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Firstly, Cook was published 5 years after the email 'Mike's nature trick'. So they were shooting from the hip assuming the divergance problem can be ignored.

Secondly, Cook in no way is the final word over the controversy as to whether or not tree rings make good thermometers. It doesn't explain the cause of the modern divergance problem. It does not provide anything to bolster (or diminish) trust that tree rings are a good temp proxy. All it does is provide a pretext to disregard modern, inconvenient, data.

Steve McIntyre critiques the Cook paper on a number of levels. Namely that the breakdown Cook uses separates out trees that are well understood to respond to Co2 fertilization. If you consider only trees that do not respond to fertilization, the divergance problem actually persists. Implying that Cook rationalisation is actually a red herring. http://climateaudit.org/2006/03/14/cook-et-al2004-more-cargo-cult/. His post though is quite unstructured, incomplete and difficult to parse.

Ahh...not cherry picked, a complete data set, the largest and highest fidelity. And It has not even been mentioned except for a brief description in a few papers because it doesn't support the AGW mantra. Did you even RTFA?

Didn't think so. If you don't like the facts, just go ahead and admit you do everything on faith.

You can't ignore facts that you don't like like these guys did.

The more I read about all this the more I don't trust the scientists. Then when you factor in that most of these folks came up in the 60;s, amid a general lowering of standards for everything, I get an even worse feeling. No less than Richard Feynman called "Climate Science" a Cargo Cult. Excuse me if I go with a giant in the scientific community rather than legions of grant grubbing, agenda driven trolls..

I am guessing that you are referring to Stephen McIntyre of Climate Audit. Have a look at his biography:

Mr. Steve McIntyre has been appointed as Chairman of the Board of Trelawney Mining and Exploration Inc with effect from June 30, 2011. Mr. McIntyre has over 30 years experience in the mining and mineral exploration business, including over 10 years with Noranda Mines Ltd. and 20 years as an officer and director of several junior mineral exploration companies, including Dumont Nickel Inc., Northwest Explorations Inc., Timmins Nickel Inc. and Vedron Gold Inc. Most recently, Mr. McIntyre has achieved international prominence through critical statistical analysis of climate research. In 2010, he was named as one of "50 People Who Matter" by the New Statesman, an English magazine, and was co-winner of the Julian Simon Award from the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Why is it that so many prominant climate nay-sayers can be traced back to the mining industry? The common complaint about scientists in this field is that they spruke global warming to get research funds, but those same complainers don't seem to care about how the denialist scientists make their money.

Have a look the next time a "scientist" comes out against climate change. You will often find that a lot of those scientists are actually geologists. I accept that geologists can tell us a lot about atmospheric conditions going back over time, but I also accept that the biggest industry that employs geologists is the mining industry.

(1) Billboard messages need to be terse and use familiar phrasing or they don't work at all

(2) The ad designer was trying to spark a little controversy and saw it as a fight-fire-with-fire, no-publicity-is-bad-publicity sort of situation.

I agree with you that something like "I still believe in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming" would have been closer to the intended meaning, but few would be able to parse and understand that (or similar attempts to convey more subtlety) while driving 60 mph. :-)

It's also worth noting that Heritage was told to knock it off by its own featured speakers, including the previously-mentioned Ross McKitrick. Ross threatened not to come to the conference and posted his letter to Climateaudit, where many skeptics read it. Meanwhile, Donna Laframboise (creator of NOconsensus.org) actually did withdraw from the conference, also posting the reasoning to her blog. You might want to read both those links before assuming that skeptics in general are fully behind the campaign.

I like the way you've cherry-picked a Hansen prediction. He has made other predictions which turn out to be complete rubbish, of course (and later than the one you cite). I guess you didn't come across it, or deliberately chose the one most closely matching your idea of the truth. The fact of the matter is that when the temperature is rising, you can produce a variety of exponential curves that match the observed trend over short periods of time (yes, 30 years is a short period of time), because at the start of the trend the divergence is lowest.

I somewhat suspect you would find a way to protect your preconceptions no matter what, but

look at the first graph in this link. Would you estimate that in future, the temperature will more closely track the red line, the green line, or the blue line?

Yeah. Remember what we said about realclimate.org? That article is by a guy talking about his boss. Do you think he's going to say how bad the predictions are?

If you look at the graph you linked to, the green line means we add a lot of CO2 to the atmosphere, the blue line means we add a little CO2 to the atmosphere, and the purple line means we stop adding CO2 to the atmosphere entirely by the year 2000. The reality is we added more CO2 than the blue line, but less than the green line. So if the model were accurate, temperature should track between the two.

If you look at updated data in that first diagram, you can see that the land-sea temperatures are below scenario C, ie below what he estimated if we stopped emitted CO2 completely. The satellite temperature reading is off from between A and B by nearly half a degree. If I were trying to be misleading, I could say he was off by 100%.

Our other dataset, the land-only dataset, can be seen updated here, but even that is off by 30% or so. It's not clear why the land data is diverging from the other two records.

Especially since tree ring data started to deviate dramatically from measured data around the 60's and have gone awry ever since. Historically that data have been proven to be accurate, but I guess pollution and certain now banned chemicals were to blame for the trees to start behaving erratically.

If that was true, why didn't that same tree ring data agree with temperature centuries before as well? There's a very valid scientific alternative known as spurious correlation. Using only those parts would then be cherry picking a proxy that might not hold up to scrutiny.

http://climateaudit.org/2011/03/23/13321/

(And many tree ring studies do point to better correlation with precipitation and nutrients - that might not follow temperature)

Considering that multiple independent temp reconstructions have made the Hockey Stick into a Hockey Team, his work seems to be on solid ground

Or, one could posit that the other temp reconstructions are on as shaky ground as Mann: http://climateaudit.org/2009/10/29/upside-down-proxies-baffle-the-team/ :)

( and he's been cleared of wrongdoing by 6 or 7 investigations - and no, they weren't mere cursory glances at his e-mails by colluding cronies ).

You're right, they weren't cursory glances - they didn't even *glance* at the emails.

Here, check out the details: http://thegwpf.org/images/stories/gwpf-reports/Climategate-Inquiries.pdf

I'm guessing that one is of the contemporary period and the other coincides with the last Dalton minimum that was aggravated by several notable volcanic eruptions. Yes, no? Good guesses or bad?

Any guess is a good guess, but in this case, it's a wrong guess. Lindzen presented this to parliament:

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02148/RSL-HouseOfCommons_2148505a.pdf

Page 16. One is 1895-1946 the other is 1957-2008.

And truly, therein lies the problem - nature is perfectly capable of changing climate on its own, at the same rates we've observed in the modern CO2 spouting era. I've no doubt we humans have some effect, but the evidence is that this effect is minor, if measurable at all. The earth is simply not a fragile little teacup - it is a resilient beast that, much like your own body, maintains a form of homeostasis. In the same way that taking a warm shower won't give you a fever just because it's heating your body, our trivial contribution to a gas measured in parts per million, subject to all kinds of biological processing, is not going to show up in any sort of significant or catastrophic heating.

Mann and Hansen have endured FAR more scrutiny and critique

Endured? Mann's work was thoroughly refuted, and Hansen's either has error bars so big you can predict *anything*, or has also been refuted :)

Didn't Mann produce an updated reconstruction that was essentially still the same even after the McIntyre / Mckitrick criticism?

http://climateaudit.org/2011/12/13/ar5-and-mikes-pnas-trick/

"Thousands of blog readers are aware that the “similar findingswithout tree-ring data” were obtained only by including upside-down contaminated data. It’s disquieting that IPCC coauthors are unaware of this. The failure of Mann and his coauthors to retract or correct the PNAS 2008 article lingers on."

While the events in the ice cores indicate there's still much to be learned that doesn't mean that we are somehow not at all responsible for the last century.

Here are two 50 year periods of the climate record. One comes from a time of low CO2 emissions. The other comes from a time with high CO2 emissions. Can you discern which one is which?

http://climate-skeptic.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/08/26/periodb.gif
http://climate-skeptic.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/08/26/perioda_3.gif

Considering the limited models and relatively weak computing power of the time, his predictions were pretty darn good.

What observations would have made you question his basic conceit? How far off would he have had to be in order for you to hold him strictly accountable?

It sounds like no matter what reality showed, you'd still be defending his hypothesis. We call this astrology :)

only showed the most extreme of Hansen's scenarios

Hansen's oral testimony called Scenario A the "Business as Usual" scenario.

Try these critiques of Hansen, if you don't like Michaels:

http://climateaudit.org/2008/01/16/thoughts-on-hansen-et-al-1988/
http://climateaudit.org/2008/07/28/hansen-update/

Considering the limited models and relatively weak computing power of the time, his predictions were pretty darn good.

What observations would have made you question his basic conceit? How far off would he have had to be in order for you to hold him strictly accountable?

It sounds like no matter what reality showed, you'd still be defending his hypothesis. We call this astrology :)

only showed the most extreme of Hansen's scenarios

Hansen's oral testimony called Scenario A the "Business as Usual" scenario.

Try these critiques of Hansen, if you don't like Michaels:

http://climateaudit.org/2008/01/16/thoughts-on-hansen-et-al-1988/
http://climateaudit.org/2008/07/28/hansen-update/

How exactly was it "proven false"? They massaged the numbers to hide temperature declines. They have models that output hockey-stick graphs regardless of the inputs.

http://climateaudit.org/2011/03/23/13321/

I don't like people who massage numbers and call it science.

A few links for the interested:

Temperature Record

Hockey Stick claim

Sedimentary data claim

doh!

put a stick in it. The hockey stick is a complete fraud!

So grace us with you brilliance and tell us how this is wrong or taken out of context or any other bullshit you may have.
http://climateaudit.org/2011/12/01/hide-the-decline-plus/
face it - you have been scammed cult boy!

The proxy also diverges centuries earlier (pre 1550), which casts doubt on it possibly having being cherry picked and considered good only when for those time periods where it was deemed suitable.

http://climateaudit.org/2011/03/23/13321/

Because that's the real issue that most skeptics have been questioning of late. Anyone who isn't an idiot knows that the earth's climate is ALWAYS changing (and always has been).

Well, I don't like to call these prominent 'skeptics' idiots (those are your words, not mine), but they certainly have considered this to be questionable: Roy Spencer, Steve Macintyre, Joseph D'Aleo & Anthony Watts,

But even the "skeptics" were willing to accept the findings of the Berkeley study. Watts had famously promised “I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.“

...Unless of course the Berkeley study proved them wrong that is. Watt's is now back peddling: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/20/the-berkeley-earth-surface-temperature-project-puts-pr-before-peer-review/

OK. I've picked a blog based on your criteria. In fact, its the most prominent of blogs in the community.

Now, please point to where he is saying what you are claiming he is saying.

Of course not. Nor is that what is happening. Proxies are discarded when they disagree with known, better data... in this case thermometer data, and satellite data. Or are you suggesting knowingly using bad data? In order to get to a conclusion you'd prefer?

That is exactly what's happened - like using a proxy upside down since that's how the algorithm automatically made the data fit the "known, better data" (which is another name for "only when they agree with your foregone conclusion")

Would you honestly accept this in any other scientific discipline?

http://climateaudit.org/2009/10/14/upside-side-down-mann-and-the-peerreviewedliterature/

before it is cut off when it stops matching

That is different from the dendrochronology graphs cut off at both ends (pre 16th century and late 20th century) just how?

http://climateaudit.org/2011/03/21/hide-the-decline-the-other-deletion/

So, even with the half-dozen parameters that are left to tune the model to the observed climate, perturbations are not tuned, so they can still be falsified.

With a half-dozen parameters open for tweaking, I can make a model do whatever I want :)

http://climateaudit.org/2007/12/01/tuning-gcms/

"why did Jones take such a large professional risk by asking other scientists to destroy documents?"

http://climateaudit.org/2011/09/02/nsf-on-jones-email-destruction-enterprise/

Wikileaks certainly has an agenda, but they were not even responsible for "climategate" (Despite the revisionist claims of Assange)

http://climateaudit.org/2010/11/30/assange-on-climategate/

I would agree with you if it was only an error in the recent proxy record, however, the proxy also failed in the beginning of the measurement series casting doubt to it's correlation abilities completely.

That was also hidden.

http://climateaudit.org/2011/03/23/13321/

I'm sorry, but Mann, and frankly Jones for that matter, simply aren't reliable sources.

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/a_regional_approach_to_the_medieval_warm_period_and_the_little_ice_age.pdf

http://climateaudit.org/2010/04/05/ipcc-and-the-law-dome-graphic/

Look at the graph again in http://epic.awi.de/Publications/Ste2009a.pdf - you'll note the MWP clearly in the upper left of the graphs on page 154. Here it is with it pointed out: http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0134849d3d3f970c-pi

Also note, that the hockey stick supports the AGW theory, but the AGW theory does not rest on the hockey stick.

Granted. The hockey stick is used to support the CAGW theory, and the CAGW theory clearly rests on the hockey stick. The lesser claim of AGW can very well be true, but at such a low level that it makes no catastrophic impact on humanity or the globe.

Speaking of which, do you ascribe to CAGW or just AGW? I'm not sure if I've ever asked you that question straight out.

Actually, I didn't just appeal against authority, I provided a citation for exactly what the problems were with the Climategate whitewashes.

Let's take one example, Oxborough. An investigation so thorough that it ended up being 5 pages long. Here's some relevant detail on the 11 so-called representative papers they examined (and you'll of course do me the favor of actually responding to the specific allegations and problems here, rather than appealing again to authority of course):

The Committee did not issue a call for evidence. They claimed that the 11 papers they selected for examination were chosen because they “cover a period of more than twenty years and were selected on the advice of the Royal Society.” (Report paragraph 3). UK blogger Andrew Montford inquired who at the Royal Society advised on the selection. In response, the Royal Society would only state that they recommended the Committee have access to “any and all papers” they needed, but would not confirm the claim that they had selected the 11 papers specifically. It later emerged that the Royal Society did not provide any meaningful advice on the selection of papers. The actual chronology of their selection was unearthed through FOIA requests.

On 12 March 2010, UEA Vice-Chancellor Trevor Davies contacted Martin Rees of the Royal Society and Brian Hoskins (FRS) of the Hadley Centre to ask if they could say the list had been selected on the advice of the Royal Society.

Ron [Oxburgh]... is keen that we can say that it was constructed in consultation with the Royal Society. I did send you this list earlier, which I attach again here.[List obtained] They represent the core body of CRU work around which most of the assertions have been flying. They are also the publications which featured heavily in our submission to the Parliamentary Inquiry, and in our answers to the Muir Russell Review’s questions.

I would be very grateful if you would be prepared to allow us to use a form of words along the lines: “the publications were chosen in consultation with The Royal Society”.

Seven minutes later Martin Rees replied:

Dear Trevor, It seems to me that the scope of the panel’s work is a matter primarily for Ron [Oxburgh], but if Brian [Hoskins] is also happy with this choice of papers (as you know, I have no relevant expertise myself!) I see no problem with saying that the list was drawn up in consultation. best wishes Martin

Thirteen minutes later Brian Hoskins replied:

Dear Trevor I am not aware of all the papers that could be included in the list, but I do think that these papers do cover the issues of major concern. Best wishes Brian

(text of emails posted at http://climateaudit.org/2010/06/10/british-due-diligence-royal-society-style/)

That is the extent of the consultation behind the claim of the Inquiry that the papers were selected “on the advice of the Royal Society.” It is more accurate to say that the list of papers to be studied by the “independent” inquiry was drawn up by the UEA itself, and within about 20 minutes was rubber-stamped by two members of the Royal Society, both of whom cautioned that they did not have the proper expertise to do so. At no time was the list subject to any extensive examination by members of the Royal Society itself.

As for the 11 papers themselves, they were never ones that have been controversial (see http://climateaudit.org/2010/04/15/a-fair-sample/). The list also omitted the paleoclimate papers that had been subject to controversy, such as the Tornetrask and Yamal papers by Keith Briffa, and all the ‘hockey stick’-related paleoclimate papers from CRU. By focusing only on journal articles, the Oxburgh panel avoided the key question of whether CRU staff had suppressed uncertainties in WMO and IPCC Reports.

Actually, I didn't just appeal against authority, I provided a citation for exactly what the problems were with the Climategate whitewashes.

Let's take one example, Oxborough. An investigation so thorough that it ended up being 5 pages long. Here's some relevant detail on the 11 so-called representative papers they examined (and you'll of course do me the favor of actually responding to the specific allegations and problems here, rather than appealing again to authority of course):

The Committee did not issue a call for evidence. They claimed that the 11 papers they selected for examination were chosen because they “cover a period of more than twenty years and were selected on the advice of the Royal Society.” (Report paragraph 3). UK blogger Andrew Montford inquired who at the Royal Society advised on the selection. In response, the Royal Society would only state that they recommended the Committee have access to “any and all papers” they needed, but would not confirm the claim that they had selected the 11 papers specifically. It later emerged that the Royal Society did not provide any meaningful advice on the selection of papers. The actual chronology of their selection was unearthed through FOIA requests.

On 12 March 2010, UEA Vice-Chancellor Trevor Davies contacted Martin Rees of the Royal Society and Brian Hoskins (FRS) of the Hadley Centre to ask if they could say the list had been selected on the advice of the Royal Society.

Ron [Oxburgh]... is keen that we can say that it was constructed in consultation with the Royal Society. I did send you this list earlier, which I attach again here.[List obtained] They represent the core body of CRU work around which most of the assertions have been flying. They are also the publications which featured heavily in our submission to the Parliamentary Inquiry, and in our answers to the Muir Russell Review’s questions.

I would be very grateful if you would be prepared to allow us to use a form of words along the lines: “the publications were chosen in consultation with The Royal Society”.

Seven minutes later Martin Rees replied:

Dear Trevor, It seems to me that the scope of the panel’s work is a matter primarily for Ron [Oxburgh], but if Brian [Hoskins] is also happy with this choice of papers (as you know, I have no relevant expertise myself!) I see no problem with saying that the list was drawn up in consultation. best wishes Martin

Thirteen minutes later Brian Hoskins replied:

Dear Trevor I am not aware of all the papers that could be included in the list, but I do think that these papers do cover the issues of major concern. Best wishes Brian

(text of emails posted at http://climateaudit.org/2010/06/10/british-due-diligence-royal-society-style/)

That is the extent of the consultation behind the claim of the Inquiry that the papers were selected “on the advice of the Royal Society.” It is more accurate to say that the list of papers to be studied by the “independent” inquiry was drawn up by the UEA itself, and within about 20 minutes was rubber-stamped by two members of the Royal Society, both of whom cautioned that they did not have the proper expertise to do so. At no time was the list subject to any extensive examination by members of the Royal Society itself.

As for the 11 papers themselves, they were never ones that have been controversial (see http://climateaudit.org/2010/04/15/a-fair-sample/). The list also omitted the paleoclimate papers that had been subject to controversy, such as the Tornetrask and Yamal papers by Keith Briffa, and all the ‘hockey stick’-related paleoclimate papers from CRU. By focusing only on journal articles, the Oxburgh panel avoided the key question of whether CRU staff had suppressed uncertainties in WMO and IPCC Reports.

Neither an accurate summary from Soulskill or NOAA. See http://climateaudit.org/2011/02/24/noaa-misrepresents-inspector-general-report/

At least one NOAA scientist directly lied to the investigation, assuming they wouldn't check, then was caught out when the IG actually asked for evidence.

Agreed, he's using data. The issue is what data.

Contrary to public opinion, that's not temperature data. That's someone's opinion of what temperatures were/should've been. And they keep getting changed

http://climateaudit.org/2010/12/26/nasa-giss-adjusting-the-adjustments/

If you're referring to Steig 2009 [nature.com], perhaps you can point us to evidence that discredits this?

An article to be published in the Journal of Climate refutes it, even after one particular reviewer (a "team" member) submitted 88 pages of criticism. All criticisms were answered. Here

I honestly wonder if people who resort to ad hominem attacks ever actually study the science or just repeat what they are told to believe. There was a time when "skeptic" was a GOOD thing in science. Remember how we're supposed to question assumptions, test those assumptions, and test them again to prove or disprove a theory? Come on, drop the "denier" tag and engage in real science discussions.

Try reading some of the more prominent opposition, such as Anthony Watts' Watts Up With That or Steve McIntyre's Climate Audit or Roger Pielke Sr.'s climate blog.

Are you aware that prominent AGW proponent Judith Curry has turned on her colleagues and is now questioning their findings? Of course they call her a heretic; she's not just parroting what they want her to say. Are you aware that sea ice is not retreating at all, but growing? Have you given any thought to wondering why the AGW community keeps needing to change the terminology? In the wake of decreasing temperatures and increasing snowstorms, it's no longer global warming but climate change. Now *any* weather event can be blamed on AGW, or is that AGC?

So to answer your question, yes, I'll believe you when we have freighters sailing the arctic. Then, just like the vikings, we can start farming Greenland again. In the meantime, I'll continue to watch the numbers and see how they don't add up. If you have any constructive proof, pay a visit to any of the skeptical blogs and have your say. You'll find that unlike AGW blogs, your comments will not be removed and people who attack you ad hominem will not be tolerated.

Right on! Since we can't filter all the garbage out it isn't worth picking up ANY of the garbage at all.

That's the approach the EPA is taking with European ships that could suck up 96% or so of the oil out of the water...because some small amount gets put back in (which you could probably pick up later in another pass through the area), they're saying this tech is unacceptable. Wouldn't a 96% reduction be better than nothing?

That RealClimate article you cite has already been addressed and refuted by data from other sites: http://climateaudit.org/2010/04/25/yamal-and-the-decline/.

that is the fraud he perpetuated by hiding the decline by REMOVING it from the famous hockey stick graph. It's blatant fraud

Uh, no, it isn't. In fact, entire research papers are dedicated to the problem. How can something be "fraud" when it's being openly and widely discussed and analyzed?

Oh, he also bent it upwards to merge it back into a continuous line with the temperature data...

Really? When and where was that?

oh wait there's more, he eliminated the Medieval Warm Period which was actually warmer than anytime in the last hundred years!

He did no such thing. The MWP was a local phenomenon. But hey, don't let your own ignorance and dishonesty get in the way of ranting about things you are obviously clueless about.

For more details see http://www.climateaudit.org/ where the hockey stick is slaughtered as are the three recent political whitewash inquiries.

The hockey stick has been confirmed as being valid. Oops.

'the tree ring data, seriously, you're using that?"

Dr. Micheal Mann keeps using the tree ring data even though it diverged downwards declining - that is the fraud he perpetuated by hiding the decline by REMOVING it from the famous hockey stick graph. It's blatant fraud. I would have failed science classes had I tried to pass that off as real data. Oh, he also bent it upwards to merge it back into a continuous line with the temperature data... another fraud! At least two frauds so far... oh wait there's more, he eliminated the Medieval Warm Period which was actually warmer than anytime in the last hundred years! Three frauds. The list goes on but they get much more technical. For more details see http://www.climateaudit.org/ where the hockey stick is slaughtered as are the three recent political whitewash inquiries.

"No it doesn't, your list of 3 is faulty to begin with, and yet you claim to be the one who is honestly reporting the situation."

Your opinion is irrelevant as the facts speak for themselves, fraudulent representations by Mann and Jones and others abound in climate science, if you don't dig you'll never learn the verifiable facts. If you only listen to the alarmists and fail to think for yourself you'll become an alarmist believer. So be it. I'm not here to change your mind or debate you just to make my points which I've done so above. If you want to learn then read and study but also study the critics and what they have to say from the point of view of what if the critics are right? If you're stuck in single perspective thinking (we're doomed, the end is near) then you'll never learn the facts, broaden your horizon and become an actual independently thinking scientist who relies up the facts and evidence not on political opinions.

I'm just stating the facts that are obvious if you've read any of the Climategate emails or dug into the real criticisms of the alleged climate science.

If you'd like to hear from a climate scientist on the topic read this and the many other supporting articles. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/10/fred-singer-on-the-muir-russel-report

The "conspiracy" is well documented in the Climategate emails: political interference in the peer review scientific method process, hiding declines in tree ring data is blatant fraud and deserves jail time for Mann and Jones, refusing information requests also deserves jail time for public data needs to be available to the public especially when it is being used to spend the public purse on public policy of governments, ... the list goes on and on... Nasa GISS temperature data fabricates data with one temperature station being used for 1200km diameter up north in Canada - fabrication of data is fraud the last time I checked ethics... the list goes on and on and on....

So do your own homework. I don't have time to debate you or bring you up to speed.

Here are some sources with many excellent and informative articles (including one that shows that the Null Natural Hypothesis has better correlation coefficients than any of the Alleged AGW Hypothesis climate models).

http://www.climateaudit.org/
http://www.wattsupwiththat.com/

You might think that challenging someone for references is being scientific smidget2k4 but really do your own research. I'm not here to mother you.

On the Oxburgh "investigation": "The science was not the subject of our study.".

Smoking, for example, is worse for your health than the low fat low calorie diet.

Actually, I think that's a debatable point. Low-fat/low-calorie/high-carbohydrate diets being preached to us by the government for the past 30 years have caused easily more deaths than smoking, since you get to lump in heart disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity underneath that whole category.

Not having to use DDT in our lattitude, sidestepping the issue of whether or not DDT is a miracle or a curse, is the smarter option.

Actually, we used DDT in all kinds of latitudes - thanks to DDT, we eradicated malaria in the US. So yes, if in fact malaria never existed in places like Siberia, perhaps they'd have a point...except it has existed in places as cold as Siberia:

http://climateaudit.org/2005/08/30/mosquitos-malaria-and-the-ipcc-consensus/

Maybe you're not advocating doing nothing to prevent global warming and then fixing it with DDT.

Actually, I am advocating doing nothing to prevent global warming, and if I actually believed that CO2 emissions would cause global warming, I would advocate doing more, not less of it. That being said, I think it's pretty clear that malaria is not worsened by a warmer world - but I do think we should be using DDT as much as humanly possible in the pockets of poverty where malaria still exists (africa in particular).

So to be perfectly clear, I think there is debate on whether or not CO2 actually causes any appreciable warming outside the range of "normal" natural variation, and I think there is also debate as to the effects of any warming, regardless of its source. What frightens me is the idea of an ice age, or CO2 below 170ppm or thereabouts, which would pretty much shut down plant life on planet earth.

I think you got my point, though - our proposed interventions are often spectacular failures, and I'm very fearful of the very real negative effects making energy cost more would have on the poorest people on planet earth.

The nuclear arsonal of just a few superpowers could kill all life on earth. Instantly. No supervolcano can do that

Bull pucky. A supervolcano would easily out do every single warhead ever built by man, and even if every nuke went off at once, life would certainly go on.

Also, the seasons are caused by the tilt of the earth, not the sun. It may be summer up north, but in Aussiland it is fall, the beginning of winter.

So get rid of summer in one hemisphere. Whether because of axial tilt or solar output, natural variation in global climate far exceeds even the most outrageous projects of unfalsifiable climate models.

Oil is a combination of hundreds of different hydrocarbons of varying length and shape. Its most likely origin is from deposits of life that were burried by sedimentation and eventually compacted into coal or oil.

Its most likely origin is from methane created in the lower layers of the earth, percolating up through various levels of temperature and pressure, creating complex hydrocarbons. The idea that deposits of life somehow magically turn into petroleum is farcical.

What is not nice, is when we increase CO2 or Methane, because then the earth heats, and warmer oceans mean more H2O in the air, keeping it even warmer. However, clouds do help reflect some light.

Actually, the latest papers on the subject show that the cloud reflection effect acts as a negative feedback that far outweighs any increase of CO2 or methane. You've got your story right, but your conclusion wrong.

I am currently only struggling because Americans have decided that if I want to do something with my life I need to be absolutely perfect, and put myself in such heaploads of debt that it will take a good part of my life to pay off, or I could just pull the money out of my ass, or save up 10 dollars that don't go towards cost of living each month to put towards going to college, so that I could get a degree by the time I am 50.

You're struggling because you've chosen to put yourself in debt. There are plenty of community colleges and state universities that offer college educations for much less than some fancy dancy private four year college. And you're always welcome to join the military and get GI bill benefits for education, if you're not a total lard ass.

Please, if you are going to continue, consider the arguments out there, as I have looked at every single anti-global warming website and haven't found even the slightest reasonable argument against it

Well, you may have looked, but it's obvious you haven't understood anything. Check out http://surfacestations.org/ http://wattsupwiththat.com/ and http://climateaudit.org/ - and please, further than just the front page, actually read the critiques and think about it. It's fairly obvious that politics of catastrophic AGW have been corrupting the science of global climate, and the religious fervor with which you defend the "consensus" view is an example of that.

Unfortunately, that 5.35 value is NOT well sourced. It's only necessary to kill that equation. Your video shows the effect that yes, CO2 can act as a greenhouse gas. It does not demonstrate the size of the effect, nor even that this is the proper form of equation to calculate warming.

That .14deg/decade is only true with adjustments made to the instrumental record. Using UHCN v2 data, which is part of GISS, I checked the effect of adjustments on annual averages. Although my google docs skills make it trickier, when using excel to graph, I had it add trendlines and display the equation for them. The slope of the TOBS adjustments trendline alone is twice the slope of the raw data. The TOBS adjustments have a nice quadratic shape, which reduces the preveious warm anomaly of the 30's and increases the warming trend later. If you plot the adjustments for any given station at random, they appear chaotic, but seem to cancel out to fit a pretty smooth curve. Could be a spurious regression... but it's pretty damn suspicious. There is no reason to expect time of observation of any given station to vary as much as their adjustments do or to do so in a way that averaged out across all stations it creates a smooth curve.

Ah, argumentum ad linkium. Here's a few for you:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/
http://climateaudit.org/
http://www.junkscience.com/

The warmists are the ones who are making the creationist argument - tell me if you've heard this one before:

"After understanding all of the natural drivers we know of, we cannot account for X degrees C of the observed global warming, therefore, changes must be due to man emitted CO2."

"After understanding all of the fossils that we know of, we cannot account for the gaps between the observed fossils, therefore, changes must be due to the Hand of God."

Well, I haven't seen the lost CRU data, but the temp record sheets do vary a lot -> some have the added fields as you note, but others are simply manual temp measurements logged by someone...or more often, not logged by someone, leaving some pretty long gaps here and there.

Here's a breakdown of the historical numbers on weather stations:

http://climateaudit.org/2008/02/10/historical-station-distribution/

Seriously, though, if I was running a program that was supposed to collect data from hundreds, if not thousands of stations, and let's say worst case scenario these people were sending me paper forms, I'd still keep the originals around, either in those paper files or as data files (which would probably have been of reasonable size, even back then). At the very least, for the "value-added" data, I'd have recorded whatever adjustments were made, and saved that somewhere, so we could recreate the original data.

Now, if there had been some sort of flood of the computer room, or library, or some other natural disaster, I could be more forgiving.

Some station data held by the CRU was not made available publicly because it is the intellectual property of some national meteorological services around the world and subject to non disclosure agreements.

It is much worse than that. The CRU guys would not even give a list of exactly which data sets they were using. Some of the guys trying to check the numbers were willing to go around and sign NDAs to get copies of the numbers, and the CRU guys wouldn't even tell them which number sets to ask for. The CRU guys claimed that they were under non-disclosure agreements that forbade them from even identifying which stations' data they were using.

http://climateaudit.org/2007/05/31/why-does-cru-have-a-confidentiality-agreement-with-germany/

So, the CRU guys want to impact the global economy to the tune of many trillions of dollars, which is an abstract way of saying they want to inflict misery on millions of people. They claim it is a necessary evil, needed to prevent horrible misery down the line. But they also ask us to just trust them, and not review the data at all, which is just plain unacceptable.

The Large Hadron Collider guys aren't handing out copies of their data, but they also aren't asking the world to impose Draconian controls on the economy. The global warming people are demanding extraordinary interventions into the economy, and they must have an extraordinarily high level of disclosure. They haven't met this.

The CRU should have had all the data sitting on a web server, and all the source code they used to massage that data and make graphs. They not only didn't do that, they didn't even have the original data (they claimed it was "lost"). I am stunned at the level of confidence you have in these guys.

If there really are as many data sets available as you are claiming, then some climate scientists should start over and do the whole research project again, this time with full transparency. If they reproduce the results, then maybe we can talk about Cap and Trade.

steveha

I'll bite:

Cherry picking is how Mann created his second try at the hockey stick (the spaghetti version), after the first was falsified.

http://climateaudit.org/2005/02/25/a-red-noise-spaghetti-diagram/

Michael Mann used the same tree ring data as temperature proxies for his studies and has published papers on this. But now the very same scientists who collected the tree ring data claim that data cannot be used as a temperature proxies - even though they haven't mentioned a word about how this would invalidate Michael Mann's work.

http://climateaudit.org/2010/04/21/mann-of-oak/#more-10811

From Climate Audit: http://climateaudit.org/2010/04/21/mann-of-oak/

Notwithstanding the considered opinion of Baillie and Wilson that oaks are “virtually useless as a temperature proxy” and “dangerous” to use in a temperature reconstruction, no fewer than 119 oak chronologies were used in Mann et al 2008.

Among Mann’s oak chronologies were three Baillie chronologies: brit008 – Lockwood; brit042 – Shanes Castle, Northern Ireland; brit044 – Castle Coole, Northern Ireland.

Thanks, things like "James Hansen's 1988 climate predictions" (despite being disputed) are what I was talking about.

OTOH, I would take the "hindcasting" and "weather chaotic, climate not" arguments more lightly.

A: Correct. It is about manipulating the IPCC, not the peer review literature itself. I dont really know if that strengthens your case, however. For more extensive discussion, head over to the CRU nemesis himself: http://climateaudit.org/2009/12/17/climategatekeeping-2/

B: But here you go for some cut n paste - how to deep six a "dangerous" paper or journal editor in some easy steps (as far as I know it has not been published so far):

From: Phil Jones

To: rbradley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx,mhughes@xxxxxxxxx.xxx,srutherford@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, "Michael E. Mann" ,tcrowley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Subject: Fwd: Soon & Baliunas
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2003 08:49:22 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@xxxxxxxxx.xxx,jto@u.arizona.edu,drdendro@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, keith.alverson@xxxxxxxxx.xxx

I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more
to do with it until they
rid themselves of this troublesome editor. A CRU person is on the
editorial board, but papers
get dealt with by the editor assigned by Hans von Storch.

Cheers
Phil

Dear all,
Tim Osborn has just come across this. Best to ignore probably, so
don't let it spoil your
day. I've not looked at it yet. It results from this journal having a
number of editors. The
responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few
papers through by
Michaels and Gray in the past. I've had words with Hans von Storch about
this, but got nowhere.
Another thing to discuss in Nice !

Cheers
Phil

"From: Keith Briffa
To: Edward Cook
Subject: Re: Review- confidential REALLY URGENT
Date: Wed Jun 4 13:42:54 2003
I am really sorry but I have to nag about that review – Confidentially I now need a hard and if required extensive case for rejecting - to support Dave Stahle’s and really as soon as you can. Please
Keith"

Hi Keith,
Okay, today. Promise! Now something to ask from you. Actually somewhat important too. I
got a paper to review (submitted to the Journal of Agricultural, Biological, and
Environmental Sciences), written by a Korean guy and someone from Berkeley, that claims
that the method of reconstruction that we use in dendroclimatology (reverse regression)
is wrong, biased, lousy, horrible, etc. They use your Tornetrask recon as the main
whipping boy. I have a file that you gave me in 1993 that comes from your 1992 paper.
Below is part of that file. Is this the right one? Also, is it possible to resurrect the
column headings? I would like to play with it in an effort to refute their claims.
If published as is, this paper could really do some damage. It is also an ugly paper to
review because it is rather mathematical, with a lot of Box-Jenkins stuff in it. It
won't be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically,
but it suffers from the classic problem of pointing out theoretical deficiencies,
without showing that their improved inverse regression method is actually better in a
practical sense. So they do lots of monte carlo stuff that shows the superiority of
their method and the deficiencies of our way of doing things, but NEVER actually show
how their method would change the Tornetrask reconstruction from what you produced.
Your assistance here is greatly appreciated. Otherwise, I will let Tornetrask sink into
the melting permafrost of northern Sweden (just kidding of course).
Cheers,

Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it
wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either
appears
I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL.
Cheers
Phil

And another one:

Thanks a bunch Phil,
Along lines as my other email, would it be (?) for me to forward this to the chair of our commitee confidentially, and for his internal purposes only, to help bolster the case against MM?? let me know
t

I used to belive in AGW, until I discovered that its proponents are such pricks. People are jerks when they're defending the indefensible, because that's how bullies gain their turf.

When faced with the quandry of conflicting sources with agendas, it's best to sweep the agendas away and examine the underlying facts. So... Who's got facts to share? Which debater is documenting their sources, publishing their underlying data and disclosing their analysis methods without fear or shame? Crunch the available numbers yourself if you want to.

I did. I don't have any peer-review quality data to share, but when I look at the raw data the corrections, the updates, the sample selection for the studies I find a number of things. The sensors march determinedly toward the sea over time. They decrease in elevation and move toward city centers (or city centers are built up around them). Remote and colder data is neglected as being unreliable. The newer the revision, the more older data decreases in temperature. An ice age is forming in 1910 as we watch the data evolve. The numbers are publicly available and you're welcome to check my figures.

I find the dendro-proxy data unconvincing for a number of reasons. It includes strip-bark tree data like Bristlecone Pines. I used to have a section of a Bristlecone pine (I grew up where they live - it was pre-endangered species period. The Paiute call it "Iron Wood". One log of it will burn for two days, but if you cut a tree down to try that you're going to prison.) Bristlecone pines have bark that wanders across their exterior. The type of sampling they did - cores - might show a particularly thin gap between rings that represents a dry summer, or that thin stripe might represent a thousand years that the bark covered a different part of the tree trunk. They were warned not to use strip bark trees in their dendro-proxies, but ignored the guidance because Bristlecone pines are the oldest living tree.

The dendro-proxy data includes highly selected (<20% sample) of a Russian Yew study that shows no warming except for one tree, the most influential tree in the world. The Russians have since refuted the warmist interpretation of the data. It includes samples from a Chinese study which has since denied their interpretation. Of course the Himalayan glacier melt quote and the disaster prediction paper are such embarassingly poor science as to be unworthy of mention here among adults - that's ISO/IEC 29500:2008 grade science, not something grownups should consider even if they nearly caused a disaster that was averted.

And then there's the Midieval Warm Period, which warmists deny as local on faith without any evidence whatsoever because it conflicts with their impending climatic apocalypse view. I don't know what to say about that. Obviously written history records that the Midieval Warm Period happened. It was perhaps partly responsible for the Black Death and the Renaissance, against which our modern concerns seem trivial.

Warmers like to cite satellite data. The satellites are calibrated on terrestrial data (theirs). They claim the satellites back their data, when in fact the satellites are deltas from it, and poor ones at that. 3000 miles is a long distance to measure a point in time temperature from, especially to fractions of a degree C. And then there's the fact that the satellites measure the temperature of the solid object their gaze falls upon - the ground or the surface of the sea in full daylight, rather than the air temperature two meters above ground in the shade, which is what most weather stations measure. To expect a high corrolation between these two method

http://climateaudit.org/2007/08/03/hansens-y2k-whopper/
and
http://climateaudit.org/2010/01/23/nasa-hide-this-after-jim-checks-it/

FWIW I don't think it's fair to characterise the NASA guys as 'faking' the data - they just stuffed up. It doesn't reflect particularly well on them that they attempted to quietly & retrospectively correct it though. Note that it also only affected US temperature readings.

NB: I'm sure Steve McIntyre doesn't count as a 'reputable' source as he's a heathen denialist who clearly doesn't understand climate science (despite being the one to find & report the anomoly). There would be other references, I'm just too lazy to look.