Climate Science In Denial

Global warming alarmists have been discredited, but you wouldn't know it from the rhetoric this Earth Day.

By RICHARD S. LINDZEN, PhD 

The Wall Street Journal 4/22/10 

In mid-November of 2009 there appeared a file on the Internet containing thousands of emails and other documents from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain. How this file got into the public domain is still uncertain, but the emails, whose authenticity is no longer in question, provided a view into the world of climate research that was revealing and even startling.
In what has come to be known as "climategate," one could see unambiguous evidence of the unethical suppression of information and opposing viewpoints, and even data manipulation. The Climatic Research Unit is hardly an obscure outpost; it supplies many of the authors for the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Moreover, the emails showed ample collusion with other prominent researchers in the United States and elsewhere.
One might have thought the revelations would discredit the allegedly settled science underlying currently proposed global warming policy, and, indeed, the revelations may have played some role in the failure of last December's Copenhagen climate conference to agree on new carbon emissions limits. But with the political momentum behind policy proposals and billions in research funding at stake, the impact of the emails appears to have been small.

The general approach of the official scientific community (at least in the United States and the United Kingdom) has been to see whether people will bother to look at the files in detail (for the most part they have not), and to wait until time diffuses the initial impressions in order to reassert the original message of a climate catastrophe that must be fought with a huge measure of carbon control. 

This reassertion, however, continues to be suffused by illogic, nastiness and outright dishonesty. There were, of course, the inevitable investigations of individuals like Penn State University's Michael Mann (who manipulated data to create the famous "hockey stick" climate graph) and Phil Jones (director of the CRU). The investigations were brief, thoroughly lacking in depth, and conducted, for the most part, by individuals already publicly committed to the popular view of climate alarm. The results were whitewashes that are quite incredible given the actual data.

Climate Alarmist Trashes Dr. Spencer's New Book Using Leeches

Climate hyper-alarmist Joe Romm has just posted his scientific rebuttal of Dr. Roy Spencer's new book. Mr. Romm, perhaps the only alarmist to the left of Al Gore, bases his primary scientific argument upon the occasional medicinal use of leeches. Would that make Dr. Spencer a medicinal leech denier too?

Mann Threatens Lawsuit Against Video Exposing His Hockey Stick

I'm no lawyer, but believe that for a libel or slander lawsuit to be successful, the plaintiff must prove that the defendants knew what they said was false, and that truth is an absolute defense. Thus, if Michael Mann is foolish enough to proceed with his threatened lawsuit against Minnesotans 4 Global Warming for their Hide the Decline parody video, he will:
1. Need to prove that Phil Jones email to Mann about Mike [Mann's] Nature Trick to "hide the decline" doesn't really refer to Mann "hiding the decline" in the tree ring data, which show decreasing temperatures after 1960.
2. Need to prove that Mann's email to Phil Jones on June 4, 2003, stating "it would be nice to try to "contain" the putative "MWP" [Medieval Warming Period], even if we don't yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back” does not show scientific malfeasance.
3. Need to prove that Mann's hockey stick isn't one of the most thoroughly debunked scientific papers of the 20th century
4. Need to prove that Mann himself has not repeatedly deliberately distorted highly critical reviews of his work
5. Need to prove that it is ok for Mann to continue to flip temperature proxies upside down even in his latest papers, even though this egregious error has already been pointed out to him in the past and which he still refuses to acknowledge.
6. UPDATE: Need to prove that Mann's email stating "As we all know, this isn't about truth at all, its about plausibly deniable accusations" shows Mann has any interest in the "truth at all".
and so on...ad nauseum.
Minnesotans 4 Global Warming hope Mann will proceed with his lawsuit so that the legal discovery process will force exposure of data and methods Mann has still not released and that the official whitewash inquiries refuse to investigate. In the mean time, they have removed Mann's name and produced the new Hide the Decline II video:

Related: Michael Mann quotes

The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists

April 20th, 2010 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

Today (April 20) is the official release date of my new book entitled: “The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists“, published by Encounter Books.

About one-half of Blunder is a non-technical description of our new peer reviewed and soon-to-be-published research which supports the opinion that a majority of Americans already hold: that warming in recent decades is mostly due to a natural cycle in the climate system — not to an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning.

Believe it or not, this potential natural explanation for recent warming has never been seriously researched by climate scientists. The main reason they have ignored this possibility is that they cannot think of what might have caused it.

You see, climate researchers are rather myopic. They think that the only way for global-average temperatures to change is for the climate system to be forced ‘externally’…by a change in the output of the sun, or by a large volcanic eruption. These are events which occur external to the normal, internal operation of the climate system.

But what they have ignored is the potential for the climate system to cause its own climate change. Climate change is simply what the system does, owing to its complex, dynamic, chaotic internal behavior.

As I travel around the country, I find that the public instinctively understands the possibility that there are natural climate cycles. Unfortunately, it is the climate “experts” who have difficulty grasping the concept. This is why I am taking my case to the public in this book. The climate research community long ago took the wrong fork in the road, and I am afraid that it might be too late for them to turn back.


Read more at Dr. Spencer's website

Astrophysicist: Anthropogenic Global Warming is a Myth

South African astrophysicist and solar researcher Hilton Ratcliffe (author of "The Virtue of Heresy" and "The Static Universe") tackles Al Gore, climate change, and the myth of Anthropogenic Global Warming head on. He must be another of those Republican climate deniers in the pockets of big oil.

CNBC's "Carbon Hunters" to Premiere Tomorrow

Snide on-air promo states "will it save the earth or is it all a scam?"

Press release: "Carbon Hunters" on CNBC will premiere on Tuesday, April 20th at 10pm ET, and repeats that night at 1am ET. The documentary will re-air on Sunday, April 25th at 10pm ET.


Can going green make you money? Or is the $100 billion carbon trading market all smoke and mirrors? Carbon Hunters on CNBC takes you inside this controversial, market-driven solution to pollution, where you will meet a new breed of entrepreneurs cashing in on the ‘green rush’. From the Chicago Climate Exchange to Hollywood to ‘Garbage Mountain’ in the Philippines, carbon trading is attracting investors and critics.

As always, follow the money for the answers (not part of press release). Also note, CNBC is owned by General Electric, a manufacturer of wind turbines, nuclear, and fossil fuel power plants.

The Incorrect Postulate of Climate Alarmism

Very interesting series of posts today on the blog of Dr. Claes Johnson, Professor of Applied Mathematics, KTH, Stockholm, Sweden on his physical derivation of a climate model which predicts the sensitivity of the earth's climate to a doubling of CO2 to be only 0.15ºC, which is in far better agreement with the five peer reviewed studies of empirical satellite data, and in stark contrast to the IPCC/GISS models which artificially inflate the effect of CO2 by a factor of up to 5.35 over the Stefan-Boltzmann prediction to create their artificial alarm.

Dr. Johnson takes issue with the application of the Stefan-Boltzmann Radiation Law to the coupled Earth-atmosphere system, and argues Fourier's Law is the appropriate physical law, which would require the IPCC to use an imaginary positive feedback fudge factor of 30 to match their unjustified claims of the sensitivity to CO2. 

The basic postulate of IPCC climate alarmism is the relation dQ = 4 dT connecting radiative forcing dQ to global warming dT, with dQ = 4 Watts/m^2 from doubling of CO2 giving the climate sensitivity of dT = 1ºC, which is inflated to 1.5 - 4.5ºC by feed back.

The relation dQ = 4 dT comes from Stefan-Boltzmann's Radiation Law, which cannot be disputed as such.


However, the application of the Radiation Law to the coupled Earth-atmosphere system can be disputed. This is what I do in the previous posts on Climate Sensitivity and in the related article A New Approach to Climate Sensitivity with a a model study indicating instead a basic climate sensitivity of 0.15ºC without feed backs...

The basic climate sensitivity thus appears to be 0.15ºC (by Fourier's Law), rather than the commonly presented rock solid 1ºC (by Stefan-Boltzmann's Law). To reach a climate sensitivity of 4.5ºC starting from 0.15ºC requires a positive feed back factor of 30. What can be the science behind a so large positive feed back factor? IPCC does not give any clue, and nobody else... Maybe climate sensitivity is about 0.15ºC? Barely noticable?

There He Goes Again: Mann Claims His Hockey Stick was Given "Clean Bill of Health"

Spinmeister Michael Mann is quoted in this article from the Telegraph yesterday as follows:

Prof Hand (Head of the UK Royal Statistical Society) praised the blogger Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit for uncovering the fact that inappropriate methods were used which could produce misleading results. "The Mann 1998 hockey stick paper used a particular technique that exaggerated the hockey stick effect," he said.

Prof Mann, who is Professor of Earth System Science at the Pennsylvania State University, said the statistics used in his graph were correct. "I would note that our '98 article was reviewed by the US National Academy of Sciences, the highest scientific authority in the United States, and given a clean bill of health," he said. "In fact, the statistician on the panel, Peter Bloomfield, a member of the Royal Statistical Society, came to the opposite conclusion of Prof Hand."

Mann has been repeating this arrogant duplicitous spin continuously since Climategate and refuses to acknowledge any problems whatsoever with his infamous doomsday hockey stick graph. Mann always refers to the subtly worded US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report as his ally because he knows McIntyre & McKitrick, the Wegman Report, Hans von Storch, et al, and now the Head of the Royal Statistical Society have minced no words debunking his hockey stick. But what did the NAS report and the authors actually say about the Mann hockey stick? In fact, the NAS report validated all of the significant criticisms of McIntyre & McKitrick (M&M):

Another Nail in the Coffin of Man-Made Global Warming & IPCC

(notations in red added)

A 2007 paper published in the prestigious journal Earth and Planetary Sciences Letters by lead author Vincent Courtillot, a prominent French geophysicist and AGW skeptic, shows the stalagmite paleoclimate reconstruction above. A close agreement is found between solar activity and temperature, and no agreement found between CO2 levels and temperature. The Medieval Warming Period is again shown to be the hottest period of the last 2000 years, and the Little Ice Age the coldest period of the last 2000 years (the global thermometer record begins in 1850, around the same time as the termination of the Little Ice Age, and thus mostly represents recovery from these abnormally low temperatures). Stalagmites appear to be superior to tree rings as paleoclimate indicators because the latter is a living organism with many more important confounding variables. Incredible as it may seem, the IPCC attributes 97% of the total positive forcing of climate change to CO2, and assigns solar variation a mere 7% of the positive forcing of CO2, while not even considering the possibility of secondary effects on cosmic rays. AGW salesmen, such as geologist Richard Alley, still cling to the theory that CO2 controls all, despite evidence to the contrary in their own presentations. From the abstract of Courtillot's paper:

The Curious Case of the Disappeared NASA Graph

From Ponder the Maunder (website of remarkable teen Kristen Byrnes), comes The Curious Case of the Disappeared NASA Graph:

"The graph [above] was a part of James Hansen's surface temperature analysis for many years. It was continuously updated like the many other graphs on the NASA GISS site. It shows land temperatures warming much faster than ocean temperatures. The graph disappeared from the NASA GISS website without an explanation following the widely publicized Climategate email below:"

From: Tom Wigley

To: Phil Jones

Subject: LAND vs OCEAN

Date: Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:36:15 -0700

We probably need to say more about this. Land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming -- and skeptics might claim that this proves that urban warming is real and important.

NASA's (Changing) FACTS

NASA FACTS 1998 (p.3): "The temperature record of the past hundred years does show a warming trend, by approximately 0.5°C. However, the observed warming trend is not entirely consistent with the carbon dioxide change. Most of the temperature increase occurred before 1940, after which Earth started to cool until the early seventies, when warming resumed. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, has been increasing steadily throughout the past century."

NASA FACTS 2002: "Far from being some future fear, global warming is happening now, and scientists have evidence that humans are to blame. For decades, cars and factories have spewed billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and these gases caused temperatures to rise between 0.6°C and 0.9°C (1.08°F to 1.62°F) over the past century. The rate of warming in the last 50 years was double the rate observed over the last 100 years. Temperatures are certain to go up further."

"Most of the temperature increase occurred before 1940" is mathematically incompatible with "The rate of warming in the last 50 years was double the rate observed over the last 100 years". That is...unless the temperature records changed in the four year interim. Oh wait, they did:

(source)

Richard Alley's Failed Rebuttal of Cosmoclimatology

AGW salesmen, such as geologist Dr. Richard Alley of Penn State, maintain that the variations in solar output have little to do with climate change on earth. In a 2009 lecture, Dr. Alley makes the following statements and shows the slide below as his rebuttal to the Svensmark et al theory of Cosmoclimatology. This theory suggests that small changes in the solar magnetic field throughout solar cycles are amplified due to the effect on cosmic rays, which may seed cloud formation and thereby cool the earth. Dr. Alley tries to refute this theory by stating that a period of high cosmic ray activity 40,000 years ago didn't change the climate. However, the added vertical line below shows a correlation between the increased cosmic rays 40,000 years ago and the end of an interglacial with transition to an ice age and drop in temperature of about 6 degrees. While this does not prove Svensmark's et als theory, it certainly does not support Dr. Alley's rebuttal. Why does Dr. Alley not consider the possibility that the increased cosmic rays played a role in transition to an ice age, and that there might be a "saturation point" beyond which additional cosmic rays do not make a significant difference? That's not discussed, since it doesn't agree with his party-line theory that CO2 controls all.

(red vertical line and "X" added)

link for article above and below

 

The Cooling of Greenland over the past 8000 Years

A 2009 paper¹ plots GISP2 paleoclimate icecore data from central Greenland over the past 8000 years, finding at least 6 periods of warming exceeding that of the 20th century. In addition, the rate of warming 900-1000 AD leading up to the Medieval Warming Period exceeds the rate of warming in the 20th century. The authors find close agreement between two analysis methods of the temperature proxies for GISP2 data, stable isotope analysis² and Oxygen 18/16 variability³. The Medieval, Roman, and Minoan warming periods are all found to be hotter than the 20th century, in addition to other unnamed periods of warming over the past 8000 years.

¹Florides GA, Christodoulides P Global warming and CO2 through sciences. Environ Int. 2009 Feb;35(2):390-401.

²Alley RB. GISP2 ice core temperature and accumulation data. IGBP PAGES/World Data Center for Paleoclimatology Data Contribution Series #2004-013. NOAA/NGDC Paleoclimatology Program, Boulder CO,USA;2004. http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/greenland/summit/gisp2/isotopes/gisp2_temp_accum_alley2000.txt

³Grootes PM, Stuiver M. Oxygen 18/16 variability in Greenland snow and ice with 10^3 to 10^5-year time resolution. JGeophysRes1997;102:26455–70 ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/greenland/summit/gisp2/isotopes/gispd18o.txt

Accumulating Evidence of the Corrupted US Temperature Record

A new SPPI paper examines the raw and adjusted historical temperature records for Pennsylvania and finds the mean temperature trend from 1895 to 2009 to be minus .08°C/century, but after unexplained adjustments the official trend becomes positive .7°C/century. The difference between the raw and adjusted data exceeds the .6°C/century in global warming claimed for the 20th century. An example of the raw and adjusted datasets is shown below for Lebanon, PA:

NASA's Gavin Schmidt's Lies, Damned Lies, and Models

From The Washington Post April 6, 2010: Scientists' use of computer models to predict climate change is under attack

This year, critics have harped on that fact, attacking models of climate change that have been used to illustrate what will happen if the United States and other countries do nothing to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Climate scientists have responded that their models are imperfect, but still provide invaluable glimpses of change to come.


They have found themselves trying to persuade the public -- now surrounded by computerized predictions of the future -- to believe in these.

If policymakers don't heed the models, "you're throwing away {GIGO} information. And if you throw away{GIGO} information, then you know less {more} about the future than we actually do {don't}," said Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

"You can say, 'You know what, I don't trust the climate models, so I'm going to walk into the middle of the road with a blindfold on,' " Schmidt said. "But you know what, that's not smart."

Climate Change is Simply Natural and Disaster isn't Imminent

Dr. Richard Lindzen's OpEd Published today:

The IPCC's claim that most of the warming since the 1950s is because of man assumed that current models adequately accounted for natural internal variability. The failure of these models to anticipate that there has been no statistically significant warming for the past 14 years or so contradicts this assumption.

However, the modelers chose not to stress this. Rather, they suggested that the models could be further corrected, and that warming would resume by 2009, 2013, or even 2030.

Global warming enthusiasts have responded to the recent absence of warming by arguing that the past decade has been the warmest on record. We are still speaking of tenths of a degree, and the records have come into question. But since we are, according to these records, in a relatively warm period, it is not surprising the past decade was the warmest on record.

Given that the evidence suggests that anthropogenic warming has been greatly exaggerated, so is the basis for alarm. But this basis would be weak even if anthropogenic global warming were significant. Polar bears, arctic summer sea ice, regional droughts and floods, coral bleaching, hurricanes, alpine glaciers, malaria, etc., all depend not on GATA, but on a regional variables including temperature, humidity, cloud cover, precipitation, direction and magnitude of wind, and the state of the ocean.

Trees Insist Arctic Cooled 500-2004 AD

(notations in red added)

Two tenets of AGW theory are 1) tree-ring paleoclimate data reconstructs an accurate portrayal of the climate of the past [except when scientists don't like what it shows, call it a "divergence problem" and hide the decline] and 2) the poles should show the most warming of all. Unfortunately, the Scots pines in the Torneträsk area within the Arctic Circle in northern Sweden around 68.5°N have not received the memo on AGW as of 2004. A 2008 paper shows that the updated Torneträsk data "show a trend of -0.3°C over the last 1,500 years". The trees also say that the end of the Little Ice Age in the late 1800's was the lowest temperature over the past 1,500 years, and according to ice core data was the lowest temperature in the past 10,000 years. By pure chance, this exceptionally cold period is also the same time the global temperature record (HADCRU) begins in 1850. Thus, the global thermometer record showing increasing temperatures in the 20th century mostly represents the recovery from the lowest temperatures of the past 10,000 years during the Little Ice Age. The Torneträsk pines insist that the rate of temperature increase and temperature anomaly of the 20th century was not unprecedented and was less than that of the Medieval Warming Period (~850-1200AD). From the abstract: