Slashdot Mirror

Yes, like I said, your a wanker and habitual liar who deliberately takes things out of context as I have done here. Define "evil"?

BTW: Interested readers can check your "facts" for themselves and I encourage them to do so.

Yes, like I said, your a wanker and habitual liar who deliberately takes things out of context as I have done here. Define "evil"?

BTW: Interested readers can check your "facts" for themselves and I encourage them to do so.

I wouldn't take that real climate site as dry fact. It has a purpose of pushing anthropological global warming and is set up to discount anything else. here is another site that purports to be neutral but seems to be more in the denier side of things. According to NASA the tools to measure the solar radiance from satellites aren't accurate enough to properly display the variances thought to be in the solar cycles as well as the spots and such. In other words, the known margin of error in the measurements are thought to be greater then the differences in the sun's output.

But that was suppose to have changed in 2003 when the source satellite was put into orbit. As a matter of fact, It is data from this that sparked the recent 30% adjustment to solar factors in determining climate models. Both links you pointed to are dated before this information becomes available. I understand the reasoning behind this though. The Real Climate site does the same thing in linking to older outdated articles to rebuke newer submissions and when that fails, they find a link to Exxon or some big oil for reasons to discount the information. I just read a bunch of on these new reading but cannot find the links or the articles anymore. There is a Russian who thinks they are so different then the old data, that he claims we will start seeing the temp go down in another 10-15 years.

But don't just take my word for it, Ask all the people who have reported receiving death threats and had their jobs placed in jeopardy for saying something against the anthropological global warming model. And lets not forget the weather channel chick who wanted to kick every weather reporter out of their club if they made a statement that the current weather anomalies was because of something else and not global warming.

You will find people on both sides pushing their views. This isn't the problem. The problem is the demonetization of anyone who disagrees. I'm sure you will find few people who object when you cannot object without fear of losing your job or life. Hitler, Saddam, Stalin and other dictators had a lot of support from the people but it didn't make them any more correct in what they did.

I'd be surprised if Pluto weren't warming, given it is just past perihelion and it has some quirky orbital parameters. Funny how when things get closer to the sun they warm up a bit. I'd also point out neither article mentions anything to do with the sun getting hotter, and both have quite plausible explanations for the observed trends on both bodies

Actually since Pluto is moving further away from the Sun and continuing to warm despite that fact, it indicates that something doesn't fit the "Constant Solar Constant" BS

So you've failed the reading test. Will we get a conspiracy theory?

These articles in no way supports your "OMG it's a conspiracy!" distortion field, unless you believe the astronomers are in on it with the climatologists and geologists.

I didn't posit a conspiracy since the astronomers are simply reported experimental results. By no means do all or even most astronomers believe the global warming hysteria, nor all climate scientists.

Also, if you bother to check your history, James Hansen didn't pull this out of his ass and a bunch of climatologists suddenly said "Brilliant! We can finally crush ExxonMobile/Shell/BP/Chevron!!!".

I didn't say that he did then, although he has exactly no scruples about doing it now. Nevertheless the decision to back the greenhouse theory was a political decision taken during the Carter administration, as described in a book called "The End" published in 1988.

He also has no scruples about rewriting recent climate history making the late 20th Century warmer and the early 20th Century colder. This isn't conspiracy but cold hard fact. History being rewritten according to a hypothesis. It's just like Wikipedia.

There was quite a bit of review and discussion early on, it's just that the theory that best explained the observations survived, which is how good science works.

Actually it survives not because it makes the best observations (it doesn't) but by a scorched earth policy of accusing any critics of complicity with Big Oil or the Republican Party. Comparisons with Holocaust Deniers abound, and Hansen keeps altering history to fit his pet theory.

Name a single scientist who denies that the climate is currently warming. Just one.

You can't? You're not going to bother because its so trivial? Or because its simply not true?

So when a global warming story comes along (as it does all too frequently) then make the same straw man case over and over. Google does the rest.

The question is not if the climate is warming, since the global climate has generally warmed since the early 17th Century (well before industrialization but hey! what's the point of quibbling over trivia?), the questions are does that warming have a single human-based cause and if so should we do anything about it and can we do anything about it.

But first, before we know whether the current warming is extraordinary, we've got to check that a few scientists aren't rewriting the past to make the late 20th Century warming seem greater than it really is.

The whole question of whether the warming is natural or man-made is one of the great open questions of science.

We will now see the Slashdot effect applied to moderating this response down so that readers are not accidentally and unnecessarily educated.

The vast majority of climate research comes from places like the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Department of Energy, etc. What you get out of the Sierra Club and the like is mostly political policy papers, not much in the way of climatology research appearing in scientific journals.

Yes, which opens up a whole new can of worms about having to keep the welfare (funding) coming in. So you have people with an agenda using research by people who need to keep funding going. It's a recipe for disaster.

And of course, the SPM is starting to reveal errors:

"
The SPM contains an embarrassing typographical error in connection with an issue identified as a hot-button issue: the contribution of Antarctic ice sheets to sea level rise. It also failed to report WG1 model results on Antarctic contributions to lowering sea levels in the 21st century.The actual WG1 Report stated that all studies projected a negative contribution of the Antarctic to sea level in a warming 21st century due to increased precipitation:

        all studies for the 21st century find that Antarctic SMB (surface mass balance) changes contribute negatively to sea level, owing to increasing accumulation [10.6]

Instead of reporting this, the SPM included a table showing a substantial contribution from Antarctic ice sheets from 1961-2003, saying:

        [Models] include the full effects of changes in ice sheet flow, because a basis in published literature is lacking. The projections include a contribution due to increased ice flow from Greenland and Antarctica at the rates observed for 1993-2003, but these flow rates could increase or decrease in the future. For example, if this contribution were to grow linearly with global average temperature change, the upper ranges of sea level rise for SRES scenarios shown in Table SPM-2 would increase by 0.1 m to 0.2 m. Larger values cannot be excluded, but understanding of these effects is too limited to assess their likelihood or provide a best estimate or an upper bound for sea level rise. {10.6}

What happened to the negative contributions in the WG1 Report itself? Here is a copy of the table itself, showing that the Antarctic ice sheet is the largest contributor to recent sea level rise. One set of units is in m/century and one is in mm/year, from which derives the confusion.
" ...
"one major probelm i see between the 2 tables is not even the fact that antarctica is assumed to be a possitive influence on sea level, but rather how much of an increase is observed.

if the SPM table is taken as is , then observed SLE is +180mm/century,
when "fixed (m/century -> mm/yr)" the table yields, +180mm/yr or 1800mm/century
the WG1 table if taken as is gives +1.8mm/yr or 180mm/century

so its clear that the "note for correction" should not be "convert to mm/yr" but convert m to mm while maintaing the temporal scale...

that is EVEN IF the WG1 table is correct in assuming that antarctica, if a +ve factor in SLE, then the should see a an increase on 18cm per cantury if the trend holds for the next century, that is less then daily tide variation in most parts of the world!

and if one of to follow the SPM as gospel, the increase would by either a WHAPPING 18cm in the next century ( about 0.18mm per year or the high average for the thickness of a human hair strand!!), or if they follow their own revision recommendation the value jumps to 1.8 METERS per century (or 18mm per year)!!!

neither of which agree with the WG1 figures!!!!!!!
"

From http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1118#more-1118

"I haven't seen anyone discredit this panel or this document yet."

When the full report actually is officially released, you'll probably find some good responses to the weaker parts at Climateaudit and elsewhere.

For the record, I am not a climatologist, which is why I listen to what people who are climatologists are saying.

HAHAHAH, you are pointing to Dr. Mann's site. The man that invented the hockey stick graph! His site supports his findings and the climatologists he allows to post support his findings. I would expect nothing less.

You can read about about rejected posts and dissenting opinions.

Or you could read on about them deleting posts.

This is why the vast majority of climate scientists believe that the theory of AGW is correct

Sorry, It realy does not matter what the vast majority of climate scientists believe Consensus does not make science. As you point out A theory of yours that you've relied on for half of your life could be shattered beyond reconciliation by some dork on the other side of the planet that you've never even heard of.

I find it interesting that realclimate.org discounts the findings of other scientists on the solar forcing. It only goes to show you that the science is in debate. A simple Google search of Nasa.gov shows that there are over 5,000 references to solar forcing. It would seem that the verdict is out as to what the climates reaction is to solar variance.

Think of the reaction changes in the great climate models. If they only give solar variance a forcing of 10% - 20% and the real forcing is more in the range of 40% - 50% the change is drastic. Some papers give solar forcing percentages as low as 9% others rate it as high as 80%

All in all the debate is open, the consensus is BS and the global warming zealots are scared!

The science at the Real Climate site is often called into question. For balance, readers should also take a look at, say, Climate Audit.

Actually, the phrase "rife with claims and counter-claims" is making more of the counter-claims then they are; the vast body of the evidence indicates climate change is real; Lomborg is the only serious counter-claimaint that I am aware of.

Pudge, you still blew it. After citing one of McIntyre and McKitrick's papers in a peer-reviewed social-science journal (I would have picked their one example from a more serious journal, the Geophysical Research Letters 2005 paper, but OK), you went straight to:

In fact, out of M&M's 10 claims, only one was sortof discredited...

Your link proving that "fact" was to a webpage set up by McIntyre and McKitrick themselves. I thought we were talking about science and how we know scientific debate is occurring or not. You apparently still don't understand that scientists self-publishing doesn't count; by that standard the jury is still out on whether humans evolved from animals and whether the earth goes around the sun. You might as well just point out that McIntyre has a website. Not every word that comes out of a scientist's mouth is a work of science; the peer-review check is critical to the scientific process.

Anyway, to avoid further digression, I'll allow that the scientific debate over the "hockey stick" graph has not quite ended yet. Give that just a few years, probably. From what I've read, McIntyre and McKitrick's analysis on that topic is so flawed, and has been dissected so thoroughly, that, real soon now, it's going to turn into an embarrassment for any serious journal that publishes their work.

But the "hockey stick" graph is just one way of reconstructing temperature, and it corroborates the many other ways that we know the earth is warming. Maybe the methods used to draw the "hockey stick" were flawed (though it's not looking that way). Getting back to what I actually said in the review of the movie, that has no impact on what I identified as Gore's main point:

There are minor errors. They don't detract from Gore's main point, on which the scientific debate has ended.

And the main point is scary, and almost too big to think about or talk about. The earth is warming, because of us. Sometime in the next hundred years, our environment is going to change in big ways. We can't predict it with much accuracy yet, but the best estimates we have are that it's going to be -- measured in lives and dollars -- really bad.

(a) The earth is warming, (b) because of humans, (c) big changes are coming, (d) we can't predict them very well yet but (e) our best estimates are that it's going to be really bad. You're welcome to try to find a single recent paper that argues with any of that. As a hint: McIntyre and McKitrick's "alternative" reconstructions all clearly show substantial global warming throughout the 20th century and they at no point deny that global warming is anthropogenic via CO2 emissions. There's not just scientific consensus on this, but, as far as anyone can tell, unanimity.

And while nobody has a crystal ball, the lack of substantial negative-feedback mechanisms found for this planet's greenhouse effect (quite the contrary, apparently), the ties between CO2 and temperature, and the current CO2 levels being far outside the norm for the past almost-million-years point to really bad stuff starting sometime this century.

I guess I recognize that you aren't going to accept any of this, because you don't really understand what the science is saying:

With global-warming-caused-by-man, there are innumerable potential theories, and right at the top of the list is "it's merely coincidental." [...] The claim being made is that man causes global warming, but the data does not show that. It shows only correlation, not causation. This is true. If you disagree, show me one paper that actually shows causation. I'll wait.

Scientists can pretty reliably determine historical temperatures from things like tree cores.

You couldn't be further from the truth.

Trees respond to moisture, CO2, and soil nutrients to name a few factors in addition to temperature. Furthermore, their response to temperature is non-linear and hump shaped. Initially, as temperature rises, tree rings are thicker (all other things equal), but after a certain point they get thinner again because it's too hot. So, if you are trying to reconstruct temperature you have no way of determining if you are in the too hot or too cold section of the tree's temperature response.

The most heavily weighted trees (bristlecone pines) in the most heavily hyped historical temperature reconstructions (the hockey stick) have no response to local temperature and are in fact believed to be responding to CO2 levels. The National Academy of Science recently concluded that bristlecone pines should not be used in temperature reconstructions. See here for a discussion.

Thus, scientists can not reliably determine historical temperatures from things like tree cores. Anyone who tells you differently is selling something.

Allow me to paraphrase in as bad a light as possible. I'm particularly annoyed by the hand waving argument in the second one.

First link: "We were able to reliably get a hockey stick graph using various modifications to the original methodology. Therefor McKintyre and McKitrick's paper which showed that random data also produces the same shape is irrelevant". You may want to check out a counter argument. It's worth noting that the graph at that link also starts after the MWP, which is one of the complaints about the graph in the first place.

Second link: "A reconstruction of past temperature data using various proxies for temperature does not show a large medieval warm period, contrary to historical knowledge of the time period. Therefor the historical claims are wrong and the medieval warm period did not exist." Effectively, they are arguing that their proxy information is more accurate than reconstruction based on other proxy data and known historical events. They may even be right, but the link provided has no information for why their reconstruction is better. Given that one of the complaints about Mann, et al was specifically leaving out data which indicated a MWP, it's not a good idea to use their graph as proof that the MWP doesn't exist.

Third link: I got nothing. The claim that china was up there is very weakly sourced. It was a particularly weak example of proof that the weather was significantly warmer then. This doesn't necessarily invalidate the rest of the article, but using it does indicate that the author didn't look very hard at some of his information.

"Is the the climate changing?"


Of course it is. The evidence suggests that it has been changing in weird and wonderful ways for a couple of billion years. On smaller timescales there is evidence of massive glaciation and warmer periods than now. Examples of warmer periods include the Medieval Warm Period and the Holocene Warm Period.


"Is it changing in a way that will benefit humanity?"


If it gets as warm as the Medieval Warm Period or the Holocene Warm Period we might see the greening of the Sahara desert. We will probably see many more acres of land that can be used for growing crops and feeding people, and we just might see an increase in biodiversity. During the Holocene Warm Period there were forrests all the way up north in places that are permafrost now and the Sahara was much more inviting.


"If not, how do we manufacture the change we desire?"


We are a long way from having the technology to allow us to manage the climate of the planet. I suspect another 50 to 100 years will be required.

Meanwhile, Climate Audit is where non-Climate-Alarmists hang out and shoot the breeze and do nifty calculations to try to replicate some of the graphs produced by the Alarmist Team.

Check out Climate Audit for much discussion on this matter.

...of Global Salvationism

Before we go do a really stupid thing and imperil everyone on the planet, perhaps we should do a little checking? Just to make sure that we haven't been misled?

Those and anyone with a brain who understands just how flawed the current climate models are.

BY the way, you might want to look at this recent study http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=795#more-795 before holding out your climate models as some golden standard of wonderfulness.

Which is to say, you didn't read it. Honestly, have a look at chapter 12 (Attribution) of the IPCC Third Assessment Report. You'll find just a single mention, buried in the qualitative section, of Mann's study, listed amongst 5 other different palaeological climate reconstructions by different authors, and only to note that "the 20th century warming is highly unusual."

You said the SUMMARY not the chapter. The centerpiece of the SUMMARY was the thoroughly discredited "Mann Hockey Stick" a piece of shit so bad that not even Mann bothered to defend it when he testified in Congress recently. It was Mann's study that was touted as the "Smoking Gun" of man-made climate change and it was Mann's study that was reproduced five or six times in the Summary for Policymakers.

You can see those reconstructions (plus several others) charted together if you're curious. Mann's studies, let alone the "Hockey Stick", far from being "the centerpiece", get scant mention.

Actually the Mann Hockey Stick gets scant attention now because it's been revealed to be a fraud, which was shoved down the throats of scientists, politicians and the public. The other studies in that spaghetti graph are siblings of the Hockey Stick, using the same flawed proxies over and over again, as the Wegman report made clear. Steve McIntyre has shown that ALL of those studies fail statistical verification tests just like the Hockey Stick.

Hockey Stick Denialism means rewriting history, and Wikipedia is the perfect medium to do it.

Of course calling Mann's work a "scientific fraud" is rather unfounded too. You may note, in the chart linked above, that there are many other historical temperature reconstructions, done indepdently by different people, that arrive at a similar result to Mann.

As Wegman noted, all of those studies used the same flawed proxies, and some used Mann's flawed PC1 as a proxy in itself, even though it had already been shown to be a product of bad data in 2003 and bad statistics in 2005. There's even a nice table in Wegman showing how they are all related. Wegman testified that Mann's study was a piece of "bad mathematics" and was meaningless.

The Mann Hockey Stick was a deliberate fabrication of the climatic record. It removed the Little ice Age and Medieval Warm Period as global phenomena and even last year Mann confirmed that the Hockey Stick did not have those events. It should be obvious that writing "Medieval Warm Period" and "Little Ice Age" across the top of a set of graphs that doesn't show them is not exactly evidence, but we're dealing with Denialism here.

There is also the recent National Academy of Sciences report on the subject which concluded, with high confidence, that the earth was the warmest it had been in 400 years, and that while there was less confidence in reconstructions going further back, they still point to the earth undergoing unusual recent warming.

What they effectively was re-establish the Little Ice Age, which Mann had said didn't exist and downgraded the rest of his crap to "plausible" which my dictionary defines as

1. having an appearance of truth or reason; seemingly worthy of approval or acceptance; credible; believable: a plausible excuse; a plausible plot.
2. well-spoken and apparently, but often deceptively, worthy of confidence or trust: a plausible commentator.

That the Mann Hockey Stick was deliberately fabricated and knowingly false was the discovery of

If you were looking for a balanced view point on the dangers of tobacco smoking 30 years ago, would you have gone to the cigarette companies or the think tanks they supported? If not, why would you go to the think tanks of oil companies (mainly, if not exclusively, funded by ExxonMobil) today? This is, of course, in reference to climateaudit.org, which seems to be mainly written by Stephen McIntyre, who is funded (albeit indirectly through the George Marshall Institute) by ExxonMobil. If you doubt the veracity of ExxonSecrets.org, feel free to verify it against Exxon's own "giving report".

With regards to Climate Science and Roger Pielke, if you actually look at his publications, you'll find that he does believe that CO2 contributes to significant climate change. He is just a little more agnostic than many of his fellow researchers as to the nature of that climate change. I'm not sure if you want to count him as your ally.

1. The needed focus for the study of climate change and variability is on the regional and local scales. Global and zonally-averaged climate metrics would only be important to the extent that they provide useful information on these space scales.
2. Global and zonally-averaged surface temperature trend assessments, besides having major difficulties in terms of how this metric is diagnosed and analyzed, do not provide significant information on climate change and variability on the regional and local scales.
3. Global warming is not equivalent to climate change. Significant, societally important climate change, due to both natural- and human- climate forcings, can occur without any global warming or cooling.
4. The spatial pattern of ocean heat content change is the appropriate metric to assess climate system heat changes including global warming.
5. In terms of climate change and variability on the regional and local scale, the IPCC Reports, the CCSP Report on surface and tropospheric temperature trends, and the U.S. National Assessment have overstated the role of the radiative effect of the anthropogenic increase of CO2 relative to the role of the diversity of other human climate climate forcing on global warming, and more generally, on climate variability and change.
6. Global and regional climate models have not demonstrated skill at predicting climate change and variability on multi-decadal time scales.
7. Attempts to significantly influence regional and local-scale climate based on controlling CO2 emissions alone is an inadequate policy for this purpose.
8. A vulnerability paradigm, focused on regional and local societal and environmental resources of importance, is a more inclusive, useful, and scientifically robust framework to interact with policymakers, than is the focus on global multi-decadal climate predictions which are downscaled to the regional and local scales. The vulnerability paradigm permits the evaluation of the entire spectrum of risks associated with different social and environmental threats, including climate variability and change.

Ignoring these science questions provides the perspective that the Report is intended to promote a particular perspective on climate science, rather than providing a balanced presentation on the issues. Indeed, the statement in Boston Globe that,

"Our conclusion is that this recent period of warming is likely the warmest in a (millennium),'' said John Wallace, one of the 12 members on the panel and professor of atmospheric science at the University of Washington",

clearly shows such a biased view. The Report is a disappointment in not adequately addressing the accuracy of the global surface temperature trend data. Since its accuracy is at the foundation of the entire Report, the absence of such an evaluation very substantially weakens the value of the Report in climate science.

And Dr. Richard Peilke of Colorado State says that only 28% of the observed warming is due to increases in CO2. There are scientists out there who are qualified to be skeptics. Also look at: http://www.climateaudit.org/

... and when you read it, remember that RealClimate is an advocacy site for the pro-anthropogenic warming theory.

Have a look at climate audit, which is a critical site, and Roger Pielke's Climate Science; Pielke is a famous climatologist and more middle of the road, accepting some anthropogenic warming, but questioning whether it's at all dominant in apparent overall warming.

For those who want to bypass the dysfunctional reporting of the MSM, you can get the full report in PDF directly from NAS.

Also available from that link: The press release, audio of the press briefing, an abbreviated report and opening statement.

Stephen McIntyre offers interesting commentary on the report here.

As opposed to what? Should I link to RealClimate.org and use the highly quoted and totally accepted "Hockey Stick" which we now know is basically a giant crock of sh_t?

The Hockey Stick is on the web, and for ten years no one decided to question its veracity. Except of course for McKitrick and McIntyre for which they were roundly and soundly criticized for daring to question the "truth" of the Holy Hockey Stick.

Now it turns out that they were right. Mann hid his methods and data, from a publicly funded study, until forced to reveal them in what almost came down to an act of Congress.

John Daly was just an average guy, who was struck by the screaming about rising sea levels, when he lived next to the sea level marker left in New Zealand in the 1800s. The fact that the sea level is now below this mark (which is carved in solid stone) is a very telling thing. The fact that the largest rise in sea level shown by satellite data is 0.03mm/year is also well below the 1.2cm/year the IPCC promised us in 2000 is also extremely damaging to the GCC crowd, but they hide that as well.

Those IPCC studies are on the web too. Why don't you question them with the same veracity that you complain about my sources? All the climate data on John Daly's page are linked to the sources and have references. That's better than anything on Mann's site, where they regularly throw out things like "because we say so" (paraphrase) and delete posts that question them.

It actually is a valid counter point because anybody who is getting their funding from the oil industry has an innate bias towards conclusions that benefit the oil industry. This is obvious.

Not a single one. Not one in all of those piles of papers, not one damn paper.

It does mean there is not an official, unquestioned consensus. In the 1970s, there was also a consensus that we were all going to be in a new Ice Age by now.

Wrong: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=94

Hell, one guy even put out a book called The Skeptical Environmentalist

The "one guy" was a political scientist name Bjørn Lomborg. How is he qualified to make judgements about climate science?

On the other hand the detractors all seem to fall into two categories:
1) Industry funded pseudo-scientists
2) People who don't know jack about climatology

I just ask for one. One legitimate paper that really shows valid evidence to discredit the consensus. I assume said paper will be delivered by Godot.

Okay, first the dislaimer: I am in the 'dissenter' camp. At least as far as the bandwagon goes. I think the models are incomplete and the issue far too politicized for the science to be trusted at this point in time.

But, to address your question about the solar input, there HAS been some work done on that. I found these links by searching "global warming, anticorrelation" on Google Scholar a while back.

Cosmic Rays and Climate

and

influences of solar radiation on the global climate

Okay, feel free to take with a grain of salt if you wish; the analysis of proxy data is fundamentally flawed: http://www.climateaudit.org/

I don't buy that core samples or ice samples are a valid metric. The only valid metric in my mind are samples taken at the time. See data corrupts over time, especially data sitting out in the open. I've had this conversation with my wife (a B.S. meteorologist, not the TV kind but the research kind) and I don't think I'm too unreasonable.

There are also a fair number of skeptics of realclimate, like this guy and here are a list of legitimate post RealClimate has deleted from their website that disagree with their contentions... based on that I'd consider them a biased source.

• Steve McIntyre's Site - basically geared toward discounting the statistical existence and/or importance of the 'hockey stick' temperature graph. Specifically, this is a discussion of the statistical errors involved in using multiple proxies (like tree rings, ice cores, etc) to model correlations.
• Climate Audit site - this is key to address your point; this site has a lot of scientists/researchers who dissent from populist view of anthropomorphic climate change, at least based on the current models. There is some important, and sometimes subtle, stuff here.
• A New Temperature Reconstruction - one of the stories linked to in the above site; worth a look.
• The Discovery of Rapid Climate Change - simply emphasizes that rapid climate change HAS occured historically and that human causes are not required; note that the swings in temperatures, etc, are MUCH larger than the 1-5 C shifts many take as catastrophic.
• Some have asserted that the AGW phenomenon is an example of Pathological Science. Note specifically the criteria:
  • The maximum effect that is observed is produced by a causative agent of barely detectable intensity, and the magnitude of the effect is substantially independent of the intensity of the cause.
  • The effect is of a magnitude that remains close to the limit of detectability, or many measurements are necessary because of the very low statistical significance of the results.
  • There are claims of great accuracy.
  • Fantastic theories contrary to experience are suggested.
  • Criticisms are met by ad hoc excuses.
  • The ratio of supporters to critics rises and then falls gradually to oblivion.

Maybe they're going to try and top 11C warming that they managed last time.

It should be "How I bombed the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and waited for the headlines"

This "yet another multiproxy study" is examined by McIntyre on The Climate Audit site, and reveals that it is based on the same ingredients as the other "hockey stick" type studies, with the same bias toward the result.

Four dead polar bears in the open ocean. Therefore they died because they drowned. Therefore its because the Arctic has warmed recently. Therefore the warming is caused by "Global Warming" caused by human fossil fuel use.

But wait, the Arctic from 70-90 is still not as warm as the 1930s, as can be seen from long station records all across the high Arctic (for example Nuuk or Ostrov Dikson ) This was well before large increases in carbon dioxide.

Since the poster child for linking climate change with carbon dioxide use has been shown to be a product of bad statistics and the whole multiproxy study paradigm shown to be without significance (see Bürger, G., and U. Cubasch (2005), Are multiproxy climate reconstructions robust?, Geophys. Res. Lett., 32, L23711, doi:10.1029/2005GL024155.) I'd say the whole "Cry Polar Bears are drowning" schtick to be Yet Another Fake Panic.

Therefore, hence, or in conclusion: I call bullshit.

Of course this message has been brought to you by Exxon Mobil, the Bush Administration, the Republican Party, the Freemasons, the Illuminati and all stations to Satan.

A word to the wise: if you read realclimate.org, you owe it to yourself to also read climateaudit.org. The discussions at realclimate.org don't include some of the more prominent critics of their work because realclimate.org silently deletes their postings. A lot of what the folks at climate.org publish doesn't hold up very well to close scrutiny. They tend to hide their data and methods from researchers who want to reproduce their results, which is never a good sign. Many of their statistical methods are highly questionable. And their results are a good deal less robust than they make them out to be.

One of the actions of the US that is declared "anti-science" is the refusal to ratify Kyoto. I find that very strange since one of the lead scientists doesn't agree with kyoto. Lindzen's senate testimony is an extremely disturbing look into how politics shape science. Couple that with the bad data found in the Mann report and it's enough to make anyone doubt good science is being done.

At the end of the day, the US isn't anti-science it's a system that has been built around science in much of the developed world that doesn't promote enough skeptisism or honesty. Peer review in some circles just means you belong to the right clique, with the right point of view. Put that together with funding that often comes from political circles filled with "true believers" and you have a recipie for disaster.

Lindzen's quote "There is a certain charm when politicians are so certain of the science when the scientists are not" seems rather apt.

cluge

First I might recommend you look outside one source, the IPCC, for your data. You may poo poo those that have problems with their data, but by looking at only one source you bias your data, and your interpretation of the situation.

Regardless of anything else, I doubt the International Panel on Climate Change is going to release a report that says "Yup, everything is fine, nothing to worry about, you can start cutting our funding at any time." I'm not saying they are completely wrong, I'm simply saying they have a dog in this fight, and you can find plenty of reputable climatologist that take issue with them, a few months ago one resigned over his data that he felt they were misrepresenting. There have been other resignations, less formal than that.

Regardless, I'm not going to sit here and point for point you at 4:30 AM. I will say this though.

Figure 1 and 2: Second is the (in)famous Mann graph. Much disputed. There's lots to say about it, all of which you can easily find yourself. You may start at http://www.climateaudit.org/ Suffice to say. I might ask where in the second graph are the Medieval warm period and the Little Ice age. You are aware that at least one data set in the graph was derived from a single tree.

Figure 3 and 4: I think you might have posted the wrong link. None of those graphs are about radiative emissions. They are about greenhouse gas atmospheric concentrations, using leading graphs with scales that accentuate current increases.

Effect from volcanic eruptions that last only a few years are from aerosols. These are the same people (IPCC) that say that CO2 last for centuries in the atmosphere (I won't argue that at all), Volcanoes spew CO2, why does it not persist in the atmosphere like Man made CO2?, and how can they tell the difference from Volcanic and man made CO2?

The aerosol effect is a separate issue, there is little argument to be had there. Large volcano, lowered global temperatures. We have data on enough eruptions to show cause and effect. And yes the -aerosol- effect is limited to a few years. But that is not what I was talking about, I was talking about natural emissions of CO2.

Everything in your post is wrong - see www.climateaudit.org . Also peer review is no substitute for replication and full data and analysis audits, which is what McIntyre and McKitrick did. The other studies derive their conclusions from the same faulty series as Mann.

The issue is PCA, not averaging as you state. Mann now claims that the essential data for his conclusions is in the 4th PC:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?m=200412

"Robustness:
If 2 PCs are used in the AD1400 North American network along with conventional (centered) PC calculations, we argued in our Nature submissions that MM-type results are obtained. This is now effectively acknowledged by MBH. To try to salvage MBH98, they now argue that they should be entitled to increase the number of PCs in the AD1400 North American network from 2 to 5 and that our not doing so is "incorrect". They point out that, using centered PC methods, the PC4 (instead of the PC1) has a hockey stick shape (from the bristlecone pines) and, as long as they can use the PC4, the PC4 now drives world climate history. Doesn't this just seem silly? Now we're not dealing with a "dominant" pattern of world climate, but a PC4.)"

I'm not astroturfing. I have no connection with the energy industry or the researchers. I just enjoy exposing and correcting bullshit such as yours.

From http://www.climateaudit.org/?m=200501

Our article "Hockey Sticks, Principal Components and Spurious Significance" has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, copyright 2005 American Geophysical Union (doi: 2004GL012750). A pre-publication version is at http://www.climate2003.com/pdfs/2004GL012750.pdf. Further reproduction or electronic distribution is not permitted.

Our article "The M&M Critique of the MBH98 Northern Hemisphere Climate index: Update and Implications" has been accepted for publication by Energy & Environment and is available at http://www.multi-science.co.uk/mcintyre-mckitrick. pdf.

Our research shows fundamental flaws in the "hockey stick graph" used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to argue that the 1990s were the warmest decade of the millennium. The original hockey stick study was published by Michael Mann of the University of Virginia and his coauthors Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes. The main error affects a step called principal component analysis (PCA). We showed that the PCA method as used by Mann et al. effectively mines a data set for hockey stick patterns. Even from meaningless random data (red noise), it nearly always produces a hockey stick.

This "backgrounder" provides a road map and summary of the 3 articles. While these papers have been under review, Mann et al. have opened up their own weblog realclimate.org and criticized some of our earlier work. We include some comments here on this commentary and some FAQ.

I submitted this same story on June 28th and it was rejected. Why did we have to wait for the Washington Times to notice it?

Now nearly a full month later, Slashdot gets to hear about it.

For those interested, the meat of the story can be found on Steve McIntyre's weblog where you can find Steve is patiently going through the code and finding that Mann Bradley and Hughes have not told the truth about their paper.

Cmdr Taco - I recommend a new slogan:

"Slashdot - Old news for nerds. Stuff that doesn't matter anymore"

I went here: http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=274#more-274/
and followed some links and read some papers (well skimmed).
My understanding is that there is data missing, data that might go against the idea of global warming (something about R2....).

I've done some skimming too, and essentially the issue seems to revolve around how proxy data was used to infer temperatures - so for instance, how tree ring data was converted to temperature data. The issue with "R2" (which actually looks like its r^2 - the correlation coefficient squared) is how you measure correlation of generated data with actual measurements (you want to make sure your method correlates well with reality).

HTH.

Jedidiah.

I went here: http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=274#more-274/
and followed some links and read some papers (well skimmed).
My understanding is that there is data missing, data that might go against the idea of global warming (something about R2....).

I would imagine that if there is a call on his tax records and financial records and such that maybe what is being looked for is if he took any pay in exchange for making the data work out like it did.

I think it raises an interesting question.
If he produced these results for a private entity with private money I would say that his finances are his business.
But he used public money to produce the data for public use. I want to know if MY DATA can be trusted.

Actually, part of the interest by Congress is in results from federally funded studies, so part of the interest is from its own funding.

• The Congressional letters are available in PDF format.
• The replies from some people are available.
• The scientists explained some things, but it seems odd that the source code does not match the data, so the program can not simply be run as is.
• Although the program calculated R2 statistics they were not published along with an explanation of why they were not important so others would learn from their wisdom.
• The Barton questions about statistics were not answered.

Actually, part of the interest by Congress is in results from federally funded studies, so part of the interest is from its own funding.

• The Congressional letters are available in PDF format.
• The replies from some people are available.
• The scientists explained some things, but it seems odd that the source code does not match the data, so the program can not simply be run as is.
• Although the program calculated R2 statistics they were not published along with an explanation of why they were not important so others would learn from their wisdom.
• The Barton questions about statistics were not answered.

Actually, part of the interest by Congress is in results from federally funded studies, so part of the interest is from its own funding.

• The Congressional letters are available in PDF format.
• The replies from some people are available.
• The scientists explained some things, but it seems odd that the source code does not match the data, so the program can not simply be run as is.
• Although the program calculated R2 statistics they were not published along with an explanation of why they were not important so others would learn from their wisdom.
• The Barton questions about statistics were not answered.

Actually, part of the interest by Congress is in results from federally funded studies, so part of the interest is from its own funding.

• The Congressional letters are available in PDF format.
• The replies from some people are available.
• The scientists explained some things, but it seems odd that the source code does not match the data, so the program can not simply be run as is.
• Although the program calculated R2 statistics they were not published along with an explanation of why they were not important so others would learn from their wisdom.
• The Barton questions about statistics were not answered.

The belief in AGW rests on two pillars: Historic Temperature reconstruction and computer models of climate(even these two things are not independent of each other...many of the latter are baselined by the former). Temperarture reconstruction are mainly done through proxies(tree rings, ice cores...etc). They rely on heavily on statistical tools to merge all avaiable data and pretty much does an extropolation on extrapolated data. How accurate can this be? Not sure since there hasn't been any fund to see if proxies match up with recent instrumental data Link.

As for the computer models...water vapor is considered the primary AGW gas by far and we cannot even come close to properly modelling it. So how accurate can these models be?

Actually, part of the interest by Congress is in results from federally funded studies, so part of the interest is from its own funding.

• The Congressional letters are available in PDF format.
• The replies from some people are available.
• The scientists explained some things, but it seems odd that the source code does not match the data, so the program can not simply be run as is.
• Although the program calculated R2 statistics they were not published along with an explanation of why they were not important so others would learn from their wisdom.
• The Barton questions about statistics were not answered.

Actually, part of the interest by Congress is in results from federally funded studies, so part of the interest is from its own funding.

• The Congressional letters are available in PDF format.
• The replies from some people are available.
• The scientists explained some things, but it seems odd that the source code does not match the data, so the program can not simply be run as is.
• Although the program calculated R2 statistics they were not published along with an explanation of why they were not important so others would learn from their wisdom.
• The Barton questions about statistics were not answered.

Actually, part of the interest by Congress is in results from federally funded studies, so part of the interest is from its own funding.

• The Congressional letters are available in PDF format.
• The replies from some people are available.
• The scientists explained some things, but it seems odd that the source code does not match the data, so the program can not simply be run as is.
• Although the program calculated R2 statistics they were not published along with an explanation of why they were not important so others would learn from their wisdom.
• The Barton questions about statistics were not answered.

Actually, part of the interest by Congress is in results from federally funded studies, so part of the interest is from its own funding.

• The Congressional letters are available in PDF format.
• The replies from some people are available.
• The scientists explained some things, but it seems odd that the source code does not match the data, so the program can not simply be run as is.
• Although the program calculated R2 statistics they were not published along with an explanation of why they were not important so others would learn from their wisdom.
• The Barton questions about statistics were not answered.