Feb
16
Climate Change Realist
Filed Under Uncategorized | 7 Comments
Ace of Spades highlights an extract from an interview with John Christy of the University of Alabama-Huntsville. It speaks to where I am on climate change:
JOHN ROBERTS, CNN ANCHOR: There’s also something else that’s out there. Phil Jones from the University of East Anglia, the climate research unit, the guy that was at the center of this recent e-mail controversy late last year, has said in an interview with the BBC that he has not seen any, quote, “statistically significant warming since 1995,” though he says he still believes that the earth’s temperature has warmed. And he also said that he might be missing some of the data that is responsible for his climate models.
Of course, skeptics are jumping all over this, saying the whole thing is a farce. Global warming doesn’t exist.
What do you think of the Professor Jones situation, the lack of statistically significant warming, and the fact that he may have misplaced some of the records?
JOHN CHRISTY, PROFESSOR, ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCE, UNIV. OF ALABAMA- HUNTSVILLE: Well, I think what Phil Jones is saying is that Mother Nature is perfectly capable of making the temperature rise and fall through the past several hundred years. And in terms of the data problems, well, we do have to be careful when we’re talking about public policy, that means trillions of dollars, and we haven’t had that very hard and critical situation where you take care of data and make it publicly available to everyone. And that needs to be done now.
Like Immigration, the debate about climate change is an either/or argument. Believe in climate change and opponents (including myself) call you an alarmist. Be sceptical of climate change and you are denialist.
Why can’t one be a realist? Is it true that the earth has warmed over the last 100 years? Yes but only slightly. Is it true that human activity has put extra CO2 into the atmosphere and that that has contributed to the warming? Very likely but not to the extent that other natural conditions also influence climate. Is global warming potentially catastrophic? Ah. Here’s the rub. There is little evidence that this is true, and when, as seen by the latest deceitful disclosures by the IPCC, catastrophic theories are put forward, they are more often than not discounted. Himalayan glaciers, the kilimanjaro glacier, polar bear numbers, a flooded Netherlands and now hurricanes have all failed the test of a second look.
But for climate change advocates to create a transformative economic and social agenda, the catastrophic element is required otherwise where is the importance of now. The climate change realist on the other hand, whilst accepting the possibility of anthropogenic climate change, does not accept the catastrophic nature of it and therefore does not accept the need for dramatic economic and social change.
And that’s where I am right now. In other words: “yeah! So what?”
Jan
24
The Science Is Settled
Filed Under General Politics | 4 Comments
It really isn’t. What is being revealed is layer upon layer of fraudulent claims from the International Panel For Climate Change:
First it was revealed that IPCC claims in it’s 2007 report that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 has shown to not only be false, but based on a wholly unscientific reasoning:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report contained an estimate that most of the Himalaya’s glaciers could disappear by 2035….Other glacier experts have said that while the Himalaya’s glaciers are certainly melting, at current rates of warming, it would take much longer than 25 years for them to disappear altogether – ten times as long, perhaps.
No peer review, just the picking up of a “speculative comment” in an e-mail interview with a scientist for New Scientist magazine:
Glaciologists are this week arguing over how a highly contentious claim about the speed at which glaciers are melting came to be included in the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
In 1999 New Scientist reported a comment by the leading Indian glaciologist Syed Hasnain, who said in an email interview with this author that all the glaciers in the central and eastern Himalayas could disappear by 2035.
Hasnain, of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, who was then chairman of the International Commission on Snow and Ice’s working group on Himalayan glaciology, has never repeated the prediction in a peer-reviewed journal. He now says the comment was “speculative”.
Despite the 10-year-old New Scientist report being the only source, the claim found its way into the IPCC fourth assessment report published in 2007. Moreover the claim was extrapolated to include all glaciers in the Himalayas.
And this isn’t the only falsehood in the report:
THE United Nations climate science panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.
It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny — and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak. The report’s own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough.
The claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that global warming is already affecting the severity and frequency of global disasters, has since become embedded in political and public debate. It was central to discussions at last month’s Copenhagen climate summit, including a demand by developing countries for compensation of $100 billion (£62 billion) from the rich nations blamed for creating the most emissions.
Ed Miliband, the energy and climate change minister, has suggested British and overseas floods — such as those in Bangladesh in 2007 — could be linked to global warming. Barack Obama, the US president, said last autumn: “More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent.”
The Sunday Times has since found that the scientific paper on which the IPCC based its claim had not been peer reviewed, nor published, at the time the climate body issued its report.
When the paper was eventually published, in 2008, it had a new caveat. It said: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses.”
The case for global warming alarmism is being revealed for what it is; built upon a pack of lies, representing unscientific reports as being peer-reviewed. At the start of the year I made some predictions. One, which I eventually left out, was that the climate change consensus would start to fall apart this year. I’m starting to wish I’d left it in.
Jan
11
Here We Go Again!
Filed Under General Politics | 9 Comments
In the seventies it was “ice age here we come”. And then it was global warming. Guess what. The mini-Ice Age is on it’s way.
The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists.
Their predictions – based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans – challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy’s most deeply cherished beliefs, such as the claim that the North Pole will be free of ice in
summer by 2013.
They say that their research shows that much of the warming was caused by oceanic cycles when they were in a ‘warm mode’ as opposed to the present ‘cold mode’.
The article is really interesting and it speaks to where I am on climate change right now. Yes the world has been warming, yes we are putting increasing levels of CO2 into the atmosphere, yes CO2 has a warming affect, but it is a minor effect negated by naturally occurring climatic conditions.
Anyway, if we are in for atwenty to thirty year freeze, shouldn’t we start pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere to mitigate the effects?
Dec
19
An Agreement In Copenhagen
Filed Under American Politics | 13 Comments
Barack Obama touts the agreement as:
“a meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough”.
So that’s a non-biding agreement to aim for no more than a 2 degree increase in temperatures. The fact that “we’re in this together” mentality will serve as the watch-dog to ensure this happens, nothing more binding than that, and that countries will have to self-declare and self-monitor what there targets and actions are.
Well that’s good then. Worth every penny of the $100 billion that the Obama administration are prepared to give away, worth the two weeks and the massive carbon footprint that the Copenhagen summit was. A bugger all solution to a bugger all problem that unfortunately doesn’t cost bugger all.
Gordon Brown calls the agreement a “vital first step”. Couldn’t a “first step” be possible without everyone jetting into Copenhagen in this modern connected world? One would think that this Copenhagen boondoggle should have aimed for “final step” or the “almost there step”. I’m sure the “first step” could have been achieved without private airplanes and chauffeur driven cars. But then how else would Al Gore have been able to promote his ‘poem’?
Sarcasm aside; I think one are in which Obama should get some plaudits, is that he was able to get the agreement with Russia and India. In the present debate, that’s no small achievement. The question is, what did he have to do to get them on board as they were threatening to pull out. Obama had to have some agreement out of his visit to Copenhagen. Another failed visit to that city (the Olympics being the first) wouldn’t have served his reputation as someone able to persuade the world very much.
Dec
7
The sacrifice required to combat climate change? Only for the little people:
On a normal day, Majken Friss Jorgensen, managing director of Copenhagen’s biggest limousine company, says her firm has twelve vehicles on the road. During the “summit to save the world”, which opens here tomorrow, she will have 200.
“We thought they were not going to have many cars, due to it being a climate convention,” she says. “But it seems that somebody last week looked at the weather report.”
Ms Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. “We haven’t got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand,” she says. “We’re having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden.”
And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? “Five,” says Ms Jorgensen. “The government has some alternative fuel cars but the rest will be petrol or diesel. We don’t have any hybrids in Denmark, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it’s very Danish.”…
The temptation, then, is to dismiss the whole thing as a ridiculous circus. Many of the participants do not really need to be here. And far from “saving the world,” the world’s leaders have already agreed that this conference will not produce any kind of binding deal, merely an interim statement of intent.
And planes?
There are so many jets headed there that the local airport can’t accommodate them all; after dropping off their passengers in Copenhagen, some will have to fly on to other regional airports so that they can “park.”
Eco-friendly enviro-mentalists and politicians. Just what the world doesn’t need.
time to put things on hold for three years:
The Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails.
The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012.
Good for them. But one can always rely on the politicians to ignore the people’s concerns:
The (British) Government is attempting to stop the Met Office from carrying out the re-examination, arguing that it would be seized upon by climate change sceptics.
Who says that AGW isn’t a politically driven matter?
Nov
30
Climategate Part Two
Filed Under Uncategorized | 14 Comments
Via Mark Steyn at NRO:
SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.
It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years…
The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building…
In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”
So we are reliant on data that the CRU have manipulated and filtered, assumedly to justify their own assumptions. Still, they’re scientists so they would have acted honourably and competently wouldn’t they? If you want a giggle and a window into the competency of the scientists at the Climate Research Unit, have a look at these excerpts from a programmer documenting his attempts to get to grip with the CRU’s data.
Nov
30
Whilst reading some comments at Realclimate.org, I saw a comment which for me sums up the quality of the debate on climate change and how advocates of AGW view sceptics. The comment was by a commentator CCPO and is comment no 179. Read it and weep at how real debate is no longer necessary when pushing a progressive agenda, it is now a case of having to accept liberal truth without the facility for criticism:
…it is neither in the interests of the cause of reducing CO2 emmissions, nor the greater cause of upholding science itself, to assume all skeptics are Denialists.
Why? They are. If they are so ill informed as to not know the very obvious, even as laypersons, perhaps they should not be posting, eh? Since the evidence is incredibly one-sided, and even the scientists here and elsewhere don’t dispute my contention posted here and elsewhere that there is not even one paper that in any way refutes any of the underpinnings of AGW, how can they be but a denialist?
Asking me to be “nice” will get you nowhere. We’ve been too nice, and the nuts are winning.
The only thing that will stop these pugilists is for them to have consequences. They need to find themselves in criminal or civil court.
Just as in the healthcare debate, it is unacceptable to the liberal nuttery for anyone to question their assertions. Because they are backed by ’science’, we peasants should just blindly accept their judgements. They are the modern catholic church, only allowing the chosen few to interpret their ‘religious’ texts. But 15th century Catholicism was challenged by a sceptical protestant revolution and todays sceptics are becoming more and more motivated by the dogmatic left to play that protestant role.
Nov
25
These infamous e-mails. I don’t think they are necessarily the Rosetta stone that proves that AGW is a massive fraud perpetrated on human kind. Even though “hide the decline” and the “tricks” are damning statements, they don’t necessarily deny the existence of AGW. But it is the unscientific actions of these scientists at the Climate Research Unit that bothers me. Not because I’m suddenly enamoured by science, but because “peer-reviewed science” was the weapon used by AGW advocates against those that are sceptical.
It is peer-reviewed studies that advocates use to legitimise their global warming theories, it is the absence of dissent within peer-reviewed literature that AGW exists that is used to discredit scepticism:
This analysis shows that scientists publishing in the peer-reviewed literature agree with IPCC, the National Academy of Sciences, and the public statements of their professional societies. Politicians, economists, journalists, and others may have the impression of confusion, disagreement, or discord among climate scientists, but that impression is incorrect…But there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen.
But as these leaked e-mails reveal, it’s no wonder that there is no dissent in peer-reviewed research, they’ve acted to nobble that very process
“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.
and:
“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. K and I will keep them out somehow-even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
and from Realclearpolitics:
You can also see from these e-mails the scientists’ panic at any dissent appearing in the scientific literature. When another article by a skeptic was published in Geophysical Research Letters, Michael Mann complains, “It’s one thing to lose Climate Research. We can’t afford to lose GRL.” Another CRU scientist, Tom Wigley, suggests that they target another troublesome editor: “If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted.” That’s exactly what they did, and a later e-mail boasts that “The GRL leak may have been plugged up now w/new editorial leadership there.”
I’ve seen the Climate Research Unit described as the “Pentagon” of the AGW argument. The fact that they have behaved so unscientifically seriously discredits their argument and helps to demonstrate that this issue is a political, rather than a scientific one.
What these e-mails reveal is that the science is most definitely not settled, just that the nature of the debate has been deliberately manipulated to make it appear that way.
Oct
10
Cooling On Climate Change
Filed Under Uncategorized | 21 Comments
The BBC no less.
This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.
But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.
And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.
It’s quite simple. If the climate models couldn’t predict the cooling, it calls into question everything the climate models show.
The oceans, he says, have a cycle in which they warm and cool cyclically. The most important one is the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO).
For much of the 1980s and 1990s, it was in a positive cycle, that means warmer than average. And observations have revealed that global temperatures were warm too.
But in the last few years it has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down.
These cycles in the past have lasted for nearly 30 years.
Wasn’t the climate news 30 years ago one of entering a new Ice age? What a coincidence.
The whole theme of this article is that the advocates and the sceptics can’t agree on whether AGW exists. It’s clear to me, that if there is no consensus in the scientific community, how can it be settled science?
And it matters. Governmental measures to curb CO2 emissions have a negative impact on the economy. Right now, that’s not a good thing. When the scientists get their act together, then we can talk, but for now, government should leave the hell alone on this issue.
Sep
28
The AGW Debate
Filed Under General Politics | 46 Comments
Intersting debate on AGW in the comments, which I’d like to hijack and centralise here if you don’t mind. I do so, so that I can credit Martin Meenagh with another interesting post of which I thought his opening paragraph was particularly true:
The twenty years before 1999 brought forth many pathologies. One was a crazy worship of ideal market systems and their imposition on everyday life, regardless of people; others included neoconservatism, faith-based abusive atheism, uncontrolled tort and human rights law, the definition of men and women as sexual beings alone, and Pelagian approaches to criminals. Another was global warming.
I’m not totally comfortable with the science on this issue, but my scepticism needs AGW to be proven, and I think we’re a long way from that.
I’ll leave Martin with the final word:
Don’t stop thinking. Don’t turn off your critical rationality. Just don’t treat grant dependent scientists as priests, or let the media-political class think for you.