Global Warming/Climate Change Super Thread

[a_majoor]

Beat me too it, I see. But here is Lord Monckton's transcript (and apparently he is now being given the credit or blame for derailing the conference)

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/07/monckton-on-his-smashing-u-n-wall-of-silence-on-lack-of-warming-and-censure/

Monckton on his smashing the U.N. wall of silence on lack of warming, and censure
Posted on December 7, 2012 by Guest Blogger
UPDATE: The Russian Times blames Monckton for the failure of COP18 to fail to reach an agreement:

The 18th Climate Change Summit in Doha is drawing to an end after once again failing to find common consensus on what it calls a major threat to human existence. Failure seemed inevitable after climate skeptic Lord Monckton crashed the event.

LOL! Source here

From Christopher Monckton of Brenchley in Doha, Qatar

I have been a bad boy. At the U.N. climate conference in Doha, I addressed a plenary session of national negotiating delegates though only accredited as an observer.

One just couldn’t resist. There they all were, earnestly outbidding each other to demand that the West should keep them in pampered luxury for the rest of their indolent lives, and all on the pretext of preventing global warming that has now become embarrassingly notorious for its long absence.

No one was allowed to give the alternative – and scientifically correct – viewpoint. The U.N.’s wall of silence was rigidly in place.

The microphone was just in front of me. All I had to do was press the button. I pressed it. The Chair recognized Myanmar (Burmese for Burma). I was on.


On behalf of the Asian Coastal Co-operation Initiative, an outfit I had thought up on the spur of the moment (it sounded just like one of the many dubious taxpayer-funded propaganda groups at the conference), I spoke for less than a minute.

Quietly, politely, authoritatively, I told the delegates three inconvenient truths they would not hear from anyone else:

• There has been no global warming for 16 of the 18 years of these wearisome, self-congratulatory yadayadathons.

• It is at least ten times more cost-effective to see how much global warming happens and then adapt in a focused way to what little harm it may cause than to spend a single red cent futilely attempting to mitigate it today.

• An independent scientific enquiry should establish whether the U.N.’s climate conferences are still heading in the right direction.

As I delivered the last of my three points, there were keening shrieks of rage from the delegates. They had not heard any of this before. They could not believe it. Outrage! Silence him! Free speech? No! This is the U.N.! Gettimoff! Eeeeeeeeeagh!

One of the hundreds of beefy, truncheon-toting U.N. police at the conference approached me as I left the hall and I was soon surrounded by him and a colleague. They took my conference pass, peered at it and murmured into cellphones.

Trouble was, they were having great difficulty keeping a straight face.

Put yourself in their sensible shoes. They have to stand around listening to the tedious, flatulent mendacities of pompous, overpaid, under-educated diplomats day after week after year. Suddenly, at last, someone says “Boo!” and tells the truth.

Frankly, they loved it. They didn’t say so, of course, or they’d have burst out laughing and their stony-faced U.N. superiors would not have been pleased.

I was amiably accompanied out into the balmy night, where an impressive indaba of stony-faced U.N. officials were alternately murmuring into cellphones and murmuring into cellphones. Murmuring into cellphones is what they do best.

After a few minutes the head of security – upper lip trembling and chest pulsating as he did his best to keep his laughter to himself – briefly stopped murmuring into his cellphone and bade me a cheerful and courteous goodnight.

The national delegation from Burma, whose microphone I had borrowed while they were out partying somewhere in the souk, snorted an official protest into its cellphone.

An eco-freako journalist, quivering with unrighteous indignation, wrote that I had been “evicted”. Well, not really. All they did was to say a cheery toodle-pip at the end of that day’s session. They couldn’t have been nicer about it.

The journalist mentioned my statement to my fellow-delegates that there had been no global warming for 16 years. What she was careful not to mention was that she had interviewed me at some length earlier in the day. She had sneered that 97% of climate scientists thought I was wrong.

I had explained to her that 100% of climate scientists would agree with me that there had been no global warming for 16 years if they were to check the facts, which is how science (as opposed to U.N. politics) is done.

I had also told her how to check the facts (but she had not checked them):

Step 1. Get the monthly mean global surface temperature anomalies since January 1997 from the Hadley Centre/CRU. The data, freely available online, are the U.N.’s preferred way to measure how much global warming has happened. Or you could use the more reliable satellite data from the University of Alabama at Huntsville or from Remote Sensing Systems Inc.

Step 2. Put the data into Microsoft Excel and use its routine that calculates the least-squares linear-regression trend on the data. Linear regression determines the underlying trend in a dataset over a given period as the slope of the unique straight line through the data that minimizes the sum of the squares of the absolute differences or “residuals” between the points corresponding to each time interval in the data and on the trend-line. Phew! If that is too much like doing real work (though Excel will do it for you at the touch of a button), find a friendly, honest statistician.

Step 3. Look up the measurement uncertainty in the dataset. Since measuring global temperature reliably is quite difficult, properly-collated temperature data are presented as central estimates flanked by upper and lower estimates known as the “error bars”.

Step 4. Check whether the warming (which is the difference between the first and last value on the trend-line) is greater or smaller than the measurement uncertainty. If it is smaller, falling within the error-bars, the trend is statistically indistinguishable from zero. There has been no warming – or, to be mathematically nerdy, there has been no statistically-significant warming.

The main point that the shrieking delegates here in Doha don’t get is this. It doesn’t matter how many profiteering mad scientists say global warming is dangerously accelerating. It isn’t. Period. Get over it.

The fact that there has been no global warming for 16 years is just that – a fact. It does not mean there is no such thing as global warming, or there has not been any global warming in the past, or there will be none in future.

In the global instrumental temperature record, which began in 1860, there have been several periods of ten years or more without global warming. However, precisely because these periods occur frequently, they tend to constrain the overall rate of warming.

Ideally, one should study periods of warming that are either multiples of 60 years or centered on a transition year between the warming and cooling (or cooling and warming) phases of the great ocean oscillations. That way, the distortions caused by the naturally-occurring 30-year cooling and 30-year warming phases are minimized.

Let’s do it. I have had the pleasure of being on the planet for 60 years. I arrived when it first became theoretically possible for our CO2 emissions to have a detectable effect on global temperature. From 1952 to the present, the planet has warmed at a rate equivalent to 1.2 Celsius degrees per century.

Or we could go back to 1990, the year of the first of the four quinquennial Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPeCaC). It predicted that from 1990-2025 the world would warm at 3.0 Cº/century, giving 1 Cº warming by 2025.

Late in 2001 there was a phase-transition from the warming to the cooling phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the most influential of the ocean oscillations. From 1990-2001 is 11 years; from 2001-2012 is 11 years. So 1990-2012 is a period centered on a phase-transition: with minimal natural distortion, it will indicate the recent temperature trend.

Since 1990 the world has warmed at 1.4 Cº, century, or a little under 0.3 Cº in all. Note that 1.4 Cº/century is a little greater than the 1.2 Cº/century observed since 1952. However, the period since 1990 is little more than a third of the period since 1952, and shorter periods are liable to exhibit somewhat steeper trends than longer periods.

So the slightly higher warming rate of the more recent period does not necessarily indicate that the warming rate is rising, and it is certainly not rising dangerously.

For the 21st century as a whole, IPeCaC is predicting not 1.2 or 1.4 Cº warming but close to 3 Cº, more than doubling the observed post-1990 warming rate. Or, if you believe the latest scare paper from our old fiends the University of East Anglia, up to 6 Cº, quadrupling it.

That is not at all likely. The maximum warming rate that persisted for at least ten years in the global instrumental record since 1850 has been 0.17 Cº. This rate occurred from 1860-1880; 1910-1940; and 1976-2001.

It is only in the last of these three periods that we could have had any warming influence: yet the rate of warming over that period is the same as in the two previous periods.

All three of these periods of rapidish warming coincided with warming phases of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. The climate scare got underway about halfway through the 1976-2001 warming phase.

In 1976 there had been an unusually sharp phase-transition from the cooling to the warming phase. By 1988 James Hansen was making his lurid (and now disproven) temperature predictions before the U.S. Congress, after Al Gore and Sen. Tim Wirth had chosen a very hot June day for the hearing and had deliberately turned off the air-conditioning.

Here is a summary of the measured and predicted warming rates:

Measured warming rate, 1997-2012 0.0 Cº/century
Measured warming rate, 1952-2012 1.2 Cº/century
Measured warming rate, 1990-2012 1.4 Cº/century
Measured warming rate, 1860-1880 1.7 Cº/century
Measured warming rate, 1910-1940 1.7 Cº/century
Measured warming rate, 1976-2001 1.7 Cº/century
Predicted warming rate in IPCC (1990), 1990-2025 3.0 Cº/century
Predicted warming rate in IPCC (2007), 2000-2100 3.0 Cº/century
Predicted warming rate by UEA (2012), 2000-2100 4.0-6.0 Cº/century
But it is virtually impossible to tell the negotiating delegates any of what I have set out here. They would simply not understand it. Even if they did understand it, they would not care. Objective scientific truth no longer has anything to do with these negotiations. Emotion is all.

A particularly sad example of the mawkish emotionalism that may yet destroy the economies of the West was the impassioned statement by the negotiating delegate from the Philippines to the effect that, after the typhoon that has just killed hundreds of his countrymen, the climate negotiations have taken on a new, life-or-death urgency.

As he left the plenary session, the delegates stood either side of the central aisle and showed their sympathy by applauding him. Sympathy for his country was appropriate; sympathy for his argument was not.

After 16 years with no global warming – and, if he reads this posting, he will know how to check that for himself rather than believing the soi-disant “consensus” – global warming that has not happened cannot have caused Typhoon Bhopa, any more than it could have caused extra-tropical storm Sandy.

It is possible that illegal mining and logging played no small part in triggering the landslide that killed many of those who lost their lives.

Perhaps the Philippines should join the Asian Coastal Co-Operation Initiative. Our policy is that the international community should assist all nations to increase their resilience in the face of the natural disasters that have been and will probably always be part of life on Earth.

That is an objective worthier, more realistic, more affordable, and more achievable than attempting, Canute-like, to halt the allegedly rising seas with a vote to establish a second “commitment period” under the Kyoto Protocol.

Will someone please tell the delegates? Just press the button and talk. You may not be heard, though. Those who are not partying somewhere in the souk will be murmuring into their cellphones.

===============================================================

Footnote by Anthony: Here is the video on Monckton’s address to the Doha COP18 conference.


No video has yet surfaced of him being “evicted” as the Telegraph journalist claims, suggesting that Monckton’s account of leaving the hall might be more accurate. The chair on the dais says “thank you” at the end, and didn’t call for security to evict Monckton.

Lord Monckton is a man of great learning and moral courage. Too bad there are not more like him in so many other fields.

 

[PMedMoe]

Nearly four in 10 Americans blame weather on 'end times'

Nearly four in 10 U.S. residents say the severity of recent natural disasters such as Superstorm Sandy is evidence the world is coming to an end, as predicted by the Bible, while more than six in 10 blame it on climate change, according to a poll released on Thursday.

The survey by the Public Religion Research Institute in partnership with the Religion News Service found political and religious disagreement on what is behind severe weather, which this year has included extreme heat and drought.

Most Catholics (60%) and white non-evangelical Protestants (65%) say they believe disasters like hurricanes and floods are the result of climate change.

But nearly two-thirds (65% of white evangelical Protestants say they think the storms are evidence of the “end times” as predicted by the Bible.

Overall, 36% point to end times and 63% to climate change.

More at link

:endnigh:    anic:

Time to start watching Doomsday Preppers..... 

 

[cupper]

:endnigh:    anic:

Time to start watching Doomsday Preppers..... 

Unfortunately the global warming weather nuts only account for a small portion of Doomsday Preppers. You also have the anti-government nuts, the economic meltdown nuts, the super volcano nuts, the solar flare nuts, the pandemic nuts, bio terrorism nuts, the nuclear disaster nuts, the nuclear terrorism nuts, the end times nuts, the Myan Calendar nuts and the mixed nuts.  :nod:

Personally I'm waiting for the Squirrels to rise up and start harvesting. ;D

 

[a_majoor]

Funny how "narratives" get derailed by facts. One observation that Jared Diamond and his ilk gloss over or ignore is the fact that it is too cold today to raise cattle in Greenland, yet the Vikings were able to do so in 1100AD. Now what are the implications of that, I wonder...

http://www.barrelstrength.com/2013/01/12/jared-diamond-and-the-collapse-of-the-greenland-norse/

Jared Diamond and the collapse of the Greenland Norse

Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel‘s essential message is that there was nothing special about Europeans, their societies, or their culture that have led them to dominance of the world from the 17th century forward, which continues.  In all ways he has worked to explain why European and offshoot societies have had more goods, more freedom, and more power than other societies, not through any racial or cultural characteristics but purely through geographical, mechanical advantages.

I have seen him burst into tears on a PBS television special at the thought of racial or cultural differences between Africans and Europeans having any explanatory power whatever.

Diamond’s book is one that can be read for profit and pleasure without  being persuasive in the least. His anti-whitism is extreme but by no means untypical of self-hating academic circles.

His book Collapse explores several reasons why some societies have failed, including the Norse of Greenland, who died out, or emigrated out, during the Little Ice Age of 1300-1850.

This from the Wikipedia article on Diamond’s book Collapse:

Part Two describes past societies that have collapsed. Diamond uses a “framework” when considering the collapse of a society, consisting of five “sets of factors” that may affect what happens to a society: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, loss of trading partners, and the society’s own responses to its environmental problems. The societies Diamond describes are:

The Greenland Norse (climate change, environmental damage, loss of trading partners, irrational reluctance to eat fish, hostile neighbors and most unwillingness to adapt in the face of social collapse.

As you might expect, actual studies of the Greenland Norse reveal a much different picture.

they quickly gave up herding cattle for sheep and pigs.
they adapted quickly to a fish diet

On the other hand, they did not want to become Inuit or live the lives of Inuit. They abandoned the settlements in an orderly way, taking gold and silver with them. The young and strong got out, leaving the aged to stay behind, as was ever the case with emigration.

Although the descendants of the Vikings had adjusted to life in the north, there were limits to their assimilation. “They would have had to live more and more like the Inuit, distancing themselves from their cultural roots,” says Arneborg. “This growing contradiction between identity and reality was apparently what led to their decline.”

An Orderly Abandonment

In the final phase, it was young people of child-bearing age in particular who saw no future for themselves on the island. The excavators found hardly any skeletons of young women on a cemetery from the late period.

“The situation was presumably similar to the way it is today, when young Greeks and Spaniards are leaving their countries to seek greener pastures in areas that are more promising economically,” Lynnerup says. “It’s always the young and the strong who go, leaving the old behind.”

In addition, there was a rural exodus in their Scandinavian countries at the time, and the population in the more remote regions of Iceland, Norway and Denmark was thinning out. This, in turn, freed up farms and estates for returnees from Greenland.

However, the Greenlanders didn’t leave their houses in a precipitous fashion. Aside from a gold signet ring in the grave of a bishop, valuable items, such as silver and gold crucifixes, have not been discovered anywhere on the island. The archeologists interpret this as a sign that the departure from the colony proceeded in an orderly manner, and that the residents took any valuable objects along. “If they had died out as a result of diseases or natural disasters, we would certainly have found such precious items long ago,” says Lynnerup.

The Greenland Norse are like the English speakers of Quebec, who abandon old towns and farms where they have dwelt for a hundred and fifty years for more opportunity in other provinces. In one case the reason is the Little Ice Age. In the other it is official suppression of their language and of their economic opportunity. The energetic emigrate; they do not stick around in order to become a people living on what the emigrants consider to be too poor or too small a scale, or too isolated an existence.

Sometimes it is advantageous not to adapt.

On a more general note, Jared Diamond makes observations of small, isolated economies and ecosystems, like Greenland and Rapa Nui (Easter Island), and then claims they are general cases applicable to continental societies, economies and ecologies. Save yourself some time and money. As for climate change, this example shows the natural trend of people adapting and moveing to meet changing circumstances.

 

[Old Sweat]

Here is a short piece that I picked up from Small Dead Animals. The author reports that analysis of tree ring data indicates both that climate models do not accurately report previous warm periods and that there has been cooling of the European climate in recent years. It is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provision of the Copyright Act.

Tree Ring Studies Confirm Global Cooling

Wednesday, January 30, 2013 at 1:02PM


Contributed by Chriss Street. Specialist in corporate reorganizations and turnarounds, former Chairman of two NYSE listed companies. His latest book, The Third Way, describes how to achieve management excellence and financial reward by moving organizations from Conflict and Confrontation to Leadership and Cooperation. He lives in Newport Beach, CA.

The prestigious Nature Journal recently published a major climate change study named Orbital Forcing Of Tree-Ring Data that proves through analysis of over 2000 years of tree ring evidence that current climate models substantially underestimated ancient Northern Europe temperatures levels during the Roman and Medieval Periods. The fact that temperatures have trended down for the last two centuries debunks theories that anthropogenic (man-made) global-warming is caused by a rising CO2 gas levels associated with industrial burning of “fossil fuels.”

Researchers from Germany, Finland, Scotland, and Switzerland examined tree-ring density profiles in trees from Finnish Lapland. In this extremely cold environment, trees often collapse into one of the numerous lakes, where they remain well preserved for thousands of years. The international team was able to conduct high reliability calculations of tree ring density from the cold water preserved Scandinavian pine trees, which correlate very closely with annual summer temperature patterns.



The United Nations’ endorsed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore for interpreting studies of ice cores and ocean sediments to “conclude” that Europe was about to suffer catastrophic anthropogenic (man-made) global warming. But new Tree Ring Data allows precise measurements of annual climate variability. The results reveal there has been a cooling trend of -0.3°C (0.54°F) per millennia (1000 year periods) “due to gradual changes to the position of the sun and an increase in the distance between the Earth and the sun.” The high-resolution graph shown above demonstrates that temperatures ancient periods were much warmer than predicted by IPCC. The study also documents the extreme temperature phases that occurred during Europe’s “Little Ice Age” that resulted in a general cooling trend between the 1150 and 1460 AD and extremely cold climate between 1560 and 1850 AD. According to lead researcher Jan Esper:


“We found that previous estimates of historical temperatures during the Roman era and the Middle Ages were too low” … “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 results are a huge embarrassment to IPCC, which has acknowledged it did not carry out its own original research to monitor climate and related phenomena. But their extrapolated conclusions regarding a recent warming trend served as justification for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to demand Western industrialized nations implement the Kyoto Protocol treaty to achieve “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”

In a direct broadside against global-warming doomsday alarmists, Esper noted:


This figure we calculated may not seem particularly significant. 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.

The Tree Ring study proves the recent warming trend we are experiencing is not exceptional, because temperatures have been exceeded for at least two periods over the last 2000 years. Paleoclimatologists describe the warming of the earth over the last 12,000 years as the Holocene inter-glacial of the current Ice Age. The prior Eemian interglacial period, which began 130,000 years ago and ended 114,000 years ago, was much warmer. Scandinavia was an island, hippos swam in the Thames at the site of London, and the raised beaches of Alaska & fossil reefs of the Bahamas were formed.

 

[GR66]

Is it just me or do both sides of this argument seem far too confident of their interpretations of historical "data"?  Our environment is a system of extreme complexity.  We cannot consistently and accurately predict what the temperature will be in 48 hours at a given location.  However we are quite willing to state with apparent certainty that a 2000 year old tree ring or a 10,000 year old layer of ice from a core sample "definitively" prove that the climate at that time was warming/cooling.

Do we know with absolute certainty every factor that dictates the size and density of a tree ring in a given year or the amount of a particular isotope in an ice core sample?  Can we infer that because ice in one region or tree growth in another region were such and such in a given year that the variations in micro-climates and local weather were not very different in another area? 

I'm all for research and trying to learn about our past climate but I fear that we're often a little too confident in our level of understanding of how the world really works.  The politics of the issue seems to be taking precedence over the actual science.

 

[a_majoor]

The issue isn't what the tree rings or ice core data says about that particular point in time, GR, rather the issue is attempting to explain why the climate changes from warm to cold and back again over time.

This is something like "CSI: the real world". The criminologists can collect data and interpret it with confidence ("a piece of fiber made of this material which is similar to the materials used in this brand of carpet..."), but it is actually up to the detectives to assemble the evidence into a coherent pattern and deduce who the criminal actually is.

In our case, climatologists can accurately determine historic data (and there is often much corroborating evidence as well; we can actually unearth settlements in Greenland and track the historic change from cattle farming to goat herding, and compare the dates of these changes to the dates of samples of Greenland ice), but the "detectives" have not managed to string the evidence into a coherent pattern and deduce causes. Indeed, with stunts like the "Hockey stick graph", "Hide the decline", hiding raw data and pressuring peer review journals into accepting only "consensus" papers, they have only muddied their own case and sown suspicion as to their motives and intended end results.

Climate is a chaotic system with thousands of inputs and non linear responses to input, so I personally believe that claiming to "know" the cause of climate change is actually impossible; at best you can sort out major factors and get a "broad stroke" approximation of what is happening. Like Economics and Ecology (and for the same reasons), Climatology is and can only be a "descriptive science", able to determine a rough correlation between cause and effect but unable to make accurate predictions about the future.

 

[a_majoor]

The politicization of science by the "Progressives" is perhaps the worst  possible outcome of this entire "Global warming" hysteria. Since the motivations are highly suspect (and the strong arm tactics they used pretty blatant), almost any science now will have a large question mark beside it regardless of the nature of the subject being studied:

http://opinion.financialpost.com/2013/02/21/peter-foster-whos-muzzling-whom-over-what/

Peter Foster: Who’s muzzling whom over what?

Peter Foster | Feb 21, 2013 8:05 PM ET | Last Updated: Feb 21, 2013 8:40 PM ET
More from Peter Foster
 
Report on scientists and media produces only damp squibs

The phrase “government science” rings an alarm bell, not least because it is a contradiction in terms. Governments always tend to pervert science for political reasons. Nazi and Soviet genetics are egregious, although far from rare, historical examples. To suggest that the Harper government’s science communications policy puts it into a similar category seems a bit of a stretch, but that is the claim of a new study from the Environmental Law Centre (ELC) of the University of Victoria. The study, Muzzling Civil Servants: A Threat to Democracy, has been sent by the ELC and Democracy Watch to the Federal Information Commissioner with a request for an investigation into “the apparent systematic efforts by the Government of Canada to obstruct the right of the media — and through them, the Canadian public — to timely access to government scientists.”

There is no doubt that Mr. Harper likes to run a tight — even Bounty-like — communications ship, but bureaucrats are in any case notoriously self-serving ass-coverers, so the notion of free and open media access is a pipe dream. If a journalist gets “a leak,” he’s being used.

Science is especially thorny because it has become so politicized, particularly when it comes to climate, the oil sands and “the environment” more generally. However, trying to control the message is one thing, doctoring it is quite another. There is nothing in this study to suggest that is the case.

Rather than smoking guns, the report produces a sequence of damp squibs that conjure Yes Minister or the Keystone Kops rather than the old (or new) Kremlin. In the examples provided, either the studies on which the government scientists were allegedly “muzzled” were published, and co-authors were available, or the government delayed permission to speak until the science media had rushed off in pursuit of new scares.

Meanwhile, when it comes to climate and the oil sands, there are plenty of “top” academic scientists who are more than prepared to make sure the worst possible spin is put on any piece of “objective” science, and freely to express the view that the Harper government is a mere shill for Big Oil.

The most intriguing aspect of the ELC study is that it misses the pachyderm in the lab. “Official science” is indeed one of the greatest threats to freedom in the world today, but it does not come from the likes of the Harper government, but from the alarmism promoted by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its Canadian apparatchiks.

Far more serious than any clumsy attempts to control Canadian government scientists is the evidence of the attempted suppression by the IPCC of all skepticism about official climate science. Meanwhile I didn’t see the Environmental Law Centre getting worked up when David Suzuki suggested that “deniers” should be silenced.

Just this week, IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri was forced to acknowledge the flatlining of global warming for the past 17 years. However, he claimed that such a trend would have to last “30 to 40 years at least” to break the long-term global warming trend. That is pure obfuscation. The IPCC’s own scientists have admitted that a hiatus of 15 years undermines the models on which catastrophic projections have been made.

As for suppressing voices, Roger Pielke Jr., a prominent climate scientist, just revealed that he was dumped from the editorial board of a journal, Global Climate Change, after criticizing a shoddy report that claimed that IPCC scientists were inclined to underestimate the seriousness of climate data. (One of the report’s authors, Naomi Oreskes, has called for the banning of the term “climate debate.”)

Much more serious were the revelations of the Climategate emails out of the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in 2009, which clearly established that some of the IPCC’s leading scientists had falsified data, attempted to keep skeptical articles out of peer-reviewed journals, and had moved or destroyed emails to evade freedom of information requests. Even worse, subsequent “inquiries” were almost all whitewashes. The one that wasn’t, by the InterAcademy Council, was ignored. Worst of all, the mainstream media bought, and proceeded eagerly to peddle, the they-were-exonerated line. Since then, sterling work by Canadian author and blogger Donna Laframboise has revealed the stunning amount of input into the IPCC process by activist environmental NGOs such as the WWF.

The ELC praises President Obama’s “open” science policy, but shouldn’t anyone concerned about objectivity be more worried that Mr. Owe was peddling pure science-free climate alarmism in last week’s State of the Union ?

The ELC claims that “society” cannot make informed choices about critical issues without being “fully informed of the facts.” The problem is that people in general are woefully ignorant about science, and prone to reflexive chemophobia, which means that all any “top” scientist has to do is say that there has been a “substantial” increase in toxins on snow near the oilsands, or suggest that lake sediments represent a “smoking gun” to get much of the media performing like Pavlov’s dogs.

Perhaps the Harper government would be wise to loosen up on its communications strategy, but that is a far less important issue — and threat to democracy — than the perversion of academic science by left-wing ideology. Perhaps the Information Commissioner should look into that. I’m pretty sure the Environmental Law Centre won’t.

 

[Kilo_302]

I find it hard to believe there is a worldwide cabal of scientists intent on pushing bogus science on us. I find it somewhat easier to believe that the fossil fuel lobby has successfully muddied the waters, creating the illusion of a "debate" surrounding climate change. 99.9% of the world's climate specialists are sounding the alarm. The very vocal doubters are well funded, and are borrowing tactics directly from the tobacco cases in the 1990s. Create the illusion of doubt, and you've succeeded in in preventing meaningful action that may affect profits for the companies that hired you.

 

[Old Sweat]

Can you please verify your 99.9% statement with sources?

 

[Kilo_302]

http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus

Sorry 97%.

 

[Haletown]

http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus

Sorry 97%.

So I wonder if this  97% will now agree with Hansen, Trenberth, Annan et al and as of this past week, the entire IPCC, who have had to admit their CAGW is not happening as predicted, that there has been at least 15 years now that the forecasted warming hasn't happened, that despite new record CO2 levels, the planet is in fact cooling.

Or maybe they'll just say they have it right but just need more money for their computer models and more time to come with the next version of the Global Warming-Climate Change-Climate Catastrophe-Increased Storms-Gawd Only Knows.

Time will tell.  Meanwhile I am sure they believe they should still be funded and they should still have a major say in generating Public Policies that meet the environmental standards they have invented based on the theory they know is invalid but should be adhered to regardless of the consequences.  You know, turning food into poor quality car fuel, covering rural Ontario in wind turbines solar panels and getting children to believe the normal state of our climate is static and any changes are bad.

Because 97% of scientists are always correct. 

 

[Kilo_302]

Scientists are the first to admit that a theory can never be proved, only disproved. I'm not a scientist, but the link I posted above includes a very broad and representative list of respected scientific institutions from around the world. Contrast that with the very short list of scientists who think that a) climate change is not related to human activity, or b) don't think it's happening at all. I have to go with the 97% on this one.

 

[ModlrMike]

Scientists are the first to admit that a theory can never be proved, only disproved. I'm not a scientist, but the link I posted above includes a very broad and representative list of respected scientific institutions from around the world. Contrast that with the very short list of scientists who think that a) climate change is not related to human activity, or b) don't think it's happening at all. I have to go with the 97% on this one.

Those old enough to have lived in the late 60s early 70s remember the hue and cry that the planet was cooling and that we were headed for another ice age. Forgive me if I maintain my skepticism.

 

[Journeyman]

As someone with motorcycles in winter storage.....BRING ON THE GLOBAL WARMING!!  :nod:

 

[Haletown]

Those old enough to have lived in the late 60s early 70s remember the hue and cry that the planet was cooling and that we were headed for another ice age. Forgive me if I maintain my skepticism.

Or when the 99.99999% of scientists agreed that ulcers  were caused by stress . .  .  And it took a single Australian, who had to fight for 20 years and endure huge ridicule and contempt from his "peers" to get the world to see what he knew- they were caused by a bacteria and were easily curable.

The reality of the 97% of scientists who believe in global warming is a bit of a scam I and of itself.  They question that was asked is if they believed CO2 was a "greenhouse gas".  There should have been 100% agreement.

But that is not the same as saying they agree with the CAGW theory.  Because there are two parts to CAGW, the 1ish degree of warming that could happen with a doubling of CO2.  It is the second part of the theory that is the wonky bit,, the whole positive feedback loops thingy.  Very bizarre.

And they certainly didn't agree that CO2/humans and only CO2/humans are the cause of climate change.  That clai is beyond ridiculous and should be to anyone with even a modicum of basic science education.


But hey, it is a free world and anyone who wants to believe the planet is radically warming,the polar bears are going extinct, the oceans are rapidly rising, the polar ice caps are diminishing, that CO2 is pollution not plant food can believe so if they wish.

I have to thank the Global Warming Industry for one thing.  Here in BC, we have had a carbon tax for a few years that has been implemented to both lower personal income tax rates while making bad, evil gasoline more expensive.  Since  I don't use very much gas, maybe 350 - 400 litres a year it is wonderful that everyone else pays so much so I can pay less.  Being Green is simply wonderful.

 

[a_majoor]

Don't forget that scientists are also human, and follow incentives like other humans. If a torrent of money is going to a particular field or to follow a particular hypothesis, then you can bet that scientists will be flocking to the field or telling everyone who can fund them that their specialty is related to the field de jour.

The Perimeter Institute is an example of this trend, it was ridiculed and scientists who went there (because it is nicely funded by former RIM executives) looked down upon because it was founded with the intent to examine an esoteric branch of science which is at odds with the currently "consensus" String Theory. Since String Theory is itself not proven or amenable to experimental proof, this is more a case of snobbish fashion following than anything else.

 

[Kilo_302]

Don't forget that scientists are also human, and follow incentives like other humans. If a torrent of money is going to a particular field or to follow a particular hypothesis, then you can bet that scientists will be flocking to the field or telling everyone who can fund them that their specialty is related to the field de jour.

The Perimeter Institute is an example of this trend, it was ridiculed and scientists who went there (because it is nicely funded by former RIM executives) looked down upon because it was founded with the intent to examine an esoteric branch of science which is at odds with the currently "consensus" String Theory. Since String Theory is itself not proven or amenable to experimental proof, this is more a case of snobbish fashion following than anything else.

I think you have it backwards. I don't doubt that some scientists may be swayed by the promise of larger grants but I would argue they are in the minority. In fact that minority is represented by the scientists who are funded by petroleum companies to cast doubt on whether or not climate change is happening and is caused by human activity (these are the same guys who claimed that the link between lung cancer and cigarettes was tenuous at best).  You can't honestly believe that 97% of the world's scientists are just after money, and the very small minority who actually have corporate backing with tons of money behind them are acting purely in the interests of science.

 

[Fishbone Jones]

I think you have it backwards. I don't doubt that some scientists may be swayed by the promise of larger grants but I would argue they are in the minority. In fact that minority is represented by the scientists who are funded by petroleum companies to cast doubt on whether or not climate change is happening and is caused by human activity (these are the same guys who claimed that the link between lung cancer and cigarettes was tenuous at best).  You can't honestly believe that 97% of the world's scientists are just after money, and the very small minority who actually have corporate backing with tons of money behind them are acting purely in the interests of science.

What a load of ad hominem bullshit.

Quote what you want from now on. You've lost all credibility in a single statement.

 

[Kilo_302]

What a load of ad hominem bullshit.

Quote what you want from now on. You've lost all credibility in a single statement.

I addressed a point with what I view to be another valid point, and you're going to start throwing around profanity and accuse ME of getting personal?

Anyways, the climate change debate is complex to be sure, and all the data in the world can't PROVE a theory as I mentioned above. But if you look at the numbers and what scientists on all parts of the spectrum of the debate have to actually GAIN from their position, I think it's only rational to conclude that the alarm is genuine. I genuinely  hope I'm wrong and the naysayers are right, but again, the numbers don't lie. If you examine who is backing the science that says climate change isn't happening, or humans have nothing to do with it, it's obvious that certain interests are at play here. Interests that are far more imbedded and powerful than the comparatively feeble solar or wind lobby, or the ambitions of a few scientists to increase their budgets and get papers published.