![LadyJusticeImage[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/ladyjusticeimage1.jpg?quality=83)
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
In the wake of revelations by whistleblower Dr. John Bates, Congressman Lamar Smith, Chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, has renewed demands for access to documents and correspondence relating to the release of the flawed Karl “Pausebuster” paper.
US Congress launches a probe into climate data that duped world leaders over global warming
- Republican Lamar Smith has announced an inquiry to acting chief of NOAA
- He has demanded for all internal documents and communications between staff
- It follows an investigation by the Mail on Sunday and information leaked by Dr John Bates
By David Rose for The Mail on Sunday
PUBLISHED: 13:14 +11:00, 19 February 2017 | UPDATED: 19:10 +11:00, 19 February 2017
Revelations by the Mail on Sunday about how world leaders were misled over global warming by the main source of climate data have triggered a probe by the US Congress.
Republican Lamar Smith, who chairs the influential House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology, announced the inquiry last week in a letter to Benjamin Friedman, acting chief of the organisation at the heart of the MoS disclosures, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
He renewed demands, first made in 2015, for all internal NOAA documents and communications between staff behind a controversial scientific paper, which made a huge impact on the Paris Agreement on climate change of that year, signed by figures including David Cameron and Barack Obama.
…
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4238806/US-Congress-launches-probe-climate-data.html
The following is the letter sent by Congressman Lamar Smith to Acting Administrator of NOAA Benjamin Freidman.
Source: https://science.house.gov/sites/republicans.science.house.gov/files/documents/02.14.17%20SST%20Letter%20to%20Acting%20Administrator%20Friedman.pdf (h/t E&E News)
This is getting serious. NOAA defied efforts at Congressional oversight when President Obama was in charge. I doubt NOAA will enjoy the same immunity from oversight under President Trump.
You can’t prosecute a scientist for making a mistake. You can potentially prosecute a civil servant if they are grossly negligent, cut corners, and provide misleading information to the public.
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what I don’t understand is.. Why doesn’t Trump just FIRE people like Karl & Gavin Schmidt ? HE IS the president, he knows thi sis all bullshit so why not just clean house and put someone reliable in those positions? The fact that he hasn’t indicates that the Global Warming Scam has become too big to fail. With billions of government $s pouring into this scam Leonardo DeCaprio tells president elect Trump, “Well you know there are alot of jobs in climate change.” I guess that’s the fundamental problem is that too many American’s are reliant on the US Government to give them a job. So Trumps like ‘well i don’t wanna become too disruptive and have to fire 10’s of thousands of fake scientists that work in the field of GWS.
He is very busy already, saying ‘You’re fired’.
In earlier days the President had that Power which did not work so well, as incompetent people were brought in under “to the victor goes the spoils during each change of power.” From Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_civil_service
“In the early 19th century, positions in the federal government were held at the pleasure of the president—a person could be fired at any time. The spoils system meant that jobs were used to support the American political parties, though this was gradually changed by the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 and subsequent laws. By 1909, almost two-thirds of the U.S. federal workforce was appointed based on merit, that is, qualifications measured by tests. Certain senior civil service positions, including some heads of diplomatic missions and executive agencies, are filled by political appointees. Under the Hatch Act of 1939, civil servants are not allowed to engage in political activities while performing their duties.[6]”
Unfortunately the merit system was likely severely abused by the Obama administration and merit was not the criteria but concurrence with political beliefs, obviously in climate science, energy and other.
Bottom line outright firing without cause is not viable and will cause disruption in Trump agenda. George W experienced the same problem in the State Dept during his tenure.
You think the president should have power over individual recruitment at all levels of Government on a whim? I think that is dangerous.
at least you have stopped saying “confirmation bias” over and over and over 😛
If they are part of the GS system, they cannot be fired. If they have an STS or SES title, however, they are (essentially) contractors that can be denied renewal (I believe they serve one year terms).
” Why doesn’t Trump just FIRE people like Karl & Gavin Schmidt ?”
Because then they become martyrs. The louder left will hold them up like Brian’s Gourd and anything we think they may have done wrong will be shouted down due to our apparent planet-hating nature. I doubt if Trump really thinks about the martyr angle, but I think it could happen if he simply fired them.
Most of the communications will be gone. NOAA scientists would be aware of climategate, IRS scandal, Clinton emails; etc. Also the widespread use of private email under a false name. Even President Obama used the latter to communicate with Clinton on official business.
To my knowledge there haven’t been any consequences for using deception to thwart record keeping regulations. Unless you count one lost election.
” Also the widespread use of private email under a false name. ”
NOAA scientists will be asked if they engaged in that practice. If only one admits it, his email record will reveal links to persons who were aware of what he did and whose emails could then be subpoenaed to probably expose them as guilty too. That in turn would lead to the toppling of the next domino, and the next . . ..
They will also be asked if they know of anyone else who was e-mailing under a false name.
Only one such admission is sufficient to start the unraveling.
This is the underlying Comstitutional crisis of the outgoing administration. Professor Turley spoke about the “imperial presidency” to Congress during the Loretta Lynch confirmations. The Obama administration flaunted the role of Congressional oversight time and time again.
IRS deleting records and Lois Lerner taking the 5th
Fast and Furious leading to contempt charges on Eric Holder
NOAA refusing to provide information to Smith’s committee
Then Hillary comes along and completely eschews any government record keeping responsibilities at all. The entire Benghazi issue exposed that State had provided ZERO records to Congress. The FISMA Act (passed unanimously in 2001 including a “yea” vote from Hillary) requires every government agency to not only provide records, but deliver an inventory of every system of record (including contractor managed systems) to Congress annually. The email server should have been included on an inventory list to Congress from State EVERY year. For Congress to only learn about it because of the Blumenthal hack is beyond the pale.
What we witnessed for eight years was a monarchy in the administrative branch supported by a compliant media that held no executive branch officials to task and a toothless Congress that refused to assert its Constitutional mandate.
The great thing about Trump is that the media vitriol will drive government to function as designed, because unlike Obama, the media will expect Trump to adhere to the law.
“The great thing about Trump is that the media vitriol will drive government to function as designed, because unlike Obama, the media will expect Trump to adhere to the law.”
That’s a joke, right?
They will expect Trump to obey the law.
However, they will expect the bureaucracy to do what ever it takes to thwart Trump. Up to and including breaking any laws necessary.
“They will expect Trump to obey the law.”
Who is “they”, the MSM? They’re the enemy of the people, right? Why should anybody listen to them? Trump has his own media, headed up by Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway, and they ain’t fake.
That would be clear criminal contempt of congress. NOAA was served a records retention order at the beginning of the investigation. The subpoena only came after NOAA stonewalled the usual polite requests for information.
Seem much ado about nothing, as now Bates is walking back his story.
The Karl 15 paper was supported by the new Hausfather 17 paper.
Seems we are in Witch Hunt II.
You’re extremely naive. When politicians play with climate scientists, they play by politician’s rules.
WUWT covered that paper here. It has several flaws. The most obvious being the lack of error bars.
However, that is not the point at issue here. Bad science gets published all the time. The key thing is that “replication” is not “reproduction”. Pretending otherwise is an attack on the scientific method.
A test is validated when it is repeatable and reproducible. It’s not just a spurious quirk – doing it again gets the same result. And other people doing that find the same thing. The finding is trustworthy.
Replication does not provide such support. It does not involve doing the same thing and finding the same result. Replication, like we have here, is doing something different and getting the same result. All replication can do is show that the two things may be similar. It does not show that the two findings are trustworthy.
Worse still, in this case Karl et all lost their work. Computer broke down and the dog ate the hard copy. So this replication is only showing similarity in the result. It is not showing any similarity in the understanding of the oceans.
This is just replicating an unknown method, getting the same thing out and thus saying “See. That’s how it worked the first time”. No. It tells us nothing.
You can build a pyramid with modern cranes and bulldozers. The output will be a Great Pyramid. This does not mean the Ancient Egyptians had advanced technology.
Hausfather 17 does not mean that Karl et al had working technology either.
“The most obvious being the lack of error bars.”
Maybe one should read the paper before saying things that are incorrect. No error bars:
Conceded.
It’s irrelevent.
Maybe you should read the comment.
M Courtney. Lets be totally frank, the second study supports the conclusions of Karl15. It does not and was never intended to establish the methods were correct, but was much more interested in the science. You do not appear to believe that obtaining the same result using independent methods is support for the original conclusions. M Courtney you are wrong.
Say we wanted to measure the height of something, and one person does it by triangulation. Another person also does it by triangulation and gets the same answer. That gives us confidence in the original answer, as long as triangulation is working properly. Then another person gets the same answer using another method, say sat.nav. That gives us confidence in the original answer whether or not triangulation is a good method.
Had they used the same methods you would have (rightly) been able to argue that the answers may have been the same because the method was flawed. That argument is not open to you now.
So you invent a spurious objection that using a different method tells us nothing.
seaice1, You are advocating pseudoscience.
If one person works out that cholera comes from a public water tap by using a map and epidemiology he has learnt something.
If someone else gets the same result by using astrology they have not learnt anything. Even if they get lucky. Because they do not know what method they used to get the result.
If they then say they lost their working so can’t even say which star they followed then they aren’t even trying to learn anything.
That’s what the pseudoscientists Karl et al did.
Models can be tuned to get anything you want or left to run and see what happens. We can never know which Karl et al did.
And no, climatology and astrology are not proven to be sound by anyone else finding that a result was lucky.
I will continue to defend the scientific method from those in the climate community who will endorse anything if it backs your belief systems.
You, seaice1, are wrong.
M Courtney, I am not wrong, as should be obvious. You say that using an independent method to reproduce a result tells us nothing. Yet it is obvious that using an independent method tells us more than using the same method.
Seaice1, I see we are talking at cross purposes.
I was replying to the original comment.
Obviously, that’s not true. As you concede the method is completely different. Therefore, whatever the Hausfather 17 paper has to say, it says nothing about Karl et al 15.
You are talking about the conclusion of Karl et al 15. That conclusion may well be supported by other findings. If you are willing to stretch so far as to say that Karl et al 15 had a conclusion when the workings are lost. But that is irrelevant.
If you let conclusions be evidence without methodology (PC bust, buoy data corrupted with ship data, can’t be replicated) then you really are letting any lucky guess in. That would be astrology A-OK.
But you cannot be defending Karl et al 15 with something unrelated to Karl et al 15. You must be trying to defend the conclusions of Karl et al 15.
Fair enough. Though why you would bother instead of relying on Hausfather 17 paper is anyone’s guess. Do you think that’s unjustifiable too?
If you suppose the first Witchhunt was against Communists in the federal government, well, they were actually there. And charlatan witches abound in the climate c0nspiracy as well. Their names are well known to most here.
It’s the innocent caught up in the witch hunts that we should be concerned about.
That’s why we should target malpractice. Otherwise everyone will go down and that’s not fair. That’s not just.
The anti-science army has two divisions.
•Those who want to end the whole enterprise.
•Those who want to protect all involved regardless of the reality.
We should avoid supporting either assault.
We won’t know who is innocent without investigating the c0nspirators and prosecuting the guilty. Those who haven’t committed fr@ud and other crimes need not worry.
The anti-Communist investigations of the ’40s and ’50s didn’t go nearly far enough. Many of the guilty were never prosecuted, let alone convicted. In your country, Soviet spy Blunt was even protected by the Old Boy network in MI5 and the Palace for most of his life, until finally outed by Thatcher in 1979 and stripped of his knighthood, less than four years before his well-deserved and long overdue death.
The treason went straight to the top. Canadian PM Lester Pearson, UK PM Harold Wilson and the personal assistant of German Chancellor Willy Brandt were all Soviet agents. Khrushchev bumped off anti-Communist Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell in order to advance Wilson.
Australian security services and other government organs were also riddled with Commies. From 2014: “The penetration of ASIO by Soviet spies from the late 1970s until the early ’90s is a story considered so embarrassing and so damaging that it has remained hushed up by five successive Australian governments.”
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/the-kgb-spy-who-came-in-from-the-heat/story-e6frg6z6-1227116368736
M.,
In another issue, Paris bookies now have Le Pen within 3.5 points of Macron in betting odds:
https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-02-20/le-pen-advances-in-french-polls-as-security-concerns-sway-voters-izef48iu
Pure cherry picking. The choice of dates more than doubles the trend as I pointed out above. Zeke really should retract that paper if he wants to maintain any kind of scientific integrity.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst3gl/from:1997/to/plot/hadsst3gl/from:1997/to:2014.5/trend/plot/hadsst3gl/from:1997/to:2016.0/trend
toddle off back to RC or SKS or wherever you came from
If all the fundamental data sets are flawed then any replication using a different but flawed data set is going to yield broadly similar results.
The issue here is to assess whether the endless adjustments to the instrument record are way off base. The easy way to check this is to identify say perhaps 100 isolated and pristine stations, ie., those that have no issue with siting, urbanisation, land changes, screens, record keeping etc and then retrofit these stations with the same LIG thermometers that were used in the 1930s/1940s and then observe using the same standards, methods and practice as used by the particular station back in the 1930s/1940s.
There would be no attempt to make a NH, or global construct, but just examine each station individually. There would be no need for any adjustments because the same TOB, the same type of instrument (calibrated in Fahrenheit or Centigrade as applicable) would be used in each individual case. One would simply compare raw data obtained in the late 1930s/early 1940s with raw data collected today and over then next few years.
We would quickly know whether there has been about 0.2 or 0.5 or 0.8 or 1 degC of warming since the 1930s/1940s. If today’s measurements are broadly in line with those obtained in the 1930s/1940s, we would know that the adjustment instrument record as compiled By GISS and their like has gone astray, or whether in practice the adjustments that they have made appear reasonable.
There is nothing difficult in such a quality control check, and it beggars belief that it has not already been undertaken. In fact that is what B€ST should have done as part of its quality control.
Richard, you’ll have Mosher here pretty soon to tell us all (again…yawn) that if you ran the models/stats/whatever with the virgin data you’d get even more indications of warming. Thing is, I can’t recall anyone else presenting such a paper or proposition.
Richard,
Check out this little tool showing data from GHCN: https://tools.ceit.uq.edu.au/temperature/index.html#
It only shows data up to 2015, but you can filter for rural stations only, including rural night light, and view both adjusted and unadjusted data from these. That’s pretty close to what you’re suggesting, isn’t it?
Filtering for ‘rural’ and ‘rural night light’ and asking for unadjusted GHCN data only returns a trend of +0.176 C/dec from 1900-2015 (3064 stations). Using the same rural parameters, but asking for adjusted data returns a trend of +0.175 C/dec over the same period (2875 stations).
This suggests that the warming trends in adjusted and unadjusted GHCN data from rural stations since 1900 are virtually identical.
DWR54:
Then, if one takes Tony Heller’s charts on historical adjustments as being the case (ie: True), one must come to the conclusion that it was adjustments to urban stations that have made the biggest contribution to ‘warming’.
So , over 100 years , the ‘warming trend’ is less than the accuracy of a single thermometer, never mind the attempt at a ‘global average’ if that was ever possible.
Leaving aside the fact that it is thermodynamically impossible for CO2 to affect temperatures, doesn’t this just blow away any CAGW nonsense?
The “rural night light” flaws were documented almost as soon as Hansen published his paper.
Also, all of these analyses miss the two elephants in the room:
1) Way too many stations have dropped out for this dataset to be useful anymore.
2) One reason so many stations dropped out was the advent of satellites, which NASA proudly proclaimed would make the surface dataset obsolete. Then they discovered adjustments…
talldave2
The biggest adjustments made to any global temperature data set recently were those made to the UAH lower troposphere (satellite) data set during its transition from v5.6 to v6.5 beta. The trend changes that occurred during that transition were much bigger than those described by Karl15.
According to some here the UAH lower troposphere data can seamlessly transition from being ‘pristine’ to making huge adjustments and immediately becoming ‘pristine’ all over again. It’s a very useful trait to possess for a data set producer; not one enjoyed by the surface producers, apparently.
I see that DWR54 is going to fall back on the great fable. IE, all adjustments are either justified or not justified.
The UAH adjustments are clear and well documented. You are free to agree that they are necessary or argue that they are not.
Just because we do not believe the adjustments to the ground based data (to the extent that they are even documented) are not justified, does not prove that we are required to believe that all adjustments are unjustified.
Be a man, and defend the adjustments, if you can.
At last we have some commanding support for science; indeed a vital and probing letter from a certain gentleman from Texas.
No-one could have seen this coming just a few months ago and I do feel that all the tremendous work done by WUWT, SPPI, Paul Driessen of CFact, Heartland, Jo Nova, Dr. Willie Soon, Dr. Tim Ball, Senator Malcolm Roberts (Aus.) and so very many others have had a massive effect (little by little each day) upon the outcome of government politics across the world.
There was a six page document written just three years ago by LMofBr. published by SPPI (website) on 20th. January 2015. It is extremely interesting and is relevant to … well, everything here at WUWT.
The heading reads:- “WAS 2014 THE WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD? NO, IT WASN’T…”
Here are his final, two paragraphs.
FINAL, TWO PARA’S.
The “Nature” article says that the warming of 0.05 Celsius degrees in 2014 “should chasten
climate sceptics who have used the past decade’s temperatures to deny that climate change is
happening”. On the contrary, those who have repeatedly tampered with the terrestrial
temperature record and have relied chiefly on the tampered results for their assertion that
2014 was “the warmest year on record” should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.
But they won’t be. Their strategy is now clear: cut worldwide CO2 emissions even though this
is plainly unnecessary, and then – when temperature fails to rise as predicted – assert that the
absence of global warming that would not have happened in any event is attributable to
emissions cuts. On this daft basis, the world’s governments make policy at taxpayers’ expense.
END OF ARTICLE (by LMofBr.) 20th. January 2015 – SPPI website.
Thank you again to Eric and do please keep the “bombshells” coming.
Regards,
WL
Future generations will read all this blather about the so-called pause and pause-busting and be totally increduous.
We are almost certainly on the cusp of abrupt climate change, especially in the Arctic where temperatures in the past have jumped 5-10 degrees in 1-2 years (Northern Greenland). The only plausible explanation for that is rapid sea-ice loss and that is what we see today.
NGrip and NEEM data discussed here:
4billion years of climate change, and you lot chose a period of almost two decades with no discernible warming. And then when not a single thing you predicted to increase from floods, to droughts to snow, to hurricanes – you desperately hand on to the last thing left: Arctic ice as if changes we know happened in the early 20th century are of some importance when they happen today.
And the obvious response is simple: Oh look Greenland surface ice is growing.
And if the best you can do just after an El Nino super warming year, is point to a bit of melting ice – why bother?
Well, it is the last few centuries human civilisation established itself and we are living now, not 4 million/billion years ago.
How the climate is changing now is important to us -and it must be changing, cos the climate is always changing, right?
The ice loss since 1979 is extreme and unprecedented in the period back to 1850 for which we have good records. It is lower now than in any part of the 20th century and still declining.
Greenland is still losing mass: the surface mass balance of snowfall/melt represents only 2 thirds of Greenland mass balance… the unusual snowfall this winter is itself a sign of change in the arctic.
There is no such record, Griff, but we know anecdotally that conditions were probably similar in the 1930s.
Also, we know 1979 was a peak for Arctic ice — in fact, fear of a cooling period among leading climate scientists like Lamb and Nicor was a major reason the monitoring satellites were launched in the first place.
Griff,
stop your deliberate dishonest from 1979 sea ice narrative. You have been shown repeatedly there were data back to 1973,that the 1990 IPCC report and the NSIDC considered them credible back then.
You have been told repeatedly that today’s sea ice levels in the Arctic region are above normal for the whole interglacial period.
I see that Griffie is trying to conflate two issues. One that climate is changing, and two, that man is causing this change.
To the extent that the change is natural, there is nothing we can do about it. So wasting money trying to stop it means less money is available to adapting to the change. And that’s criminal.
Regardless, Griffie is still trying to claim that the small loss of ice during the warm phase of the AMO is unusual. Despite all the data that proves it isn’t.
Griff,
Arctic sea ice decline since 1979 is not the least bit unprecedented. It is normal. Ice is still above average for the Holocene and was just as low as now during the 1920s and ’30s. Your bogus 1850 claim is a pack of lies.
You keep dodging the fact of the trend for Antarctic ice to increase over the same interval. It’s down this year due to a super El Nino, but it grew all the time the Arctic was dropping.
No, future generations will look at a herd mentality that sat teetering barely above an extinction level of CO2 (200ppm) and declared the most critical compound for survival a pollutant.
The AGW shamans will be laughed at and shown to know less about the causes of climate than the experts below:
http://images.amazon.com/images/G/01/dvd/aplus/apocalypto/apocalypto3lg.jpg
Those shamans were far smarter than you give them credit for. They were master astronomers. Their knowledge of the motion of the celestial bodies was unparalleled. They were so good at it they convinced people that the gods were angry so they were going to swallow the sun. Only sacrifice to the gods … and riches to the shamans would please the gods enough to return the sun.
Does that sound familiar at all?
Arctic sea ice fluctuations of the past 30 years are no different from those in the past 11,000 years of the Holocene or in prior interglacials. We are almost certainly not on the cusp of climate change any different from in this or other interglacials. There is zero reason to imagine such a thing.
You do not have to go back that far. Go back to the 1940s and 1950s , and one can see that there is nothing unusual about current levels of Arctic sea ice.
If one leaves aside 2012, summer sea ice minima during 2013, 14, 15 was trending around 6 million sq km. this was around the same minima seen in the 1940s and 1950s
See the plot below where 1959/60 sea ice minima is around 5.7 million sq.km
Well you and Richard are both wrong.
The change now is a continuing decline heading towards an ice free arctic summer ocean, something not seen for thousands of years and not seen without a completely different orbital influence to when this happened in the Eemian.
Richard’s chart does not continue to the present, not does it represent same extent covered in satellite measurements. (It has no context, it is not comparable)
Thick is the new thin.
Cold is the new hot.
Greenland breaking all records for snow accumulation (look at DMI charts) and arctic ice has the highest multi-year ice mass in the last eight years.
Multi-year means it’s been there awhile.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2017/02/19/arctic-ice-fake-news/
Griff, wrong on both counts. “The change now is a continuing decline heading towards an ice free arctic summer ocean” We were told repeatedly that was going to have happened by now. The only think we know for sure is that no one knows for sure.
“something not seen for thousands of years”
Again, no one can know this with any reliability. The only reliable yearly record is from satellites, and they only go back a few decades.
“There’s all kinds of myths and pseudoscience all over the place. I may be quite wrong, maybe they do know all these things, but I don’t think I’m wrong. You see, I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something, how careful you have to be about checking the experiments, how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it means to know something, and therefore I see how they get their information and I can’t believe that they know it, they haven’t done the work necessary, haven’t done the checks necessary, haven’t done the care necessary. I have a great suspicion that they don’t know, that this stuff is [wrong] and they’re intimidating people. I think so. I don’t know the world very well but that’s what I think.” — Feynman
Griff continues to deny the obvious reason for Arctic sea ice loss is the +AMO. You just have to shake your head at this level of bias. He can’t even bring himself to admit that it is a possible contributor. Face-palm.
Griff
February 21, 2017 at 7:17 am
As always, wrong again, for the same old reasons.
Arctic sea ice was lower than now for thousands of years in the Holocene, ie most of it.
That Antarctic sea ice grew since 1979 while Arctic declined shows that air temperature is not the cause of the recent trend lower in the Arctic. In any case, the Arctic trend has bottomed, unless 2017 summer extent be lower than 2012.
Nothing the least bit out of the ordinary is happening with sea ice. Besides which, lower is better.
talldave2
February 21, 2017 at 8:10 am
Yes, we can know that Arctic sea ice has often been lower than now during the Holocene, thanks to abundant paleoclimatic data.
A 30 year increase in ice, followed by a 30 year decline in ice is “almost certainly” a continuous decline to an ice free world.
As always, Griffie declares that any trend that is going in the way he wants, must continue. All other trends are just weather.
talldave2, Griffie has told us several times that a few dozen captain’s logs over a 100 year period are the equivalent to the current satellite record.
“the change now is a continuing decline heading towards an ice free arctic summer ocean, something not seen for thousands of years and not seen without a completely different orbital influence to when this happened in the Eemian.”
Utter nonsense, I call this SKS speak. No doubt where gregg gets his science
IPCC 1990 also shows lower ice in 72 than for much of the last 38 years and it only goes back to 1970
79 was a cherry pick like much including the 1880 start data for temp records, post 1878 El Nino and mid to late 1800s warming. Start in La Nina, end in El Nino, thats where Hansen was in 1999 lol. Then he still went and changed global temps anyway, without even consulting the worlds experts who managed those data sets
Mark from HellSinkEee – You’re pontificating about Arctic sea ice too? Let me see if I can display a graph here:
http://afwetware.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/PIOMAS-Jan-19Years.png
If that works, what’s your explanation for the precipitous decline in Arctic sea ice volume over the last couple of decades? Perhaps you might ask your “trainees” what they make of it also?
As always, McClod displays his religious convictions.
What is the evidence that we are on the “cusp of abrupt climate change”?
None, just his conviction that it must be so, otherwise his masters desire to change the economic structure of the world is going to fail.
Tony Mcleod, How to explain driftwood and beach sand on the ice-locked north shore of Greenland. The driftwood apparently dates from the Holocene optimum some 6000+ yrs ago?
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081020095850.htm
How about chunks of redwood trees in 50 million year old diamond ores at the 300m level below ground at the Ekati mine in the Northwest Terrritories in Canada?
http://www.livescience.com/23374-fossil-forest-redwood-diamond-mine.html
Griffipoo can’t handle the truth:
Eos, Transactions, AGU, 11 July 2006
Natural Variability of Arctic Sea Ice Over the Holocene
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2006EO280001/pdf
“Changes in regional fresh water input in conjunction with millennial-scale extraterrestrial
cycles (e.g., the 1800-year lunar cycle) may explain such trends.”
Gary Pearse
“How to explain driftwood and beach sand on the ice-locked north shore of Greenland. The driftwood apparently dates from the Holocene optimum some 6000+ yrs ago?”
Wouldn’t it be unusual if there weren’t some periods of low ice-levels during the optimum?
How to explain the current dramatic, accelerating sea-ice loss?
I’m not ure what point you are making with the second link.
richard verney
“If one leaves aside 2012, summer sea ice minima during 2013, 14, 15 was trending around 6 million sq km. this was around the same minima seen in the 1940s and 1950s”
No true. Those years were: 4.83,4.9 and 4.3 respectively. Last year 4.0 and this year with a record warm freezing season and record lowest number of freezing degree days (FDD) the ice is in far worse shape than this time last year.
None of this will convince the die-hards, but perhap next September when you’ll be able to fly from Svalbaad to the pole and back without seeing any ice – that might some take a bit more notice.
Eric – Have you by any chance read this recent article on the topic in the business section of the New York Times?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/20/business/energy-environment/climate-change-dispute-john-bates.html
If so, what do you make of it?
AFW: Thanks for the read. I was taken by this statement in the piece (my bold):
I think there will be a few bloggers snorting their coffee/beverage-of-choice at the thought that the NYT thinks Ward is a ‘researcher’.
My pleasure Harry.
Bob Ward is apparently the “Policy and Communications Director” at a research institute. Is that close enough? It would be nice to hear Eric’s perspective on the NYT story. He says above:
“You can’t prosecute a scientist for making a mistake. You can potentially prosecute a civil servant if they are grossly negligent, cut corners, and provide misleading information to the public.”
Who do you suppose he has in mind? According to the NYT:
“Dr. Bates stated that the issue wasn’t with data tampering. Rather, he said, his issue was that some of the processed data used in the report wasn’t subsequently archived in accordance with strict protocols that Dr. Bates had developed. In other words, it was a filing problem, not a science problem.”
The article is entirely an attack on Dr. Bates character and workplace demeanor but NOTHING about his accusations (except to say they were “esoteric”.) Clearly what Dr Bates suggested was far from esoteric.
It must be nice to have friends and allies in the MSM who will rush to your defense.
That’s 100% organic fake news. The real fake news, the type that has existed since news itself. Not National Inquirer type where it’s obviously for fun, but the type of half truth filled op-ed disguised as actual journalism.
Looked at the Times article. They don’t take comments, but the article begs the ofquestion| what makes them think that El Nino peaks, those temporary blips on the temperature landscape, can be used as part of permanent warming data? The long term warming trend shown makes use of warming by the super El Nino of 1998, the El Nino of 2010 and the El Nino of 2015/16 to arrive at the present warming trend. In addition, they make use of fake warming in the eighties and nineties they arbitrarily substituted for the hiatus that existed there before 1997. Add to this their failure to understand the origin of the early warming in the twenty-first century. It so happens that coincident with the start of the new century, global temperature rises by approxinately one quarter of a degree Celsius in only three years. This started numerous claims of “warmest ever” temperatures. Hansen, for example, points out that nine out of ten “warmest ever” global temperatures just happened to congregate in the first decade of the twenty-first century. To him that meant greenhouse effect fulfilled which is impossible due to the short time time period involved. What really caused this warming was a chunk of warm water that was left behind by the super El Nino of 1998 as it departed just before the year 1999. This warm batch at first looked like a hiatus and was taken to be one. But it started to cool almost immediately because it had no energy source. This cooling is still completely ignored by climate “scientists” studying the record because they lack the skill to properly interpret the temperature record they see. Their wishful thinking to see warming, not cooling, is also unhelpful for seeing the real cooling involved. To see what is coming up, extend the straight line cooling section beyond the current El Nino. It will run into the deep background later this year which cannot be lower than what existed when the hiatus of the eighties and nineties was still there, NOAA, in co-operation with GISS and the Met Office, sometme before 2008, wiped ou that hiatus. That was the year I spotted the switch and protested it, to no avail. Since they ignored me I put a notice about it into the preface of my book “What Warming?”That too was completely ignored and the false warming is still part of the official temperature record of these three temperature aces. They are tied together by using a common temperature adjustment device that left identical traces of upward spikes on all three remperature curves. One of these spikes sits right on top of the super El Nino of 1998, extending it slightly. If you extend the straight line part of the cooling curve beyond the current El Nino you realize that the new base temperature will be much lower than anything seen since the eighties. I say this because NCDC(NOAA) arbitrarily changed the real temperature of the eighties and nineties into a non-existent warming that goes by the name of “late twentieth century warming.” The true temperature trend is determined by the cooling that I pointed out. The current El Nino just sits on top of the base line temperature that is now partly obscured by ENSO. This ooling is easily located on UAH monthly satellite temperature records. For example,,the UAH monthly record for January shows that the ten years from 2002 to 2012 are a cooling period that lowers global temperature by one tenth of a degree Celsius. This means cooling, not warming, of one degree Celsius per century. To see it clearly, draw a straight line between these two data points. The line crosses crosses over the La Nina of 2008 and the El Nino of 2010 lines, both temporary features of global temperature record . If you then extrapolate it beyond the current El Nino period that that is in its declining phase you will realize that the lowerst temperature is likely to stabilize somewhere near the1980 level, before NCDC (NOAA) invented the fake warming that is now shown there.
Abrupt change. Interesting presentation but where did he tie natural variability to anthropogenic global warming? Or maybe that is your point. Although on a much shorter timescale this sounds like the nagging worry that the sun is running down. Natural variability requires a human response very different from our current policy. Frankly I saw alot of disjointed handwaving.
“… and provide misleading information to the public.”
Ahh….’misleading information’. Where have we heard that recently at the national level? And weren’t there substantial consequences in store for he who provided it?
Perhaps there have been misleading opinions as to how it doesn’t matter if you provide misleading information. It is interesting to watch how opinions about such trivial things as honesty and responsibility can evolve under a different set of leaders.
Ideology is blind. It doesn’t matter who it is, when a person has an ‘ideology’ all incoming information has to conform to this or it is rejected by the mind. The cold pursuit of ‘what is reality’ is hard for us humans, we all have imagination and dreams and this is our strong point which created civilization and it is our weak point, it can cause delusions.
The entire fight over ‘what is causing climate change’ and ‘do humans cause changes’ is a very big fight because it is something that cannot be really proven one way or another. Yes, our cities do warm up the surrounding climate in a limited degree.
Does burning fossil fuels change things? Yes, it does. Is this bad? That is an open question and it is the key question dividing the two sides. The really big question is, ‘what is our sun doing’?
We know we are in an Ice Age system cycle that has sudden warm ups and all descend into Ice Age conditions over and over again. What causes this is still not fully understood since it probably, due to the rhythmic repeating cycles, is a event situation that has a major force at work causing this ‘cooling’ and ‘warming’ which are quite violently at odds with each other.
Until we really figure this out, we are going to have real difficulties in dealing with future climate, this is how we evolved rapidly, the naked apes that had to figure out how to survive in a constantly changing world.
“when a person has an ‘ideology’ all incoming information has to conform to this or it is rejected by the mind”
Now that is funny, coming from Ms. “nuclear power is going to kill us all”.
Hi Anthony,
New GWPF paper by Judith Curry is here:
http://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2017/02/Curry-2017.pdf
Comments, based on a quick scan:
A good state-of-the-art paper on models – it speaks to the mainstream debate between climate alarmists and skeptics, which is mostly about ECS.
The ECS estimates are still too high, imo – my guess is 0.3C or less, if ECS exists at all in terms of significance (CO2 lags temperature at all measured time scales).
I would like to have read more about aerosols, and the fabrication of aerosol data to force models to hindcast the global cooling from ~1940-1975.
I think there is a tendency to overstate the complexity of the modeling problem.
Bill Illis’s one-line model with only four (really only three) input parameters does a great job of bounding global temperature – to get a functioning climate model, we only need to better-predict its primary input, which is Nino3.4 temperatures. The next most important input parameter in Bill’s equation is “Aerosol Optical Depth volcano Index”, which only matters when truly huge volcanoes erupt, and then there is the AMO, which matters a little, and atmospheric CO2, which has insignificant impact.
Best, Allan
Hey Allan – who funds the GWPF? and why?
It hardly matters, their whole budget is less a tenth of what the IPCC or the US gov’t or the Sierra Club each spend promoting climate fear.
Hey Griff,when will you read DR. Curry paper and make an HONEST assessment of the research?
Funding canards are from lazy people,who doesn’t bother to read science papers that they automatically rejected. You are showing your bigotry fella.
Mickey Mann gets more funding from Big Oil than does Curry.
“Who funds GWPF?” – Does it really matter? FWIW, you, Griff, fund Greenpeace and WWtF, as do many (probably, most) of us here, and they get many, many times the funds that any sceptic activity gets. Thing is, we have no say in the funding.
Hey Griff,
Who is funding Michael Mann’s lawsuit against Mark Steyn? And why is Mann refusing to cooperate with discovery?
Griff
Who funds you and why?
Translation: Griffie knows that he can’t refute the science, so he attacks the messenger.
Not fossil fuel companies. GWPF’s donor list has been examined by a bunch of neutral respectables (e.g., bishops) and found not to contain such donors. It’s against GWPF policy to accept donations from such sources. Its list is kept secret from public purview to spare donors from greenshirtw harassment.
Since no one else would answer that straight forward and legitamate question but instead defaulted to diversions, I’ll have a go.
Big Carbon, because sowing doubt and delaying harmful regulation of their lucrative business model is the best way to preserve their share-holder’s value. They’d be crazy to do anything else.
Great piece. Finally, someone noticed this: GCMs are evaluated against the same observations used for model tuning.
And this cannot be repeated often enough: There has been a lack of formal model verification and validation, which is the norm for engineering and regulatory science.
The standard for peer reviewed science is “plausible.” You don’t want to tell people it’s merely plausible your bridge won’t fall down or your climate policies won’t make living conditions worse for billions of people.
See my previous guest post here on models. I urged Judith to be harder when she published a first draft at Climate Etc for denizen review.
Thank you for the link to the Curry review.
Best presentation by far. Easy to follow and understand.
There is no way a competent jury won’t find Climate “Science” to be a fr@ud, and that the perpetrators of the data manipulation to have done it intentionally and with malice a forethought. To “adjust” the data the way they did there was clearly a crimin@l intent behind it. They had a motive to manipulate the data, they had an intent to manipulate the data, they acted upon the motive and intent to manipulate the data, and the smoking gun is that the data was manipulated in a manner that delivered the resulted that was desired, In any other field, data manipulation like this puts people behind bars. This article details how this entire issue have to be looked at in its entirety because each little infraction can be explained away, but taken in its entirety a crimin@l pattern develops.
Climate “Science” on Trial; Cherry Picking Locations to Manufacture Warming
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2017/02/18/a-tale-of-two-cities-cherry-picking-locations-to-manufacture-warming/
While this “battle” over trends and pauses continues, the real war determining how much, if any, human CO2 emissions into the atmosphere effect the temperature of the atmosphere, wages on.
If the raw data, done with appropriate statistical analysis with error bars and no adjustments or fill-ins to plug holes shows a warming trend, in this current interstadial, that would not be surprising. The interglacial period will show a natural warming trend and at fine scale likewise. Until it doesn’t. Scientists go too far by saying the present warming is unusual and anthropogenic.
Professional engineers and their employers get sued for mistakes, why not scientists?
Funny you should mention that I was just thinking the exact same thing.
Climate “Science” on Trial; The Criminal Case Against the Alarmists
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2017/02/21/climate-science-on-trial-the-criminal-case-against-the-alarmists/
Exactly! When the science has real world consequences then they need to be held accountable just as anyone else would.
You better believe it. We can’t have rogue scientists dragging everyone down with them.
Professional engineers and their employers are also scientists. Even better than climate scientists, because their work depends on whether a company can sell their products as quality work. This is true science, not the science of the scenarios which the word prediction avoids like the fire the water.
Probably because “scientists” work for government and/or universities, neither of which are known for accountability.
Some are under the “Deleterious Curse”. They don’t realize what they are doing results in harm, only what the Imperials have told them to do is “good science”.
It’s the imperious ones who need their feet (and their methods and data) put to the fire.
WUWT Readers, I just finished writing a criminal case against the alarmists and would greatly appreciate your insight. It tries to connect all the dots and detail how to prosecute this science in a court of law.
Climate “Science” on Trial; The Criminal Case Against the Alarmists
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2017/02/21/climate-science-on-trial-the-criminal-case-against-the-alarmists/
Excellent read. Great synopsis.
Thanks a million. Be sure to like share and subscribe.
Dear CO2islife,
I shall support you all the way. I admire your tenacity and detail: it is plain and true and you write and present with great character of writing.
Allow me to suggest:- PARAGRAPHS.
Written words are much easier to read if you use paragraphs: allow me to explain.
VERBATIM – this time “with paragraphs”.
“There is no way a competent jury won’t find Climate “Science” to be a fr@ud, and that the perpetrators of the data manipulation to have done it intentionally and with malice a forethought.
To “adjust” the data the way they did there was clearly a crimin@l intent behind it. They had a motive to manipulate the data, they had an intent to manipulate the data, they acted upon the motive and intent to manipulate the data, and the smoking gun is that the data was manipulated in a manner that delivered the resulted that was desired, In any other field, data manipulation like this puts people behind bars.
This article details how this entire issue have to be looked at in its entirety because each little infraction can be explained away, but taken in its entirety a crimin@l pattern develops.” END
I have NOT attempted to alter your strong words or punctuation marks: all I have done is to set out the sentences using “paragraphs”: they give emphasis and pause and so give the reader a chance to go back and re-read the piece with ease. This is EXTREMELY advantageous when trawling through litigation papers.
PS: I genuinely admire your words and always have: you are a breath of fresh air to WUWT.
You have a particular scientific talent and a personal “style” which (evidently) no-one else is prepared to display and which, if I may say, is unique.
I should be pleased if you would consider my humble suggestion (paragraph phrasing) as a compliment and NOT (in any way) a critique.
PPS: Long live carbonated oxygen.
Regards,
WL
Absolutely, I appreciate the comments. Grammar has always been my weakness, and you aren’t telling me something I haven’t already heard countless times. I’ll work on shortening things and using paragraphs. Once again, thanks a million for the comments, they are greatly appreciated.
I’m not sure people quite grasp the enormity of the civil service problem both in the US and worldwide. These people fervently believe they are saving the world, and their response to this will be to imagine themselves as the Heroic Scientist in the enviropocalyptic Hollywood movie of your choice. They will dig in their heels and double down on the corruption of science that they see as Brave Truth-Telling.
They may dig in their heels …until they start getting prosecuted.
They have their judges too. And even if they lose in court, the Heroic Scientists will just view that as another challenge to overcome. Remember, Hansen was more than happy to defy police and chain himself to a fence in front of a coal plant.
This is long overdue. Lets make sure they don’t do the Hillary Clinton accidental file deletion.
Haven’t “they” been loudly self-congratulating themselves for archiving climate “files” like mad before Trump “deletes everything becuz he hatezez science”?
They’re lucky that Smith is a lenient and patient man. In my opinion, they already had their chance to comply. I’d have had the FBI seize their computers and servers a long time ago. It’s probably too late, they have already Clintonized anything criminalizing.
incriminating*
Smith said at the time his 2015 subpoena was based on whistleblowers, plural. So there is more than Bates. NOAA committed contempt of congress by not complying with the subpoena atbthe time. So there is likely something to hide at NOAA that the whistleblowers have described. The new ERSST5 in press relowers SST from the ERSST4 version used to bust the pause. So we have now actual evidence that something was amiss in K15. The committee will now find out what and why, their proper oversight function.
Let’s hope that whatever they uncover leads to DoJ prosecutions. At a minimum there is contempt of Congress by officials under the Obama admin.
A little farm boy experience: sometimes when stuck in a mud hole it is better to back out slowly rather than try to keep going forward.
R2Dtoo. I can ad to that advice by adding that you should also push the 4wd button (the one your instructor failed to tell you about).
Wow ristvan, this is news! It could be that with the tyranny of the warming activist scientists removed or taking cover by the change of government, NOAA may get on the right track. I was amazed years ago when Iran released hostages the day Reagan was elected. I believe we are already seeing the Trump effect domestically and globally.
It’s not too late to investigate the organized loss to taxpayers at DoE with Solyndra loans.
New Science Advisor named. Dr. William Happer, from Princeton.
Amazing what happens when a non- politician gets his hands on the levers if power. Let Happer be Happer. Based on my circle of friends people will be amazed that the debate is not over.
Source pls wws – I cannot verify this.
Hey, here’s a simple and fun experiment you can do really easily at home to compare floating sea ice to sea level rise.
Get a clear glass or plastic bowl and fill it about two-thirds with cool water. Next add a bunch of ice cubes. Make sure they are floating individually, and not stacked on each other.
Take a marker or a piece of masking tape and line it up to indicate the water level including the ice.
Now wait.
Ice expands when it freezes so it floats. When it melts, it returns to the same volume as it was when it was water.
Guess what? The water level, including all that now melted ice in your bowl, is the same.
Therefore, the melting of floating sea ice can’t change the level of the oceans.
When one of those huge ice shelves in Antarctica breaks off and floats away, as they do every few decades, there is no net effect on sea level.
Now you know.
I have to agree with you. It is a physical impossibility that in times of this global warming (let’s go outside, whether manmade or not) the sea level can rise by melting ice, which has previously hung up on the water. Glaciers of the West Antarctic are also found on the water, and should therefore already displace as much water as they release in the sea after melting. So it would have to be a zero-sum game, so I wonder where it comes, the ever-increasing sea level, which our satellites will observe. If there are increased rainfall (I do not know of any dataset), is it the melting of the inland glaciers? That would probably be far too little to bring an annual rate of recovery at this level. Or, as the main cause, it is the thermal expansion, against which no one can do anything. To provide this thesis, the increase has been linear for decades. An increase in sea level elevation is currently only taking place in the models and not in reality.
HG, you have to distinguish further. Take the Ross ice shelf in WAIS. It has a floating portion that cannot raise sea level. It has a grounded portion below sea level. That portion is supported by the seabed, so has not fully displaced seawater. Ifvthe groundinh line recedes, it can raise sea level. But not as much as the portion of the Ross ice shelf that resides on WAIS above sea level, which the ice. Ube experiment proposed just downthread.
Sea ice and sea ice shelves have nothing to do with SLR. True via Achimedes principle. Your experiment. SLR is the product of loss of grounded ice mass ( mainly Greenland, WAIS, EAIS) plus thermosteric rise (water expands when warmed).
I still do not understand the whole thing. It is clear that in some cases a glacier flowing in the sea can resting on a ledge, and thus displaces less water than would actually correspond to its mass. If one wanted to quantify these cases, however, a tremendous computing power would be necessary for each individual case including 3D models. In the other side, however, it may also be the case that the flowing ice mass is helped by its underbed to hold together and so flow rather more under water, just as glaciers do wenn flowing under moraines. There are also a large number of glaciers that flow freely into the sea or calving from an ice wall. My impression is that there is obviously a lot of this is calculated in the “right” direction and precise Data is missing. It is assumed, as is so often the case in climate science.
HG, it is pretty simple. There are vast quantities of water locked up in those three ice sheets resting on land. This is estimated, for example, by the difference in gravity that results as measured by Grace. Most of the EAIS is over 2 km thick. If some of that ice gets into the oceans, it will raise sea level. Doesnt matter if enters the ocean as ice or meltwater. Redo the comment experiment as follows. Half fill glass with water. Mark level. Now add ice. Mark higher level. The difference is SLR caused by adding ice. How as ice melts, the higher level is unchanged thanks to Archimedes principle.
Climate science is so simple even a ten year old could understand it:
(1) The future climate is unknown, and can not be predicted by humans or computers, and
(2) The average temperature of our planet is a statistic based on very rough measurements — so rough that there are only three possible trends: up, down and flat ( since 1940 we have had all three trends).
(3) There was a flat trend between the 1998 and 2015 El Nino temperature peaks — both before and after the bogus “Pausebuster” adjustments, when assuming a reasonable margin of error ( not the official +/- 0.1 degrees C. BS ), and
(4) There is no historical evidence CO2 levels ever controlled the climate in the past 4.5 billion years.
One year is claimed to be a few tenths of a degree hotter than another ?
That’s politics, not science.
Wild guess computer game predictions of the future climate?
That’s politics, not science.
Unfortunately, the Climate Change Cult is much smarter about politics than most skeptics.
They have many skeptics here, and elsewhere, debating tiny “adjustments” to rough data.
And when skeptics are lost in debating minutia, the big climate lies will live on … and … on … and … on
( the big climate lies are that humans can predict the future climate, and CO2 is a satanic gas that will destroy the Earth as we know it through runaway global warming.)
We skeptics may only have four years (less if Trump is impeached) to reverse the effects of decades of CO2 propaganda.
Whether the bogus “Pausebuster” adjustments survive, or get reversed, is a minor issue.
Climate change blog for non-scientists
Leftists should stay away
http://www.elOnionBloggle.Blogspot.com
The letter requests NOAA to provide the documents by February 17, 2017. Today is February 21, 2017. Did they get the documents or not?