Oh, Mann: Cuccinelli targets UVA papers in Climategate salvo

UPDATE: Read the Demand Letter from the Attorney General to UVA

by Courteney Stuart 4:32pm Thursday Apr 29, 2010
No one can accuse Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli of shying from controversy. In his first four months in office, Cuccinelli directed public universities to remove sexual orientation from their anti-discrimination policies, attacked the Environmental Protection Agency, and filed a lawsuit challenging federal health care reform. Now, it appears, he may be preparing a legal assault on an embattled proponent of global warming theory who used to teach at the University of Virginia, Michael Mann.


In papers sent to UVA April 23, Cuccinelli’s office commands the university to produce a sweeping swath of documents relating to Mann’s receipt of nearly half a million dollars in state grant-funded climate research conducted while Mann— now director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State— was at UVA between 1999 and 2005.

If Cuccinelli succeeds in finding a smoking gun like the purloined emails that led to the international scandal dubbed Climategate, Cuccinelli could seek the return of all the research money, legal fees, and trebled damages.

Antarctica's Sub-Tropical Past

Scientists peer into Antarctica's past
via Eurekalert 4/29/10

The poles control much of our global climate. Giant ice sheets in Antarctica behave like mirrors, reflecting the sun's energy and moderating the world's temperatures. The waxing and waning of these ice sheets contribute to changes in sea level and affect ocean circulation, which regulates our climate by transporting heat around the planet.


Despite their present-day cold temperatures, the poles were not always covered with ice. New climate records recovered from Antarctica during the recent Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) "Wilkes Land Glacial History" Expedition show that approximately 53 million years ago, Antarctica was a warm, sub-tropical environment. During this same period, known as the "greenhouse" or "hothouse" world, atmospheric CO2 levels exceeded those of today by ten times.

Then suddenly, Antarctica's lush environment transitioned into its modern icy realm. In only 400,000 years – a mere blink of an eye in geologic time – concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide decreased. Global temperatures dropped. Ice sheets developed. Antarctica became ice-bound.

How did this change happen so abruptly and how stable can we expect ice sheets to be in the future?

[How indeed... if CO2 levels were 10 times higher than today and Antarctica a subtropical paradise could the run-away-catastrophic-positive-feedback-system possibly reverse?]

Australia's Changing Climate-Change Climate

Costly cap-and-trade legislation isn't the political winner it once was.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL APRIL 29, 2010  By TOM SWITZER

It was always going to be an uphill battle for the U.S. Congress to pass comprehensive climate and energy legislation in an election year. But with Senator Lindsey Graham's likely decision to withdraw his support from the landmark bill, the prospects are now virtually zero.

That is not just because Mr. Graham had been the only Republican senator to endorse a broad approach to tackling global warming. It's because the climate, politically speaking, has changed dramatically since June when the House of Representatives narrowly passed a climate cap-and-tax bill. President Obama's decision to make immigration reform a higher priority in the Senate legislative calendar is a recognition of this reality: Cap-and-tax is dead. And not just in Washington either.

Re-recorded History

The animation below shows how the surface, weather balloon, and even satellite data has been adjusted between years 1995, 2000, and 2006:

Older inconvenient data are pushed down and recent data increased to create a tidy story. Created from slides of Pat Michaels presentation from the highly recommended video below of the Cooler Heads Coalition congressional briefing on the science and politics of the "Climategate" scandal. Featured speakers are George Mason University Distinguished Senior Fellow Pat Michaels and International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project (ICECAP) Executive Director Joseph D'Aleo:

More on the ~60 Year Climate Cycle

The P Gosselin NoTricksZone corresponded with Dr Oleg Pokrovsky, the Russian scientist who was widely quoted by international newswires 4 days ago about his statement that the Arctic is cooling, not warming. Dr. Pokrovsky replied and provided a link to his recent powerpoint presentation. He bases his analysis partly upon the cyclical nature of the AMO and PDO, as shown in his wavelet analyses below. The simplistic explanation for interpretation of the wavelet analysis is to look for dark red horizontal bands, which show the primary cyclical component for both the AMO and PDO to range between ~60-70 years (y axis):

Dr. Pokrovsky also finds good agreement between the ~60 year AMO cycle and Arctic ice extent:

He also finds similar periodicity in the PDO during the instrument era (first graph) and from paleoclimate reconstructions (second graph).

Ancient Tools Revealed by Melting Arctic Ice

MSM fails again to point out Arctic naturally much warmer in past and no evidence to suggest it's any different this time

LiveScience Staff posted: 26 April 2010 02:43 pm ET

Warming temperatures are melting patches of ice that have been in place for thousands of years in the mountains of the Canadian High Arctic and in turn revealing a treasure trove of ancient hunting tools...
 
The results have been extraordinary: Andrews and his team (including members of the indigenous Shutaot'ine or Mountain Dene) have found 2,400-year-old spear throwing tools, a 1000-year-old ground squirrel snare, and bows and arrows dating back 850 years.

The latter two would be from the Medieval Warming Period, which despite Mann et al attempts to "contain" and claim was only localized, has overwhelming evidence it was in fact global and hotter than the present. The 2,400 year old spear tool would be from the Roman Warming Period, also hotter than the present. No mention of course in the LiveScience press release.

The Global Temperature Anomaly Race Track

And they're off! Since the starting gate of the 1998 El Nino, the Hansen/GISS thoroughbred racehorse maintains it's commanding lead from it's flying start and sharp pullout from the year 2000 backstretch. The Hansen/GISS thoroughbred was the clear favorite and thus odds are only even money for a win, even though a track record is in the offing. Pulling up the rear and actually going the "wrong" way are the neck-to-neck long-shots RSS and UAH satellite donkeys, at a record anomaly difference of .3°C, about half of the entire claimed global warming anomaly of the past century. The Hansen/GISS thoroughbred is the only one that can continue to spin that the globe is the hottest in re-recorded history at every stretch, and can continue it's commanding lead by adjustments and deletions of inconvenient data, an advantage not available to the satellite donkeys which are at 1000-1 odds. Global bets placed upon the outcome are currently estimated at $45 trillion. 

Adiabatic Theory predicts slight cooling from Doubled CO2

Adding to the list (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25...and others) of scientists and mathematicians who have disproven conventional greenhouse gas theory, Russian physicists OG Sorokhtin, GV Chilingar, and LF Khilyuk noted in their book Global warming and global cooling. Evolution of climate on earth. Developments in Earth & Environmental Sciences (Elsevier 2007) that conventional greenhouse theory is not based on sound physical derivation, with most calculations and predictions based on intuitive models using numerous poorly defined parameters and unproven positive feedback forcing from CO2. Most conventional interpretations and models, such as those of the IPCC, consider only one component of heat transfer- radiation- to create a flat earth radiation budget of the atmosphere, ocean, and land masses, and do not adequately address the impact of e.g. convection and circulation on a rotating sphere. In contrast, the Sorokhtin et al adiabatic theory considers earth as an open, dissipative system that can be described by non-linear equations of mathematical physics, taking into account the formation of stable thermodynamic structures in each compartment, between compartments, and ruled by strong negative feedbacks (e.g. convection, water cycles, clouds). They devised a model based on well-established relationships among physical fields describing the mass and heat transfer in the atmosphere and subsequently published the paper Cooling of Atmosphere Due to CO2 in Energy Sources, Part A: Recovery, Utilization, and Environmental Effects (2008), excerpted below.
 
This paper and all of the other derivations of atmospheric physics noted in the list above come to essentially the same conclusion: Doubling of CO2 levels will cause insignificant changes in global temperature (<1°C). This prediction is in much better agreement with the five peer-reviewed empirical satellite studies than any of the IPCC models or predictions from conventional greenhouse gas theory.

9000 Years of Decreasing Monsoons in China

One critical flaw of the IPCC appears to be a myopic focus on climate changes within the past century without placing these changes in proper historical context, and then assuming the 20th century changes can not be accounted for by anything other than anthropogenic forcing (i.e. man-made CO2). Time and time again, however, the paleoclimate record shows the 0.6C temperature change of the 20th century to be trivial in comparison to entirely natural changes that have occurred in both directions since the beginning of time. This is a point made by Dr. Richard Lindzen many times. Not only are the temperature changes of the 20th century trivial, but so are other climate indicators including monsoons and droughts. Here are two examples, the first indicating that the strength of Asian Monsoons has shown a declining trend over the past 9000 years:

As the earth has warmed since the last ice age 15,000 years ago, the strength of monsoons (and amount of associated vital precipitation) has decreased. The "recent" uptick started about 500 years ago from the low of the past 9000 years, and therefore can not be accounted for by anthropogenic forcing.  What does the IPCC AR4 say about Asian monsoons?:  "An increase in precipitation is projected in the Asian monsoon (along with an increase in interannual season-averaged precipitation variability)." Setting aside that there is no evidence that this is due to man, an increase in monsoonal precipitation appears to be a good thing in historical context. Shown below are records of precipitation for 5 regions covering northern to southern China, with times of severe drought shown as red vertical lines (note absence in the 20th century and lack of "increasing variability"):

The periods of severe drought correspond to the period of abnormally low monsoonal strength shown in the first graph. The IPCC prediction of increased monsoonal precipitation (and variability) due to anthropogenic forcing is baseless conjecture, and even if true is likely to be benefitial for avoidance of severe drought.
graph source

Sign of the Times: Amazon Rank Spencer 40 v. Romm 2087

Dr. Roy Spencer's new book The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World's Top Climate Scientists is the 40th best selling book on Amazon. Also just released, Climategate: A Meteorologist Exposes the Global Warming Scam by Brian Sussman is the 52nd best selling book on Amazon. In contrast, Straight Up: America's Fiercest Climate Blogger Takes on the Status Quo Media, Politicians, and Clean Energy Solutions released 5 days earlier than the 2 books above by climate hyper-alarmist Joe Romm has an Amazon rank of 2087, despite a push by Al Gore. Spencer outselling Romm 52 to 1: Another inconvenient truth (ratio could be even higher if actual sales numbers were provided by Amazon)

Twenty Years of Advocacy, Not Journalism, on Global Warming

The media has forged a consensus around climate change.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL APRIL 23, 2010, 5:39 P.M. ET
By RICH NOYES The Media Research Center

For more than two decades, the so-called mainstream media have preached the dangers of manmade global warming, insisting American businesses and consumers must make massive economic sacrifices to ward off a global climate catastrophe. Not even last November's exposure of e-mails from leading scientists on the alarmist side of the debate — showing them conniving to fudge or suppress data, discredit critics and distort the peer review process — has caused journalists to finally take a skeptical approach to radical environmentalists' doomsaying.

A new study from the MRC's Business & Media Institute documents how ABC, CBS and NBC have been just as strident in their advocacy in the months following "ClimateGate" as they were in the 20 years that preceded the scandal. At the same time, a review of the Media Research Center's archives going back to the late 1980s shows just how strongly reporters have pushed the liberal line on global warming. Here are just some of the many examples:

• "Global warming could mean economic upheaval. It could bring suffering. It could bring starvation....The causes of global warming are no mystery. The biggest culprit is carbon dioxide, or CO2, a bi-product when man burns fossil fuels to run cars or generate electricity....If we fail to act, there may be hell to pay in a hotter world....Global warming is not a fact, just a widely-held theory. The problem is, if man waits for proof, it may be too late."
— Host Don Harrison narrating CNN's primetime Climate In Crisis special, August 1, 1989.

•"As the science editor at Time, I would freely admit that on this issue we have crossed the boundary from news reporting to advocacy."
— Time's Charles Alexander at a September 16, 1989 global warming conference at the Smithsonian Institute, as quoted in the October 5 Wall Street Journal.

• "If the world is to head off the risk of global warming, with its danger of massive crop failure, or rising sea levels, or spreading starvation in the poorest countries, then America — the largest producer of the gases that cause global warming — is in the spotlight."
— ABC reporter Ned Potter on World News Tonight, April 7, 1992.

• "Environmentalists see catastrophes of biblical proportions, from droughts to melting ice caps that send sea levels rising."
— Correspondent Barry Petersen on the CBS Evening News, December 1, 1997.

• Karen Kerrigan, Small Business Survival Committee: "To say that the science is conclusive...is actually bunk."
Host Ted Koppel: "I was just going to make the observation that there are still some people who believe in the Flat Earth Society, too, but that doesn't mean they're right."
— Exchange on the December 9, 1997 Nightline.
More at WSJ.COM  and some of the results from Minnesotans 4 Global Warming: Crazy Hippies Celebrate Earthday:

BREAKING: Scientist says Arctic getting colder

MOSCOW, April 23 (UPI) -- A Russian scientist says the Arctic may be getting colder, not warmer, which would hamper the international race to discover new mineral fields.

An Arctic cold snap that began in 1998 could last for years, freezing the northern marine passage and making it impassable without icebreaking ships, said Oleg Pokrovsky of the Voeikov Main Geophysical Observatory.

"I think the development of the shelf will face large problems," Pokrovsky said Thursday at a seminar on research in the Polar regions.

Scientists who believe the climate is warming may have been misled by data from U.S. meteorological stations located in urban areas, where dense microclimates creates higher temperatures, RIA Novosti quoted Pokrovsky as saying.

"Politicians who placed their bets on global warming may lose the pot," Pokrovsky said.

Global warming hoax? Environmentalist discusses climate alarmist pollution

AN EARTH DAY COUNTERPOINT By Larry Bell April 22nd, 2010

I consider myself an environmentalist, but having extensively studied the issues I haven’t found any evidence that the sky is falling, oceans are rising, polar bears are sweating or that carbon dioxide is a polluting menace.

There is clear evidence, however, that such claims are predicated upon climate models that can’t even predict last week’s weather, that Norse Viking farmers grew crops in a much warmer Greenland about 1,000 years ago, that global temperatures have risen and fallen dramatically over hundreds of thousands of years without human influence, and that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels typically followed, not led those changes.

By the way, maybe you noticed that global temperatures have actually been dropping over the past decade in spite of increased CO2?

Happy Earth Day to you, too.

Some may argue that unfounded alarmism is justifiable, even necessary, to get our attention and motivate us to do what we should be doing anyway to conserve energy and not pollute the planet. Hey, who wants to challenge those purposes?

Quotes from the 1st Earth Day 1970

“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.”
• Kenneth Watt, ecologist

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
• George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.”
• Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
• New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”
• Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day

Human Contribution to Warming is 10% or Less

SCIENCE EDITORIAL (April 17, 2010) by S. Fred Singer, PhD

Due Diligence on the IPCC Assessment Report #4 [2007]

I know it’s a tough job – but let’s just check the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes (IPCC 2007) iconic, widely-quoted conclusion and parse its meaning:

“Most of the observed increase in globally-averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GH gas concentrations.”

How should one interpret this ex cathedra declaration to the faithful?

IPCC helpfully defines ‘very likely’ as ‘90-99% certain’, but they don’t tell us how they reached such well-defined certainty.

What remarkable unanimity! Just how many and whom did they poll? No word.

IPCC doesn’t define the word ‘most.’ We may assume it means anything between 51 and 99%. That’s quite a spread.

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?