars, so they don’t know how big space is.
However, he made an excellent and well balanced case for CO2 capture and storage: it was geologically safe, he said, but there was an energy penalty of 25%, though he hoped that might one day fall to 10% or even to 2-3% (dream on). He also hoped that the gas-fired plant at Peterhead on the north-east neuk of Buchan would shortly become the first gas-powered generation set in the world to be converted to CO2 capture and storage. We were not told that fracking is scarcely less safe than CO2 capture and storage.
He said that once the CO2 had been extracted chemically from the flue-gases and then sent through a compressor, it could be pumped out to sea using an existing pipeline and could be sequestered in the now-disused Goldeneye gas field under the North Sea. A similar retrofit at the Grangemouth refinery could send CO2 through another existing pipeline and out to the North Sea.
Next, Professor Mark Rounsevell, a specialist in modeling atmospheric chemistry at Edinburgh University, asked “So what? Should we adapt or mitigate?” He was willing to concede that the case for CO2 harming agricultural yields had not been made. Though crop yields were no longer increasing as much as they had done in previous decades, they had not dropped despite a very large reduction in the use of nitrogen fertilizers.
Dr Andy Kerr, an adviser to the Scottish executive, said that modeling of regional impacts for the UK had produced contradictory results. Earlier results had said it would be a bit wetter, later results had said the opposite. New scenarios were working on the basis of a warming of 4-5 degrees this century. We were not told that this would represent up to 20 times the underlying ocean warming rate of the past 11 years.
His sensible take-home message was that one should not start by worrying about climate change. Instead, one should be resilient to whatever might happen.
That was a cue for my question: the Cockenzie coal-fired plant (above) had been needlessly closed; the same was now to happen at Longannet; Scotland’s two nuclear plants were also due to be taken out of service; no replacement base-load power would be built; d*mnfool windmills were intermittent, costly and environmentally destructive, and were failing far sooner than their design lifetimes; and how was the Scottish executive going to keep the lights on?
That turned out to be the right question. Dr Kerr said the lights could well go out this winter because EU regulation was closing coal-fired plants all over England too, so that the entire UK grid would become acutely vulnerable. He was a fan of windmills but recognized that they were expensive and did not work when the wind was not blowing (we were not told that that is most of the time).
After the mandatory break for bad coffee and good shortbread with the Scottish saltire carefully baked into the crust in a politically correct fashion, Professor Ottmar Edenhofer of the Potsdam Institute (them again) said that CO2 emissions growth was accelerating, and admitted that the 2-degree global-warming limit had nothing to support it either in physics or in economics: it was political.
Professor Edenhofer said energy intensity per unit of GDP was improving, but was more than offset by population and GDP growth. Coal was undergoing a renaissance, notwithstanding attempts in Europe and North America to shut it down, and the renaissance was not attributable solely to China and India. We were not told it’s nearly all attributable to China alone, nor that Mr Obama has unilaterally exempted China from any obligations to the world government he hopes to establish in Paris this December.
The “precautionary principle” required us to decarbonize quickly. We were not told that the “precautionary principle” is neither precautionary nor a principle: it is an expedient deployed to divert attention from the economic reality – which even the IPCC admits in its 2013 report – that mitigation today is costlier than adaptation even to absurdly over-predicted warming the day after tomorrow.
In Professor Edenhofer’s view, the fastest road to decarbonisation was the introduction of a CO2 tax or of emissions trading. We were not told that both are in force in Europe and have been a failure.
He said, “Climate policy has a current cost, but may benefit future generations: the question of intergenerational justice is important.” He estimated that, on business as usual, there would be a warming of 4 degrees this century. I asked him whether it was realistic for him to expect a 17-fold increase in the underlying ocean warming rate compared with what had been measured over the past 11 years.
I added that [in the city that gave the world the first member of his profession – Adam Smith (below), the first economist, a free-marketeer and, along with Benjamin Franklin, a founding member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh] it was depressing to be told that the answer to what increasingly appeared to be a non-problem was a gargantuan regime of totalitarian interference in the working of the free market in energy supply.
Taxing or pricing CO2, I said, was a poll tax on the poor.
Dr Edenhofer angrily replied that he accepted “the science” [but not the science that shows very nearly all the models to have exaggerated the warming trend].
He considered there was nothing totalitarian about government setting market prices (I kid you not). Prices, he said, must reflect society’s most important scarcities. But that is what the free market does, all by itself.
His objective, he said in an unctuous tone, was “caring for the atmosphere and rescuing the free-market economy”.
The audience of totalitarians, their wobbly bottoms planted on the Consolidated Fund just as firmly as steatopygy allowed, loved this confirmation of their opinion that global warming is what Lord Stern described in his now-discredited report on climate economics as “a market failure”. Dr Edenhofer’s comment got the biggest applause of the day.
Finally, Angus Gillespie of Shell said the oil corporation was investing billions in CO2 capture and storage. Shell, he said, accepted that climate change was underway and that fossil fuels were playing a role [can I have another grant now I’ve said that?].
Shell wanted a price on CO2, because it was changing from being an oil and gas corporation to being a gas and oil corporation. Gas had half of coal’s emissions per TWh of energy generated, so a CO2 price would make coal uncompetitive and increase Shell’s market share.
Shell was investing in CO2 capture and storage because it had concluded that 7 billion tons of CO2 would have to be sequestered every year to keep within the 2-degree global-warming limit. The cost of the technology was currently $125 per tonne captured, of which $100 was the cost of the capture itself. Costly though the technology was, Shell reckoned that any other method would be 40% costlier still. They estimated that the deadweight cost or energy penalty in driving the capture, compression, transport, injection and storage was 10-20% (the industry reckons more like 25-40% at present).
I asked Mr Gillespie whether, in view of the now embarrassingly large and ever-growing disconnect between the exaggerated predictions of the “settled-science” models and the inconvenient, real-world measurements, Shell had any strategy for disentangling itself from the CO2-as-demon matrix.
The question caught him by surprise. He said that although Shell maintained its portfolio of energy-producing reserves and other assets as flexibly as possible, the corporation had no strategy for handling the situation if real-world temperatures continued to demonstrate that the models were wrong.
A climate campaigner at the back of the room – another whining, bossy voice, male this time – asked for Mr Gillespie’s reaction to the campaign to persuade people to sell their investments in fossil-fuel corporations.
Mr Gillespie responded, bluntly, that divestment made no difference to the share price. Shareholders took a relatively short-term view of the value of Shell’s assets – typically ten or eleven years – so the divestment campaign would have no impact at all.
Then, in a final dig at the skeptics, he said, “Some of the debate has become a distraction.”
So let me make a prediction (that’s what They do). As global temperatures resume their rise, but do so at a rate very far below prediction, the debate will continue, whether the Royal Society of Edinburgh or Royal Dutch Shell like it or not.
As the hall emptied, Dr Edenhofer passed by. I said I hoped he’d find his way back to the free market in time. He said the Potsdam institute was committed to the free market. “Communists, the lot of you,” I said, with a warm smile to reassure him that I was not intending an insult.
Professor Haszledine came past at that moment and said, “And what’s wrong with Communism?” Sadly, he meant it. The only thing we learn from history …
On the way out, I asked Professor Sugden whether there had ever been a climate-skeptical speaker at a Royal Society event. He said there had been several interjections by skeptics over the years. I pressed him, asking whether the Society had ever invited a skeptic to speak from the podium. “No,” he said.
That says it all. Can’t have scientific quibbles about tenths of a degree, can we? Not when our fat subsidies might be cut off once governments work out they’ve been had.
Though some of the speakers made sensible points, neither speakers nor audience seemed aware of most of the central scientific facts in the climate debate. They knew the Party Line, but that was all. One or two had heard of the pause, but none had realized how wide the discrepancy between models’ predictions and real-world outturn had become.
And where they knew the facts, they presented only one side of the picture. This was a propaganda event, pure and simple. It had nothing to do with science except the name of the once-illustrious society in whose premises the meeting was held.
After the meeting Professor Hegerl told me it was simply not true that the rate of warming since 1990 was half of what the IPCC had then predicted. The current temperature outturn, she said, was consistent with the models’ predictions.
She knew, of course, that there was no penalty in making such an entirely incorrect and insupportable assertion: for the mainstream media can now be relied upon not to ask any of the right questions. The good news, though, is that they did not bother to attend. It is slowly dawning on them that this particular horse is dead.
I came away saddened. It is not just the terrible destruction of the Scottish landscape wrought by the 600-ft windmills that can be seen from two-thirds of it. It is not just the extinction of the ospreys and golden eagles and pipistrelles and countless other species of birds and bats smashed out of the sky by the grim, new triffids of totalitarianism.
As one of Scotland’s most successful civil engineers and I agreed over ersatz coffee and politically-correct biscuits, it is the loss of the use of reason herself by the only known species that possesses it that is the heaviest loss.
How will science recover, if the very bastions of science, however elegant their premises, are infested with intellectual pygmies who no longer care to hunt for the objective truth that is – or, rather, was – the end and object as much of science as it is of religion?
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philincalifornia said
That thread cites the paper “Climate Consensus and ‘Misinformation’: A Rejoinder to Agnotology, Scientific Consensus, and the Teaching and Learning of Climate Change” at http://download-v2.springer.com/static/pdf/957/art%253A10.1007%252Fs11191-013-9588-3.pdf?token2=exp=1432766636~acl=%2Fstatic%2Fpdf%2F957%2Fart%25253A10.1007%25252Fs11191-013-9588-3.pdf*~hmac=9760b4b2e2966cfe286303b7765e4ea530d042c408acb0a040d4c6027ca16b14
This paper is paywalled, which probably means you cannot read it.
But I can, and having scanned it, it makes no reference at all to the Cook study (the word Cook does not appear in it and he is the first named author), though it does reference papers by Oreskes. Further it includes no numbers at all anywhere in the paper, except as year and page numbers of papers. Oh and “one plus one equals three” and “one plus one equals two” as sentences.
A representation of this paper as refuting the detailed analysis of Cook 2013 is totally out of order.
Oh Climate Peeeete… (ahem):
Please.
See above: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/05/27/the-royal-anti-science-society-of-edinburgh/#comment-1946782
Not for Pete’s sake.
Oh, for Pete’s sake, that’s very likely true, F.O.B. #(:)),
but, so that C.P. doesn’t fool anyone, I post.
Oops, sorry, I have the wrong paper! Must be more careful with Google. Will comment on the right paper very soon.
You really take Cook seriously? You must be a sociologist undergraduate. Or worse.
Well, since I f-ked up badly myself on a link on the gulfstream thread, I can forgive you for that.
(correct post)
philincalifornia said
The paper by Legates “Climate Consensus and ‘Misinformation’: A Rejoinder to Agnotology, Scientific Consensus, and the Teaching and Learning of Climate Change”
http://download-v2.springer.com/static/pdf/359/art%253A10.1007%252Fs11191-013-9647-9.pdf?token2=exp=1432768217~acl=%2Fstatic%2Fpdf%2F359%2Fart%25253A10.1007%25252Fs11191-013-9647-9.pdf*~hmac=e86526a3a3e849886c4543e1e2f59c954877c86521a415f411c09cbf3f9b0be1
comments only on the analysis of the independent rater view of Cook 2013, and says that most of the “supports AGW” papers came in category (3) which is :
(3)Implies humans are causing global warming. E.g., research assumes greenhouse gas emissions cause warming without explicitly stating humans are the cause ‘…carbon sequestration in soil is important for mitigating global climate change’
And claims that this is a subjective category which does not mean that the authors of the paper rated would necessarily hold that viewpoint.
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/article
However, the vital information not covered anywhere in the Legates paper is that Cook 2013 also arranged that “2142 papers received self-ratings from 1189 authors”.
What happened? Almost half the number of papers got self-rated as “expresses no opinion”, and of the ones which the original authors rated as expressing an opinion, 97.2% were self-rated as supporting humans being the primary cause of AGW implicitly or explicitly.
Therefore, whether or not the methodological criticism was relevant to the independent rater procedure, the original authors themselves were quite clear about what they though was indicated by their papers.
So the 97.2% stands. And my criticism of Monkton’s 0.3% figure stands too.
How can you get to 97.2% when “Almost half the number of papers got self-rated as “expresses no opinion”. That doesn’t make any sense.
BTW the raters were in no way independent or anonymous. They communicated with each other during the rating process.
The so-called ‘consensus‘ and the bogus “97%” are closely related: they’re both propaganda. And they’re both Bovine Scatology.
…. and, therefore, there is direct empirical evidence that CO2 going from 280 ppm to 400 ppm (a half-doubling of the effect) must have had some effect on some climate parameter, because somewhere between 0.3% and 97.1% of a load of people say so.
Why do they go through these f-kin gyrations? Why don’t they just post what the evidence is ??
(PS I already know the answer)
CP sez:
So the 97.2% stands. And my criticism of Monkton’s 0.3% figure stands too.
Yep. Stands on its head.
Almost half the number of papers got self-rated as “expresses no opinion”
But somehow 97.2% gets extracted from the result.
Pete,
You seem really up-tight about Cookie’s little paper. Why? The whole project was just an exercise in willy-waving: “Look how many papers we’ve got, aren’t you jealous?”.
No matter how many papers Cookie and Nuttyjelly claim are supporting the warmunist creed, it doesn’t make the religion of thermageddon any more correct. In the same way, there are a hell of a lot of bibles in this world, but it doesn’t make Christianity any less of a fairy tale. The huge amount of warmunist papers just means that there are a hell of a lot of scientists ready to write junk if it’ll get them a grant.
Besides, would you trust a man who fantasizes about dressing up as a n@zi?
It’s interesting that John Cook has never denied being a neo-Nazi:
I think that photo was a spoof, based on the similarity of initials of his organization. The logo on his cap is that of his organization’s penguins looking over their shoulders, not lightning bolts.
And here I thought Scotland was the homeland of Engineers.
The world needs a Monckton Science Society. All invited. All welcome. Believers. Skeptics. Press. Public.
Lord Monckton gets to speak!
Pifflefest.
Christopher Monckton, you are one funny fellow.
Kuhscheissefest ?
“Professor Hegerl mentioned Antarctic as well as Arctic sea-ice extent, but said the former had increased only “slightly”. We were not told that the increase in Antarctic sea ice now largely compensates for the loss of Arctic sea ice, and for several months it has been showing its greatest seasonal extent in the satellite era.”
Compensates?
Sea ice has no value to me. I consider it a bad thing. What value is contributed by Antarctic sea ice to what value is lost in lost Arctic sea ice?
Sir, it appears you are playing along with the nonsense.
“perhaps the best indicator of the underlying warming rate, had been warming at a rate equivalent to less than a quarter of a degree per decade across the entire 11-year run of bathythermograph data”
Shouldn’t this read “less than a quarter of a degree per century”?
Well spotted. Per century is correct.
[In this sentence, correct? “We were told that upper ocean temperature had “increased linearly”. We were not told its warming rate is equivalent to 0.23 degrees per [century]. ” .mod]
Thank you, .mod. ARGO shows ocean warming at 0.023 degrees per decade, which is equivalent to 0.23 degrees per century.
C. Pete sez:
“It’s interesting to speculate on whether Scarfett, Idso and Shaviv just didn’t respond to the survey, or maybe Cook didn’t find their email addresses…”
…or whether Cook cherry-picked whatever gave him the results he wanted, a la Michael Mann. That’s a standard tactic of the warmist cult. And of course, nothing they say withstands any scrutiny.
Cook’s “97% of scientists” propaganda is swallowed hook, line and sinker, but only by those who want to believe it. Everyone else knows it’s a completely invented number with no connection to reality. If Cook had said “103% of scientists”, Climate Pete would be trying to defend that number just the same.
If Cook had wanted to appear believable, he would have fabricated something like “61.3% of scientists…” instead of using a preposterous number like “97%”. No one in their right mind would accept a number that ridiculous. You couldn’t get 97% of Italians to agree that the Pope is Catholic. “97%” is just a dog whistle to the gullible green gang, like “robust”. The question itself was so loaded and vague that it can mean entirely different things to different people.
There were only 77 responses cherry-picked out of thousands. Climate Pete is trying to force the numbers to fit his belief system, rather than let the data lead him; a failing of climate alarmists everywhere. Instead of being properly skeptical, they’re completely credulous and gullible. “Dangerous man-made global warming” is truly their new eco-religion.
Pete should but won’t read Jo Nova’s analysis of Cook’s mendacious “studies”:
http://joannenova.com.au/2013/05/cooks-fallacy-97-consensus-study-is-a-marketing-ploy-some-journalists-will-fall-for/
I don’t recall the precise numbers, but in his bogus “survey”, he sent out around 12,000 questionnaires and got back over 3000. He didn’t like the results, so decided to limit his poll to just 77 “active climate scientists”, of whom 75 agreed with his two badly worded questions.
From this dreck, the media made things even worse by reporting that 97% of all scientists support the hypothesis of catastrophic, man-made “climate change”.
I might be wrong, but I think you’re referring to an earlier (and equally rubbish) study that initially established the farcical 97%. The study used a survey that was chopped down to just 77 responses.
Cookie’s study attempted to use reviews of papers. It was a complete scam because he was trying to confirm the afore-mentioned survey’s 97%.
Guess what? Cookie’s survey also produced a figure of 97%. How convenient!
Pure rubbish, both studies.
The Royal Society of Edinburgh
Their proud motto, “Ignorance is bliss”
Ignorantia Sunt Faustitates
They’ll but more meetings of ‘scientists’ and many more reports too come leading up to the Paris coven gathering
Mylord: there are three temperature graphs in your article that you took over from their paper which are incorrect and are set up to deceive the public. Since you did not number the figures I counted them and gave them numbers. I call them figures 5, 7, and 18. Lets take them one by one. Figure 5 shows a temperature graph with a blue straight line sloping upward. The line is drawn through the super El Nino of 1998 on the right which is impermissible. The temperatures to the left of it were created by an ENSO wave train but the super El Nino itself is not part of ENSO and must not be included with ENSO. The left side of the graph is part of a hiatus and you should get a horizontal straight line there if you exclude the super El Nino. That hiatus comprises five El Nino peaks with La Nina valleys in between. It runs from 1979 to 1997, or 18 years. . On top of this graph which meant to “hide the hiatus” with false warming there are high spikes, gross indicators of computer processing for unexplained purposes. There are four of them, located at years 1900, 1995, 1998, amd 1999. The owners of the data either do not know or do not care. I have found that these same spikes and more are also present in HadCRUT and NCDC data sets. Only satellite data are free of this trash. Clearly the three temperature data sets involved that are nominally independent were processed by a common computer program, most likely in order to hide the fake warming they are jointly pushing on the public. That warming goes by the name of “late twentieth century warming” and is an example of false science supported by the IPCC to make the alleged global warming seem bigger than it is. The hiatus they hide is separated from the present day hiatus/(pause of warming) by the super El Nino of 1998 and the step warming of 1999. That step warming raised global temperature by a third of a degree Celsius in only three years and then stopped. It is not greenhouse warming because its start/stop capability precludes that. It very likely has an oceanic origin. Hansen did notice the temperature differential when it appeared but unthinkingly attributed it to greenhouse warming. Present day warmists likewise try to bring in carbon dioxide in every inappropriate opportunity they can. The temperature history of the satellite era consists of an 18 year hiatus in the eighties and nineties, separated from the current hiatus by the super El Nino of 1998 and the step warming of 1999. This leaves no room at all for any greenhouse warming in between. That step warming actually was the only warming in the entire satellite era. One third of a degree does not sound like much but you should consider that total warming for the entire twentieth century was only 0.8 degrees according to Hansen. I discovered its existence in 2008 while doing research for my book [1] and even put a warning about this into its preface but was completely ignored. The other two figures (7 and 16) are attempts to hide the existence of the hiatus of the eighties and nineties and to create a non-existent warming at the same time. What makes it possible is the existence of the step warming that lifts up the twenty-first century side. By drawing a straight line through two horizontal lines with a step in between them you get one straight line that slants up on the right to creates a faux warming. The model fans they throw out are of course worthless and should not even be allowed in a scientific paper. Absent the step warming and the super El Nino in between the two hiatuses it is quite possible that we might have gotten one single hiatus starting in 1979 and still active today.
[1] Arno Arrak “What Warming? Satellite view of global temperature change” (CreateSpace 2010)
P.S.: Figure 15 in the book shows the hiatus of the eighties and nineties.
Mr Arrak should, first of all, realize, that more people would read his comments if he learned that the ENTER key on the computer issues a carriage return and line feed. Two of those and one achieves a paragraph spacing.
Next, he accuses me of trying to deceive the public with three graphs which were in fact generated from publicly available data by an algorithm written by me, not – as he puts it – by taking them from someone else’s paper.
He says it is incorrect to use a least-squares trend on any run of data that passes through the Singer event (the sudden rapid warming of 1997-1999), on the ground that there was no warming in the periods either side of it.
First, the least-squares trends were correctly calculated.
Next, though there has certainly been little or no warming since 1999, there was warming at a rate equivalent to one-eighth of a degree per decade from 1979 to 1997 inclusive.
It is true to say that the pattern of warming over the period since 1979 does not fit the monotonic increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration: however, that is a point that I have made in an earlier posting about the Singer event (named after Fred Singer, who on a visit to us in Rannoch first drew it to my attention), and also in several of my monthly temperature updates.
And the warming since 1979 is not a “faux warming”, as Mr Arrak tries to suggest. It is a real warming, and it would be foolish to try to pretend otherwise.
‘that the present el Nino would put warming back on track’
indeed they are , but think what that means, they actual ‘want ‘ such increases with all the problems that may bring just to prove themselves right .
Its is like doctor being disappointed that so someone fails to die of cancer , after the doctor predicted they would, rather they being happy they did not die and accept their prediction was wrong .
That is the type of people you are dealing with.
+100
Exactly what I’ve always said. You’d think they’d be celebrating the pause, not trying to hide it.
They don’t want to save the world, they just want to enjoy the oft-predicted chaos. Alarmo-junkies, the lot of them.
+100 from me too.
….. they love polar sea ice, that’s why they rejoice when it goes down (or used to).
The phony socialists love the poor. It’s fabulous that they can create more of them and, as Hank Spim said, “I love animals, that’s why I like to kill them”:
“…warming at a rate equivalent to less than a quarter of a degree per decade ”
Surely that is “per century”?
Well spotted.
Boiled down (or up) logic.
As the climate gets warmer we’ll use less energy for tea-making and central heating. As it gets colder, the cases of impaired hearing will reduce in direct proportion to the reduced use of air conditioners and refrigerators. Truth and untruth are now commodities to be traded so invest in change, boiling refrigerators and freezing kettles. It’s what the pseudo-sub-scientists do.
sturgishooper
May 27, 2015 at 12:23 pm
“Vuk,
I’d say that the best science in the first half of the 20th century was practiced in England and Germany, despite Polish-French Curie. The US IMO didn’t take over until after WWII.”
Sure we can overlook Americas 353 Nobel Prizes which number 50% more than England and Germany added together.
Please compare the number of scientific Nobels from Britain and Germany up to 1939 with those from America. Of the twelve US recipients, one was foreign born and three shared a single Medicine prize. Germany alone had 34.
I rest my case.
Actually 23 Nobel prizes were awarded to Americans in that time period. I believe Foreign born US recipients are to be celebrated for their achievements as much as native born, or perhaps more so, if they fled from oppression.
Warrenlb,
You missed my reference specifically to scientific Nobels, not including Peace and Literature. The issue is whether Europe or America dominated science in the early 20th century.
I see your reading comprehension is no better in history than in science.
Jeez, don’tcha get it yet, Mr. Monckton?
The leftards made it a priority to take over them “very bastions of science” in order to prevent the error-checking function of scientific method from being applied to the preposterous Cargo Cult Science of anthropogenic global warming.
Er, “climate change.”
Oh, waitaminnit. It’s “climate fragility” now, ain’t it?
Actually, the bastions of science seem rather secure from the amateurs and self annointed experts without portfolio who specialize in incoherent analysis and a remarkable lack of curiosity about how their notions don’t seem to align with those doing the real research and publishing to the world.
I wonder why they don’t tire of the taste of their own bathwater?
warrenlb sez:
the amateurs and self annointed experts without portfolio who specialize in incoherent analysis and a remarkable lack of curiosity about how the real world works…
warrenlb lives in a fantasy world, based on fabricated ‘papers’ that take the place of reality.
The real world flatly contradicts what warrenlb Believes: there has been no global warming for many years. Therefore, warrenlb’s CAGW scare is falsified by the only Authority that matters.
Gregg E.,
You cite a blog as your “authority”??
Let’s look at reality, as recorded by satellite data:
And it is clear that currently, global temperatures are below normal:
Put that in your pipe and smoke it. Beacause that is REALITY…
…not that your addled mind can accept reality…
So there is a pause is there? Did the increasing numbers of CO2 molecules stopped back radiating? Or the back radiation theory is falsified. What do you say to that all you radiation physicist.
Not falsified. Just shown insignificant compared to other influences on temperature.
Stopped no, overwhelmed by other, more significant factors, yes.
Sadly, Australia has been struck by the same blight. In February 2015, the Australian Academy of Science released their publication “The Science of Climate Change, Questions and Answers” which simply plagiarized the IPCC propaganda. I sent an email to the President, Professor Holmes and members of the Working Group responsible for the publication, pointing out evidence that contradicted the IPCC claims (no, I am not a Fellow). I had a polite reply from the President’s office acknowledging my message, a couple of replies from the Working Group basically telling me that I did not know what I was talking about and the rest failed to respond.
Bevan Dockery re the Ozzie Academy of Science.
You may have received the reply with input from the august member of the Academy Tim Flannery ?
The fellow who said our dams on the East coast of Oz were not going to fill because of lack of rainfall.
Of course since about 2007 we have had flooding rains.
Lord Monckton:
Are you saying the audience was (mostly) a bunch of fat asses?
Based on your colorful descriptions it would be difficult to disagree with that analysis.
Gee I had to look it up. My dict, says
Steatopygia or Steatopyga
Abnormal accumulation of fat on and about the buttocks.
This may be obvious but is the Royal Society of Edinburgh the shortened name of something more specifically interested in the sciences?
That the audience cheered a suggestion to have less science in their discussions I find extraordinary. We could call it the Main Finding. We may have to found “Royal Science Society of Edinburgh” so the membership is constantly reminded of the purpose of meeting.
James Clerk Maxwell would, I think, shudder to know that the Royal Society is promoting a book about him on their website. To think that they sing his “achievements and legacy” while grinding a generation of children into the dust of ignorance with morbid tales of climate and carbon.
The temperature in the upper troposphere decreases. Current temperature at an altitude of 3500 m.
http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/700hPa/overlay=temp/equirectangular=-330.00,0.00,211
Solar brightening is on it way-10% more sun hours since 1980. Enjoy
Aerosols might be the cause of warming- clean air act has succeeded.