Global Warming/Climate Change Super Thread

[Haletown]

...??

Just trying to make a teensy bit challenging for them  :

 

[ModlrMike]

I wager you're referring to mosquitoes.

 

[Haletown]

I wager you're referring to mosquitoes.

Well it is Easter weekend and I gotta frappe la rue here shortly to go visit the in law clan so let's just cut to the chase . . .  not exactly mosquitoes but the are actively involved.

"it is vividly apparent that DDT was not hazardous to human health and that the banning of its domestic use led to its diminished production in the United States — and less availability of DDT for the developing world. The results were disastrous: at least 1-2 million people continue to die from malaria each year, 30-60 million or more lives needlessly lost since the ban took effect. This is especially tragic since there was hope of eradicating the disease altogether when DDT was first introduced and its potential was recognized. "


http://www.acsh.org/healthissues/newsid.442/healthissue_detail.asp

Happy Easter or whatever you all do this weekend  :nod:

 

[Fishbone Jones]

Well it is Easter weekend and I gotta frappe la rue here shortly to go visit the in law clan so let's just cut to the chase . . .  not exactly mosquitoes but the are actively involved.

"it is vividly apparent that DDT was not hazardous to human health and that the banning of its domestic use led to its diminished production in the United States — and less availability of DDT for the developing world. The results were disastrous: at least 1-2 million people continue to die from malaria each year, 30-60 million or more lives needlessly lost since the ban took effect. This is especially tragic since there was hope of eradicating the disease altogether when DDT was first introduced and its potential was recognized. "


http://www.acsh.org/healthissues/newsid.442/healthissue_detail.asp

Happy Easter or whatever you all do this weekend  :nod:

Playing with soft shelled, misshapen, DDT affected Easter eggs?

 

[GAP]

Playing with soft shelled, misshapen, DDT affected Easter eggs?

That's why we decorate them....

 

[Haletown]

That's why we decorate them....

Well it adds to the BBQing challenge but they taste great if you get the grill at just the right temperature so you don't scorch the paint.

 

[Bruce Monkhouse]

Well Mr. Suzuki??

http://www.torontosun.com/2012/04/08/unbearable-news-for-doomsayers

It would come as no surprise if David Suzuki called an emergency meeting of his David Suzuki Foundation over the weekend to deal with the sad news that the North Pole was not melting.

Every eco-system has its canary in the coal mine and, in the case of the Arctic, it¹s the polar bear - supposedly dying off, say doomsayers, because global warming is melting the very ice on which these bears need to hunt.
The trouble with this, however, is that it's bogus.

Our Nanooks of the North have never been healthier. An aerial survey of the northern shore of Hudson Bay, where the polar bear is supposedly most threatened, shows a population some 66% greater than what many scientists predicted.
This should drive Suzuki apoplectic. The dying polar bear, after all, is his meal ticket. Its impending demise turned the lies of An Inconvenient Truth into a Nobel Prize for former U.S. vice president Al Gore.
This is a very difficult bell to unring.

The aerial survey's results, released last week by the Government of Nunavut, shows a bear population along Hudson Bay of 1,013 animals when the alarmists predicted the number would be as low as 610.
These would likely be the same "scientists" used by David Suzuki for his sky-is-falling, ice-is-melting, canary-is-dying fundraisers which have Santa Claus drowning as the North Pole melts. What will they say now that this inconvenient truth has the polar bears flourishing, not dying off? It is a conundrum for the Suzuki crowd.

"(The survey shows) the bear population is not in crisis as people believed," says Drikus Gissing, wildlife management director of Nunavut.
"There is no doom and gloom."
What? How could this be?

Instead of listening to eco-opportunists, or university professors, we'd rather take the word of the Inuit. It's their hunting ground too, and they say the polar bear is far from being endangered.
In fact, the 25,000 polar bears across Canada's Arctic is likely the highest number ever.
We trust, therefore, that David Suzuki will call a press conference to explain his Chicken Little routine. He can use one of our Sun News studios for free.

No charitable tax receipt necessary.

 

[Maxadia]

"Hooray!!!  All my crusading has worked!!!"

- David Suzuki (just being facetious here, of course.  ;D)

 

[ModlrMike]

You've overlooked the obvious response:

"The ice is melting and the polar bears can't get to sea. That's why they're concentrated on shore."

You can rationalize anything to support your argument.

 

[Haletown]

You've overlooked the obvious response:

"The ice is melting and the polar bears can't get to sea. That's why they're concentrated on shore."

You can rationalize anything to support your argument.

An obvious response that ignores data and the facts

http://www.real-science.com/more-ice-in-2012-than-1974

Never stopped the Warmongers before . . .

You can believe the climate models or the data but not both.

You can believe Suzuki or the data but not both.

You can believe Greenpeace or the data but not both.

Ya have to love it when a plan comes together.  :nod:

 

[Maxadia]

An oldie but a goodie....

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2007/sep/19/inside-the-beltway-69748548/

 

[a_majoor]

A long list of NASA luminaries finally speak out openly against Prof Hansen. Of course the argument for "global warming" has been based on misinterpreting or manipulating empirical evidence (the Hocky stick graph that managed to ignore the European Warm Period and the Little Ice Age is perhaps the best known example, but the Climategate emails have tons of other examples). Better late than never:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/10/hansen-and-schmidt-of-nasa-giss-under-fire-engineers-scientists-astronauts-ask-nasa-administration-to-look-at-emprical-evidence-rather-than-climate-models/

Hansen and Schmidt of NASA GISS under fire for climate stance: Engineers, scientists, astronauts ask NASA administration to look at empirical evidence rather than climate models
Posted on April 10, 2012 by Anthony Watts

An embarrassing image for NASA: James Hansen, arrested in front of the White House in Keystone pipeline protest. Image: via Wonk Room

Looks like another GISS miss, more than a few people are getting fed up with Jim Hansen and Gavin Schmidt and their climate shenanigans. Some very prominent NASA voices speak out in a scathing letter to current NASA administrator Charles Bolden, Jr.. When Chris Kraft, the man who presided over NASA’s finest hour, and the engineering miracle of saving Apollo 13 speaks, people listen. UPDATE: I’ve added a poll at the end of this story.

See also: The Right Stuff: what the NASA astronauts say about global warming

Former NASA scientists, astronauts admonish agency on climate change position

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Blanquita Cullum 703-307-9510 bqview at mac.com

Joint letter to NASA Administrator blasts agency’s policy of ignoring empirical evidence

HOUSTON, TX – April 10, 2012.

49 former NASA scientists and astronauts sent a letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden last week admonishing the agency for it’s role in advocating a high degree of certainty that man-made CO2 is a major cause of climate change while neglecting empirical evidence that calls the theory into question.

The group, which includes seven Apollo astronauts and two former directors of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, are dismayed over the failure of NASA, and specifically the Goddard Institute For Space Studies (GISS), to make an objective assessment of all available scientific data on climate change. They charge that NASA is relying too heavily on complex climate models that have proven scientifically inadequate in predicting climate only one or two decades in advance.

H. Leighton Steward, chairman of the non-profit Plants Need CO2, noted that many of the former NASA scientists harbored doubts about the significance of the C02-climate change theory and have concerns over NASA’s advocacy on the issue. While making presentations in late 2011 to many of the signatories of the letter, Steward realized that the NASA scientists should make their concerns known to NASA and the GISS.

“These American heroes – the astronauts that took to space and the scientists and engineers that put them there – are simply stating their concern over NASA’s extreme advocacy for an unproven theory,” said Leighton Steward. “There’s a concern that if it turns out that CO2 is not a major cause of climate change, NASA will have put the reputation of NASA, NASA’s current and former employees, and even the very reputation of science itself at risk of public ridicule and distrust.”
Select excerpts from the letter:

“The unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA’s history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.”

“We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated.”

“We request that NASA refrain from including unproven and unsupported remarks in its future releases and websites on this subject.”

The full text of the letter:

March 28, 2012

The Honorable Charles Bolden, Jr.
NASA Administrator
NASA Headquarters
Washington, D.C. 20546-0001

Dear Charlie,

We, the undersigned, respectfully request that NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites. We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled.

The unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA’s history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.

As former NASA employees, we feel that NASA’s advocacy of an extreme position, prior to a thorough study of the possible overwhelming impact of natural climate drivers is inappropriate. We request that NASA refrain from including unproven and unsupported remarks in its future releases and websites on this subject. At risk is damage to the exemplary reputation of NASA, NASA’s current or former scientists and employees, and even the reputation of science itself.

For additional information regarding the science behind our concern, we recommend that you contact Harrison Schmitt or Walter Cunningham, or others they can recommend to you.

Thank you for considering this request.

Sincerely,

(Attached signatures)

CC: Mr. John Grunsfeld, Associate Administrator for Science

CC: Ass Mr. Chris Scolese, Director, Goddard Space Flight Center

Ref: Letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, dated 3-26-12, regarding a request for NASA to refrain from making unsubstantiated claims that human produced CO2 is having a catastrophic impact on climate change.

/s/ Jack Barneburg, Jack – JSC, Space Shuttle Structures, Engineering Directorate, 34 years

/s/ Larry Bell – JSC, Mgr. Crew Systems Div., Engineering Directorate, 32 years

/s/ Dr. Donald Bogard – JSC, Principal Investigator, Science Directorate, 41 years

/s/ Jerry C. Bostick – JSC, Principal Investigator, Science Directorate, 23 years

/s/ Dr. Phillip K. Chapman – JSC, Scientist – astronaut, 5 years

/s/ Michael F. Collins, JSC, Chief, Flight Design and Dynamics Division, MOD, 41 years

/s/ Dr. Kenneth Cox – JSC, Chief Flight Dynamics Div., Engr. Directorate, 40 years

/s/ Walter Cunningham – JSC, Astronaut, Apollo 7, 8 years

/s/ Dr. Donald M. Curry – JSC, Mgr. Shuttle Leading Edge, Thermal Protection Sys., Engr. Dir., 44 years

/s/ Leroy Day – Hdq. Deputy Director, Space Shuttle Program, 19 years

/s/ Dr. Henry P. Decell, Jr. – JSC, Chief, Theory & Analysis Office, 5 years

/s/Charles F. Deiterich – JSC, Mgr., Flight Operations Integration, MOD, 30 years

/s/ Dr. Harold Doiron – JSC, Chairman, Shuttle Pogo Prevention Panel, 16 years

/s/ Charles Duke – JSC, Astronaut, Apollo 16, 10 years

/s/ Anita Gale

/s/ Grace Germany – JSC, Program Analyst, 35 years

/s/ Ed Gibson – JSC, Astronaut Skylab 4, 14 years

/s/ Richard Gordon – JSC, Astronaut, Gemini Xi, Apollo 12, 9 years

/s/ Gerald C. Griffin – JSC, Apollo Flight Director, and Director of Johnson Space Center, 22 years

/s/ Thomas M. Grubbs – JSC, Chief, Aircraft Maintenance and Engineering Branch, 31 years

/s/ Thomas J. Harmon

/s/ David W. Heath – JSC, Reentry Specialist, MOD, 30 years

/s/ Miguel A. Hernandez, Jr. – JSC, Flight crew training and operations, 3 years

/s/ James R. Roundtree – JSC Branch Chief, 26 years

/s/ Enoch Jones – JSC, Mgr. SE&I, Shuttle Program Office, 26 years

/s/ Dr. Joseph Kerwin – JSC, Astronaut, Skylab 2, Director of Space and Life Sciences, 22 years

/s/ Jack Knight – JSC, Chief, Advanced Operations and Development Division, MOD, 40 years

/s/ Dr. Christopher C. Kraft – JSC, Apollo Flight Director and Director of Johnson Space Center, 24 years

/s/ Paul C. Kramer – JSC, Ass.t for Planning Aeroscience and Flight Mechanics Div., Egr. Dir., 34 years

/s/ Alex (Skip) Larsen

/s/ Dr. Lubert Leger – JSC, Ass’t. Chief Materials Division, Engr. Directorate, 30 years

/s/ Dr. Humbolt C. Mandell – JSC, Mgr. Shuttle Program Control and Advance Programs, 40 years

/s/ Donald K. McCutchen – JSC, Project Engineer – Space Shuttle and ISS Program Offices, 33 years

/s/ Thomas L. (Tom) Moser – Hdq. Dep. Assoc. Admin. & Director, Space Station Program, 28 years

/s/ Dr. George Mueller – Hdq., Assoc. Adm., Office of Space Flight, 6 years

/s/ Tom Ohesorge

/s/ James Peacock – JSC, Apollo and Shuttle Program Office, 21 years

/s/ Richard McFarland – JSC, Mgr. Motion Simulators, 28 years

/s/ Joseph E. Rogers – JSC, Chief, Structures and Dynamics Branch, Engr. Directorate,40 years

/s/ Bernard J. Rosenbaum – JSC, Chief Engineer, Propulsion and Power Division, Engr. Dir., 48 years

/s/ Dr. Harrison (Jack) Schmitt – JSC, Astronaut Apollo 17, 10 years

/s/ Gerard C. Shows – JSC, Asst. Manager, Quality Assurance, 30 years

/s/ Kenneth Suit – JSC, Ass’t Mgr., Systems Integration, Space Shuttle, 37 years

/s/ Robert F. Thompson – JSC, Program Manager, Space Shuttle, 44 years/s/ Frank Van Renesselaer – Hdq., Mgr. Shuttle Solid Rocket Boosters, 15 years

/s/ Dr. James Visentine – JSC Materials Branch, Engineering Directorate, 30 years

/s/ Manfred (Dutch) von Ehrenfried – JSC, Flight Controller; Mercury, Gemini & Apollo, MOD, 10 years

/s/ George Weisskopf – JSC, Avionics Systems Division, Engineering Dir., 40 years

/s/ Al Worden – JSC, Astronaut, Apollo 15, 9 years

/s/ Thomas (Tom) Wysmuller – JSC, Meteorologist, 5 years

 

[a_majoor]

Interesting lecture on video:

Dr David Evans: Global Warming is Manmade? (1 of 2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plr-hTRQ2_c&feature=player_embedded

 

[a_majoor]

The costs of following the Global Warming agenda are huge; economic competitiveness has been damaged in many places where the Green Ideology has taken root:

http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/05/11/lawrence-solomon-green-power-failure/

Lawrence Solomon: Green power failure
Lawrence Solomon  May 11, 2012 – 10:24 PM ET | Last Updated: May 11, 2012 10:59 PM ET

Climate mania impoverishes electricity customers worldwide

Global-warming-related catastrophes are increasingly hitting vulnerable populations around the world, with one species in particular danger: the electricity ratepayer. In Canada, in the U.K., in Spain, in Denmark, in Germany and elsewhere the danger to ratepayers is especially great, but ratepayers in one country — the U.S. — seem to have weathered the worst of the disaster.

America's secret? Unlike leaders in other countries, which to their countries’ ruin adopted policies as if global warming mattered, U.S. leaders more paid lip service to it. While citizens in other countries are now seeing soaring power rates, American householders can look forward to declining rates.

The North American exemplar of acting on the perceived threat of global warming is Ontario, which dismantled one of the continent’s finest fleets of coal plants in pursuit of becoming a green leader. Then, to induce developers to build uneconomic renewable energy facilities, the Ontario government paid them as much as 80 times the market rate for power. The result is power prices that rose rapidly (about 50% since 2005) and will continue to do so: Ontarians can expect power prices that are 46% higher over the next five years, according to a 2010 Ontario government estimate, and more than 100% higher according to independent estimates. The rest of Canada may not fare much better — the National Energy Board forecasts power prices 42% higher by 2035, while some estimates have Canadian power prices 50% higher by 2020.

The story throughout much of Europe is similar. Denmark, an early adopter of the global-warming mania, now requires its households to pay the developed world’s highest power prices — about 40¢ a kilowatt hour, or three to four times what North Americans pay today. Germany, whose powerhouse economy gave green developers a blank cheque, is a close second, followed by other politically correct nations such as Belgium, the headquarters of the EU, and distressed nations such as Spain.

The result is chaos to the economic well-being of the EU nations. Even in rock-solid Germany, up to 15% of the populace is now believed to be in “fuel poverty” — defined by governments as needing to spend more than 10% of the total household income on electricity and gas. Some 600,000 low-income Germans are now being cut off by their power companies annually, a number expected to increase as a never-ending stream of global-warming projects in the pipeline wallops customers. In the U.K., which has laboured under the most politically correct climate leadership in the world, some 12 million people are already in fuel poverty, 900,000 of them in wind-infested Scotland alone, and the U.K. has now entered a double-dip recession.

The U.S., in contrast, will see power rates decline starting next year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, dropping by more than 22% by the end of the decade and then staying flat to 2035. Why the fall? Mainly because the U.S. will rely overwhelmingly on fossil fuels in the years ahead, not just coal, which dominates the current power system, but increasingly natural gas, which is expected to account for 60% of all new generating capacity in the future. Thanks to fracking, the U.S. effectively has limitless amounts of inexpensive natural gas to add to its limitless coal.

While the rest of the developed world was in thrall to global-warming rhetoric, the U.S. talked the talk but balked at following through. In 1997, then president Bill Clinton and his vice-president, Al Gore, happily signed on to the Kyoto Treaty, which coerced the countries of the developed world into compromising their economies in order to save the planet. While other nations then dutifully complied, the U.S. Senate — as Clinton and Gore knew it would — refused to ratify Kyoto by a 95-0 vote. Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, did an equally superb job of talking but balking at taking economy-killing measures. Bush successor Barack Obama, although a global-warming true believer, also put global warming on the back burner, preferring to make Obamacare, rather than climate change, his signature issue.

With the Republicans all but certain to control the purse strings following the November elections by dint of a majority in the House of Representatives, European-style legislation in the U.S. in aid of global warming will be impossible, even if the Republicans don't also capture the Senate and the White House, as polls now indicate they will. In the event of a Republican sweep, the gap between power prices in the U.S. and the rest of the developed world will increase even more as “Drill, baby, drill” Republicans remove the existing restraints on the U.S. fossil-fuel industry, and slash the remaining subsidies on the U.S. renewable-energy industry.

Financial Post
LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe.

To see how high power prices are in the EU countries, click here.

 

[a_majoor]

Real data puts a double tap into the "Hockey Stick" graph. The manipulation, Climategate, alarmism, attempting to supress evidence or ruin reputations has all backfired in a most spectacular and satisfying way (although the true believers will never, ever, look at the evidence and still claim, contrary to all evidence [even the ability of the algorithm to generate "hockey sticks" from random numbers] that the graph is true and the accumulated evidence is false).

http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-death-of-the-hockey-stick/?print=1

The Death of the Hockey Stick?

Posted By Rand Simberg On May 17, 2012 @ 12:00 am In Environment,History,Media,Politics,Science,Science & Technology | 92 Comments

People who have been following the climate debate closely know that one of the most controversial and key elements of the controversy is the so-called “hockey stick” — a graph of supposed global temperature over the past centuries that ostensibly shows a dramatic increase in average temperature in the last century or so (the upward swoop of the graph at that point is the business end of the stick, with regard to the puck). It vaulted its inventor, Michael Mann of Penn State University, to climate stardom, with associated acclaim and government grants, when he first presented it in the late ’90s. It was the visual basis of much of the hysteria in recent years, from Al Gore’s Oscar-winning crockumentary [1] to bogus reports [2] from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Unfortunately for those promoting the theory (and the potentially economically catastrophic policy recommendations supposedly supported by it), recent events indicate that the last basis of scientific support for the hockey stick may be crumbling. But to understand this, a little background is necessary.

Ultimately, in addition to Mann’s claim for the dramatic recent uptick (which we are supposed to presume was a result of the late industrial revolution and equally dramatic increase in carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as a result of the liberation of carbon from burning long-buried fossil fuels), Keith Briffa of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in England controversially declared, based on Eurasian data, that the well-documented Medieval Warm Period (MWP), from around 950 to 1250 CE — the European Middle Ages — didn’t actually exist.

This claim was important, if not essential, to Mann’s thesis, because his initial formulation only went back to 1400, the beginning of the so-called Little Ice Age. Critics of the theory thus argued immediately upon its presentation that it shouldn’t be surprising that the earth was warming now, given that we are still coming out of it, and that the medieval warming in the absence of late Carolingian SUVs and coal plants argued that the climate naturally cycled, with no need to invoke Demon Carbon. That is to say, to the degree that the hockey stick has a blade in the twentieth century, it would have another a millennium ago.

The theory has continued to take blows over the years since it was first presented. About a decade ago, a paper [1] was published by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunis claiming that there was good evidence that both the (still extant) MWP and current warming were driven by solar activity rather than carbon emissions. But these initial attacks were beaten back by the climate mafia (as we now know from the leaked emails [3] between Mann and his partners in crime in East Anglia from two and a half years ago). The real damage came when a retired Canadian mining engineer, Steve McIntyre, and a professor at the University of Guelph, Ross McKitrick, started digging into Mann’s methodology, and found flaws in both his statistical analysis and data interpretation, and published a paper [4] describing them in Geophysical Research Letters in 2005. They showed that Mann’s methodology would generate a hockey stick almost independently of the data input, by feeding it spectral noise [5]. Later, Internet satirist (and apparent statistician by day) Iowahawk provided a primer on how to create a hockey stick at home [6], using a standard spreadsheet program.

Defenders of the theory have long claimed that even if there are problems with Mann’s method or data set, we have independent results from other research, such as that at the CRU, that confirm it. But this was a point of contention. In addition to the unscientific behavior in attempting to silence critics and keep them from publishing, we also know that the climate “scientists” had been withholding data that would help to resolve the controversy (more unscientific behavior, because it makes it difficult or impossible to replicate claimed results, and behavior that continues to the present da [7]y by the University of Virginia), even in the face of numerous Freedom of Information requests, on both sides of the Atlantic.

To no avail, McIntyre had been requesting data for years from Briffa, who had claimed to have independent Eurasian tree-ring analysis that confirmed Mann’s results, from a data set called the Polar Urals (Mann’s work was based on ancient California bristlecone pine trees). Unfortunately, paleoclimatologists had discovered that the Polar Urals data didn’t actually support the disappearance of the MWP, so they were in search of another Eurasian data set that would, and they found one called Yamal, gathered and published in 2002 by two Russian scientists.

McIntyre had wanted to see it for years, and in 2008, utilizing a bylaw of the Royal Society, he enlisted their aid in forcing Briffa to finally start to release the data. Unfortunately, he still didn’t get enough, at least initially, to make any sense of it. But he did notice that, first, it had sparse data for the twentieth century and second, that it, unlike the typical treatment of such data sets, was not supplemented by any regional data — Briffa was using it by itself. When McIntyre did such a supplementation himself using other data (reluctantly) provided by Briffa, the twentieth-century hockey-stick blade completely disappeared.

That was where things stood in 2009, just before the so-called Climate-gate email and model leak. After that, the CRU actually started to pull down data [8] that had been previously available for years. It was clear from the emails that Briffa had been telling one story publicly and another privately as to his reasons for not including the devastating data, but the tide finally turned last month, when the University of East Anglia was finally forced by the British Information Commissioner to at least tell McIntyre which data sets were used in its results. Let’s let blogger “Bishop Hill” (aka Andrew Montford, who has written the book [9] on the subject) tell the rest of the story [10] (and read the whole thing for a detailed description of the deception):

    The list of 17 sites that was finally sent to McIntyre represented complete vindication. The presence of Yamal and Polar Urals had already been obvious from the Climategate emails, but the list showed that Briffa had also incorporated the Polar Urals update (which, as we saw above, did not have a hockey stick shape, and which Briffa claimed he had not looked at since 1995) and the Khadtya River site, McIntyre’s use of which the RealClimate authors had ridiculed.

    Although the chronology itself was not yet available, the list of sites was sufficient for McIntyre to calculate the numbers himself, and the results were breathtaking. Firstly, the URALS regional chronology had vastly more data behind it than the Yamal-only figures presented in Briffa’s paper

    But what was worse, the regional chronology did not have a hockey stick shape — the twentieth century uptick that Briffa had got from the handful of trees in the Yamal-only series had completely disappeared.

    Direct comparison of the chronology that Briffa chose to publish against the full chronology that he withheld makes the point clear:

    It seems clear then that the URALS chronology Briffa prepared to go alongside the others he put together for the 2008 paper gave a message that did not comply with the message that he wanted to convey — one of unprecedented warmth at the end of the twentieth century. In essence the URALS regional chronology was suffering from the divergence problem — the widely noted failure of some tree ring series to pick up the recent warming seen in instrumental temperature records, which led to the infamous ‘hide the decline’ episode.

    Remarkably, however, Briffa did allude to the divergence problem in his paper:

        These [regional chronologies] show no evidence of a recent breakdown in [the association between tree growth and temperature] as has been found at other high-latitude Northern Hemisphere locations.

    The reason for dropping the URALS chronology looks abundantly clear. It would not have supported this message.

His emphasis.

And new results are coming out almost by the day. Earlier this week, McIntyre reportedly received [11]new Yamal data, which continued to confirm that there is no blade to the stick

What does this all mean? First, let’s state what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean that we know that the planet isn’t warming, and it doesn’t mean that if it is, that we can be sure that it is not due to human activity.

But at a minimum it should be the final blow to the hockey stick, and perhaps to the very notion that bristlecone pines and larches are accurate thermometers. It should also be a final blow to the credibility of many of the leading lights of climate “science,” but based on history, it probably won’t be, at least among the political class. What it really should be is the beginning of the major housecleaning necessary if the field is to have any scientific credibility, but that may have to await a general reformation of academia itself. It would help, though, if we get a new government next year that cuts off funding to such charlatans, and the institutions that whitewash their unscientific behavior.

Article printed from PJ Media: http://pjmedia.com

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-death-of-the-hockey-stick/

URLs in this post:

[1] crockumentary: http://www.global-warming-and-the-climate.com/al-gore-documentary.htm

[2] bogus reports: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/02/climate-change-pachauri-un-glaciers

[3] leaked emails: http://pjmedia.com/blog/global-warminggate-the-science-is-unsettled/

[4] a paper: http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/mcintyre-grl-2005.pdf

[5] feeding it spectral noise: http://www.uoguelph.ca/%7Ermckitri/research/trc.html

[6] primer on how to create a hockey stick at home: http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2009/12/fables-of-the-reconstruction.html

[7] continues to the present da: http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/judge-adds-michael-%E2%80%98hockey-stick%E2%80%99-mann-uva-foia

[8] started to pull down data: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/14/whats-going-on-cru-takes-down-briffa-tree-ring-data-and-more/

[9] the book: http://www.amazon.com/The-Hockey-Stick-Illusion-Climategate/dp/1906768358

[10] tell the rest of the story: http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2012/5/9/the-yamal-deception.html

[11] reportedly received : http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/15/mcintyre-gets-some-new-yamal-data-still-no-hockey-stick/

 

[a_majoor]

Useless models have been used to drive the "debate", now that they have been debunked it is time to start looking at alternative models and solutions:

http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/06/13/junk-science-week-climate-models-fail-reality-test/

Junk Science Week: Climate models fail reality test
Ross McKitrick, Special to Financial Post  Jun 13, 2012 – 9:07 PM ET | Last Updated: Jun 14, 2012 11:17 AM ET

Computer models utterly fail to predict climate changes in regions

A few years ago a biologist I know looked at how climate change might affect the spread of a particular invasive insect species. He obtained climate-model projections for North America under standard greenhouse-gas scenarios from two modelling labs, and then tried to characterize how the insect habitat might change. To his surprise, he found very different results depending on which model was used. Even though both models were using the same input data, they made opposite predictions about regional climate patterns in North America.

This reminded me of a presentation I’d seen years earlier about predicted changes in U.S. rainfall patterns under global warming. The two models being used for a government report again made diametrically opposite predictions. In region after region, if one model predicted a tendency toward more flooding, the other tended to predict drying.

Just how good are climate models at predicting regional patterns of climate change? I had occasion to survey this literature as part of a recently completed research project on the subject. The simple summary is that, with few exceptions, climate models not only fail to do better than random numbers, in some cases they are actually worse.

There are two reasons why this is important. First, it tells us something about our lack of understanding of the climate. There are various different theories to explain the rising trend in the global average temperature over the past century. Climate models embed one such theory, based on a relatively high sensitivity to greenhouse gases and strong amplifying effects from a positive water-vapour feedback, and relative insensitivity to other things. In this setup, the only way to get a climate model to mimic the 20th-century average warming is to feed in the observed increase in greenhouse gases. Therefore, the argument goes, greenhouse gases are to blame.

But this kind of argument could be used to support other theories too, if the models are set up just so. To say which theory, if any, is right, we need to look at the spatial patterns. Different theories make different predictions about where the warming should be taking place, a detail that gets missed if we only look at the global average. A valid model should not only get the global trend right, but also the spatial pattern of change.

Second, when policymakers and scientists think about climate change, they are usually not interested in abstract global averages but in potential changes where people actually live, namely at the local level. To say anything meaningful about this requires models that make valid regional predictions.

We already had a clue that something is wrong with spatial details in climate models. Due to the water-vapour feedback, models predict rapid, amplified warming in the troposphere over the tropics. But data collected by weather balloons and satellites fail to show this, and the discrepancy between models and observations is statistically significant.

So how do models do at predicting the spatial pattern of warming over land? Though the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) devoted a whole chapter to model evaluation, it said almost nothing about this question. The IPCC talked mainly about static features, such as whether the model can make the tropics hot and poles cold, and so forth. But it was mostly silent on the spatial changes. A 2008 report of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program went a bit deeper, but only to report on tests of how daily and seasonal variations in models matched the real world (is winter a suitable amount colder than summer, etc.).

The reports weren’t ignoring anything: There just hasn’t been much work on the topic. Over a decade ago one team wrote an editorial in the journal Climatic Change lamenting that, on the few occasions people checked the spatial trend pattern, there was a tendency to use what they called “eyeball assessments”: putting colour plots side by side and declaring that they look similar. More recently, one team actually computed some test statistics, but they set the test up so that a region only failed if models and observations significantly disagreed. That’s a weak test, since lists of random numbers wouldn’t fail it.

Then in 2008 and 2010, a team of hydrologists at the National Technical University of Athens published a pair of studies comparing long-term (100-year) temperature and precipitation trends in a total of 55 locations around the world to model projections. The models performed quite poorly at the annual level, which was not surprising. What was more surprising was that they also did poorly even when averaged up to the 30-year scale, which is typically assumed to be the level they work best at. They also did no better over larger and larger regional scales. The authors concluded that there is no basis for the claim that climate models are well-suited for long-term predictions over large regions.

A 2011 study in the Journal of Forecasting took the same data set and compared model predictions against a “random walk” alternative, consisting simply of using the last period’s value in each location as the forecast for the next period’s value in that location. The test measures the sum of errors relative to the random walk. A perfect model gets a score of zero, meaning it made no errors. A model that does no better than a random walk gets a score of 1. A model receiving a score above 1 did worse than uninformed guesses. Simple statistical forecast models that have no climatology or physics in them typically got scores between 0.8 and 1, indicating slight improvements on the random walk, though in some cases their scores went as high as 1.8.

The climate models, by contrast, got scores ranging from 2.4 to 3.7, indicating a total failure to provide valid forecast information at the regional level, even on long time scales. The authors commented: “This implies that the current [climate] models are ill-suited to localized decadal predictions, even though they are used as inputs for policymaking.”

Indeed. Nor is the problem confined just to a few models. In a 2010 paper, a co-author and I looked at how well an average formed from all 23 climate models used for the 2007 IPCC report did at explaining the spatial pattern of temperature trends on land after 1979, compared with a rival model that all the experts keep telling me should have no explanatory power at all: the regional pattern of socioeconomic growth. Any effects from those factors, I have been told many times, are removed from the climate data before it is published. And yet I keep finding the socioeconomic patterns do a very good job of explaining the patterns of temperature trends over land. In our 2010 paper we showed that the climate models, averaged together, do very poorly, while the socioeconomic data does quite well.

Perhaps the problem is that the models should not be averaged together, but should be examined one by one and then in every possible combination, with and without the socioeconomic data, in case some model somewhere has some explanatory power under just the right testing scenario. That is what another coauthor and I looked at in the recently completed study I mentioned above. It will be published shortly in a high-quality climatology journal, and I will be writing about our findings in more detail. There will be no surprises for those who have followed the discussion to this point.

Financial Post
Ross McKitrick is a professor of economics at the University of Guelph and an expert reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Citations available at rossmckitrick.com.

Next week: Climate models offer millions of ways of getting the wrong answer.

 

[a_majoor]

Real data and observation is so annoying to the AGW climate alarmists. Doing science and claiming to do science turns out to gbe two different things:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/25/antarctic_ice_not_melting/

Antarctic ice shelves not melting at all, new field data show

Crafty boffins got elephant seals to survey for them

By Lewis Page • Get more from this author

Posted in Science, 25th June 2012 07:19 GMT

Twenty-year-old models which have suggested serious ice loss in the eastern Antarctic have been compared with reality for the first time - and found to be wrong, so much so that it now appears that no ice is being lost at all.

"Previous ocean models ... have predicted temperatures and melt rates that are too high, suggesting a significant mass loss in this region that is actually not taking place," says Tore Hattermann of the Norwegian Polar Institute, member of a team which has obtained two years' worth of direct measurements below the massive Fimbul Ice Shelf in eastern Antarctica - the first ever to be taken.

According to a statement from the American Geophysical Union, announcing the new research:

It turns out that past studies, which were based on computer models without any direct data for comparison or guidance, overestimate the water temperatures and extent of melting beneath the Fimbul Ice Shelf. This has led to the misconception, Hattermann said, that the ice shelf is losing mass at a faster rate than it is gaining mass, leading to an overall loss of mass.

The team’s results show that water temperatures are far lower than computer models predicted ...

Hatterman and his colleagues, using 12 tons of hot-water drilling equipment, bored three holes more than 200m deep through the Fimbul Shelf, which spans an area roughly twice the size of New Jersey. The location of each hole was cunningly chosen so that the various pathways by which water moves beneath the ice shelf could be observed, and instruments were lowered down.

The boffins also supplemented their data craftily by harvesting info from a biology project, the Marine Mammal Exploration of the Oceans Pole to Pole (MEOP) effort, which had seen sensor packages attached to elephant seals.

"Nobody was expecting that the MEOP seals from Bouvetoya would swim straight to the Antarctic and stay along the Fimbul Ice Shelf for the entire winter," Hattermann says. "But this behaviour certainly provided an impressive and unique data set."

Normally, getting sea temperature readings along the shelf in winter would be dangerous if not impossible due to shifting pack ice - but the seals were perfectly at home among the grinding floes.

Overall, according to the team, their field data shows "steady state mass balance" on the eastern Antarctic coasts - ie, that no ice is being lost from the massive shelves there. The research is published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

This is good news indeed, as some had thought that huge amounts of ice were melting from the region, which might mean accelerated rates of sea level rise in future. ®

 

[Haletown]

'nuff said.

 

[a_majoor]

There is an old joke that goes:

"How many libertarians does it take to stop a Soviet division:

None, the market will take care of it"

Well the market took care of the USSR, and now it takes care of the global warming alarmists as well...

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/06/29/us-carbon-output-forecasts-shrink-again/

US Carbon Output Forecasts Shrink Again

Much to the surprise (and, one suspects, the chagrin) of the deranged doomsaying wing of the environmental movement, new forecasts of US CO2 emission are out and they point to an even steeper drop than the last set of predictions.

No cap and trade, no huge new taxes on oil, no draconian driver restrictions, no air conditioning bans, no rationing — and the US is on track to cut its CO2 emissions 17 percent below the 2005 levels by 2020 — and to keep cutting our emissions levels beyond that.

And this news doesn’t come from embattled climate skeptics banished to the fringes of the scientific community; these numbers come from the Obama administration and are sitting right up on Don Lashof’s well respected blog at the National Resource Defense Council website. Take a look for yourselves.

So, to summarize, the United States of America basically blew the global greens off completely, trampling all over their carbon tax and cap and trade agendas, and earning wails and shrieks of hatred at the Rio+20 Summit — while making huge strides toward reducing CO2 emission levels.

It’s almost as if there is no connection between the green policy agenda and environmental progress.

It’s a little more complicated than that, of course. As Lashof notes, fuel standards for automobiles play a role; American cars are more efficient than they used to be in part due to government fuel regulations, and policies already adopted to tighten those standards down the road contribute to the anticipated future reductions in CO2. And other regulations and incentives no doubt have a role to play.

(At Via Meadia, we’ve long believed that promoting telecommuting at least part of the time is a way to cut down the costs of highway construction, conserve fuel, reduce traffic congestion and cut CO2 emissions while making it easier for working parents and improving the country’s quality of life. Ideas like that can’t seem to compete in the imagination of many greens with grotesquely expensive, poor designed, and wildly impractical and punitive regulatory schemes. Go figure.)

In any case, the United States of America is living proof that there are more ways to address environmental concerns than the green movement as a whole is willing to admit.

And if the United States can achieve this while blowing off the panicky greens and their tiresome Malthusian agendas, so can China and India. That is a very good thing, because those countries have zero repeat zero interest in  adopting any green measures that slow their growth.

The truth is that if CO2 emissions are going to come down, it’s going to happen the American way rather than the Greenpeace way. Instead of flinging muck and howling curses at the most successful carbon cutting large economy in the world, maybe a few more greens here and there will start thinking about how to spread the magic around.

And while they are at it, they might want to take another look at all those doomsday CO2 projections the green movement keeps using as justification for huge global boondoggles. It’s just possible that other countries, too, will not behave according to the models, and if that is true the whole green approach to climate issues may need to be rethought.

 

[Old Sweat]

A team including scientists from Johannes Gutenberg University studied tree rings to reconstruct climate data over the last two millennia. A report of their findings from the university's web site is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provision of the Copyright Act.

Climate in northern Europe reconstructed for the past 2,000 years: Cooling trend calculated precisely for the first time

Calculations prepared by Mainz scientists will also influence the way current climate change is perceived / Publication of results in Nature Climate Change

09.07.2012

An international team including scientists from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has published a reconstruction of the climate in northern Europe over the last 2,000 years based on the information provided by tree-rings. Professor Dr. Jan Esper's group at the Institute of Geography at JGU used tree-ring density measurements from sub-fossil pine trees originating from Finnish Lapland to produce a reconstruction reaching back to 138 BC. In so doing, the researchers have been able for the first time to precisely demonstrate that the long-term trend over the past two millennia has been towards climatic cooling. "We found that previous estimates of historical temperatures during the Roman era and the Middle Ages were too low," says Esper. "Such findings are also significant with regard to climate policy, as they will influence the way today's climate changes are seen in context of historical warm periods." The new study has been published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Was the climate during Roman and Medieval times warmer than today? And why are these earlier warm periods important when assessing the global climate changes we are experiencing today? The discipline of paleoclimatology attempts to answer such questions. Scientists analyze indirect evidence of climate variability, such as ice cores and ocean sediments, and so reconstruct the climate of the past. The annual growth rings in trees are the most important witnesses over the past 1,000 to 2,000 years as they indicate how warm and cool past climate conditions were.

Researchers from Germany, Finland, Scotland, and Switzerland examined tree-ring density profiles in trees from Finnish Lapland. In this cold environment, trees often collapse into one of the numerous lakes, where they remain well preserved for thousands of years.

The international research team used these density measurements from sub-fossil pine trees in northern Scandinavia to create a sequence reaching back to 138 BC. The density measurements correlate closely with the summer temperatures in this area on the edge of the Nordic taiga. The researchers were thus able to create a temperature reconstruction of unprecedented quality. The reconstruction provides a high-resolution representation of temperature patterns in the Roman and Medieval Warm periods, but also shows the cold phases that occurred during the Migration Period and the later Little Ice Age.

In addition to the cold and warm phases, the new climate curve also exhibits a phenomenon that was not expected in this form. For the first time, researchers have now been able to use the data derived from tree-rings to precisely calculate a much longer-term cooling trend that has been playing out over the past 2,000 years. Their findings demonstrate that this trend involves a cooling of -0.3°C per millennium due to gradual changes to the position of the sun and an increase in the distance between the Earth and the sun.

"This figure we calculated may not seem particularly significant," says Esper. "However, it is also not negligible when compared to global warming, which up to now has been less than 1°C. Our results suggest that the large-scale climate reconstruction shown by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) likely underestimate this long-term cooling trend over the past few millennia."