Catholicism and Climate Change

[kimmielittle]

Actually they have renamed it again. Change might have been seen to be positive. Like that hope stuff. Anyone now it is “Global Climate Disruption” green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/a-rebranding-for-global-warming/

Oh My…

Maybe, Mr Holden knows his tenure as Energy Czar is completely dependent upon on Mr Obamas’ term in office?

Since, anything can be disruptive even good things ] to a flow and harder yet to define - Maybe, he intends to be the Czar in charge of the Disruption-Troopers ?

 

[JasonSB]

When Trenberth made his statement on hurricanes it was not supported by the science (whether it is or is not supported now is irrelevant); Landsea pointed this out in no uncertain terms to the IPCC and was ignored.

Hang on – I actually went digging to see what you’re talking about, and Landsea wasn’t even talking about the IPCC reports!

Here’s his open letter where he explains what he was objecting to: climatechangefacts.info/ClimateChangeDocuments/LandseaResignationLetterFromIPCC.htm

He wasn’t happy that Trenberth presented a personal opinion during a press conference that Landsea didn’t think was supported by the science and he wasn’t happy that the IPCC leadership responded to his concerns by noting that Trenberth was speaking as an individual and that the IPCC could not control what scientists say. He was worried that Trenberth’s public statements would make it difficult for the IPCC process to proceed objectively, not that the IPCC had failed to proceed objectively – indeed, his statement was two years before the fourth assessment was released!

So how can you present his claim about what might go wrong as evidence that the report released two years later was actually false, and then use that as the basis for a claim that the theory of AGW is “rather reliant” on false claims??? It seems to me that your objections to AGW are the ones “rather reliant” on false claims.

The problem with the IPCC and the entire AGW community has been its disingenuousness, not all of which falls on CRU or the IPCC but they all suffer from the same fault: they behave like advocacy groups, not merely scientific ones.

Since when have scientists not been allowed to tell people what they know? I note that anti-AGW “scientists” go around advocating their pet theories like crazy. If the people we pay to be experts in the field aren’t allowed to advocate the theories that their work has led them to accept, then that would leave an enormous vacuum on one side and waste the effort put in to make them experts.

If I’m paying for research to be done, I want to know what the research uncovered, and if the public is being misled about the truth because of ideas of “false balance” in the media and because vested interests are spending millions of dollars on disinformation campaings then I expect scientists to be loud and vocal about the facts.

The difference between scientists and non-science advocacy groups is that the former have formed their opinion based on the evidence at hand and they will change their mind as new evidence emerges – the latter are specifically being paid not to. As Stephen Schneider said in the talk I mentioned earlier, as soon as he discovered an earlier paper he wrote was wrong, he was the first to publish a correction, and he was very proud of that fact – you don’t want to be shown to be wrong by someone else.

If AGW is correct then why do its advocates find it so necessary to resort to less-than-scientific and less-than-ethical means to make their case?

I find it completely astonishing that you can portray the scientific literature, statements of position by various scientific organisations, and the IPCC reports in that way. One side has thousands upon thousands of independent publications of independent research that all clearly lines up on one side of the argument and a large percentage of the public doesn’t realise this.

I also find it completely astonishing that you fail to recognise that the exact same question does spring to mind about the well-documented behaviour of the anti-AGW crowd. It never ceases to amaze me how often people use the exact same arguments that would obviously undermine their own position if they ever considered them for a second.

You have 13 years of emails from one of the research institutions and there is not one mention anywhere in there of scientists openly soliciting and accepting funds to promote a particular viewpoint – yet there is on the other side. There is no hint of an organised campaign of disinformation – yet there is on the other side. There are no memos to governments seeking the removal of “unfriendly” scientists – yet there is on the other side. What gives?

The IPCC has written into their summaries conclusions not supported by the science in the body of their own reports;

Still waiting for examples.

CRU has obviously tried not just to stonewall their critics but to obstruct the efforts of “denialists” to get out competing opinions;

Correction: CRU tried to have bad papers that should not have passed peer-review ignored by the IPCC reports – and failed. So much for “power” and “corruption”.

the media and environmental extremist groups (admittedly, a redundant description) have resorted to the wildest speculations and exaggerations all to the same end:

Again, an astonishing view of reality. I see countless examples of “fair and balanced” reporting that are anything but. Even the IPCC itself can be accused of playing down what the scientific literature actually says with proof – and this isn’t even surprising, because what makes it into the final report has to be approved by representatives from all participating governments, including the US, China, Russia, India, and Saudi Arabia.

How it can somehow still be labelled “alarmist” boggles the mind.

to effect the acceptance of a scientific theory about which there is still considerable scientific debate.

Not for any reasonable interpretation of the phrases “scientific theory” and “scientific debate”. Listen to Schneider about fingerprinting.

 

[JasonSB]

To that end I have given out almost no information whatever about myself - because it shouldn’t matter.

In general I would agree, but you answered my question in a way inconsistent with my assessment based on your earlier comments (i.e. I wouldn’t have expected a programmer to be confused by the discussion surrounding the NOAA data, and I would have expected a programmer to find Harry’s diary unremarkable) so I was intrigued.

If I were to claim 20 years of system and application programming experience with one of the world’s best know computer companies, would it make a difference?

Actually, yes, that explains a lot. (My wife has a similar CV, so I’m familiar with the kind of work you’re likely used to, and it has nothing in common with scientific programming. I sometimes forget that the majority of programmers are actually more like you than like me.)

You’re not reading carefully. I understand how code is commented.

You characterised the post I linked to as “an obscenity laced file with comments purportedly from Linux programmers gathered by an anonymous poster?” (Emphasis mine.)

It was clearly described as the result of grepping the Linux source code, not “a file”, and you could eliminate the suspicion implicit in the words “purportedly” and “anonymous” by checking for yourself. I just did and got 1,708 occurrences of the word “hack”, 40 occurrences of the “f-word”, and so on, proving very quickly that the “anonymous poster” was correct.

Rather than simply accept the point that derogatory comments by a programmer in no way reflect on the accuracy and utility of the code, you instead chose to cast doubt on the fact that real, working code is in fact full of those kind of comments, wasting both of our times yet again.

I don’t think understanding what was actually being done is all that difficult and while my comment may be a cliche it is nonetheless also a truism: no program can improve the accuracy of the data fed into it.

Only if you firstly mischaracterise the (name removed by moderator)ut as “garbage”. My cliche, sorting the wheat from the chaff, was far more accurate. Surely you don’t doubt that the raw temperature record actually has information in it, do you?

Here is what the 1999 Hansen paper actually says about the process used to detect errors in the raw data:
hansen1999:

A first quality check was to flag all monthly data that differed more than five standard deviations (5s) from the long-term mean for that month, unless one of the nearest five neighboring stations had an anomaly of the same sign for the same month that was at least half as large. Data were also flagged if the record had a jump discontinuity, specifically if the means for two 10 year periods differed by more than 3s. A third flag was designed to catch clumps of bad data that occasionally occur, usually at the beginning of a record; …]

All flagged data were graphically displayed along with neighboring stations that contained
data during the period in question, and a subjective decision was made as to whether the apparent discontinuity was flawed data or a potentially real climate anomaly. The philosophy was that if the data were not quite obviously flawed, it was retained. Only a very small portion of the original data was deleted: approximately 20 station records were deleted entirely, in approximately 90 cases the early part of the record was deleted, in five cases a segment of 2-10 years was deleted from the record, and approximately 20 individual station months were deleted.

We also modified the records of two stations that had obvious discontinuities. …] The St. Helena station, based on metadata provided with MCDW records, was moved from 604 m to 436 m elevation between August 1976 and September 1976. Therefore assuming a lapse rate of about 6°C/km, we added 1°C to the St. Helena temperatures before September 1976. Lihue had an apparent discontinuity in its temperature record around 1950. On the basis of minimization of the discrepancy with its few neighboring stations, we added 0.8°C to Lihue temperatures prior to 1950.

The impact of our data deletions and alterations is small compared with the climate changes discussed in this paper. The largest effects are those due to the changes on St. Helena and to a lesser extent Hawaii. Nevertheless, we wish to continue to clean and improve the basic station data, if problems or improvements can be identified. In section 10 we describe easy access to all of our station data via the world wide web. We would welcome feedback from users on any specific data in this record.

So they used simple algorithms to identify suspicious data, and then went and checked all the detected suspicious data by hand and verified it didn’t have much impact on the final result and made their data available (back in 1999!).

That’s the kind of work you choose to characterise as “garbage in, garbage out”.

Finally, your claim “no program can improve the accuracy of the data fed into it” is obviously false and displays a lack of familiarity with standard methods of treating both systematic and random error. As a trivial example, consider the GPS system – its raw accuracy is only about 10 m (~30 feet), limited by fluctuations in signal propagation time through a turbulent atmosphere. Yet you can buy survey-grade GPS systems accurate to 20 mm (less than an inch), and monitoring systems with submillimetre accuracy (better than 0.04 inches). All of those systems take in, as raw data, the same GPS signal that your car navigation system uses, and all of them improve the accuracy of the data fed into them using straightforward techniques to reduce both the systematic error and the random error.

This is common in scientific computing.

 

[JasonSB]

If the programmer working with the data expressed concerns over it then we are certainly justified in expressing similar opinions.

Only if you understand what his concerns actually were, and realised that there are actually fairly straightforward methods for dealing with them.

And they must have been dealt with adequately because the results are easily verified to be correct. Why express concern about the results when they have already been shown to be completely consistent with such a wide range of other results, produced by different people, using different techniques, and even different data sets? Standing around saying “Gee, I don’t know, it seems a bit suspicious to me” rather than actually investigating so you do know is disingenous, at best.

 

[JasonSB]

Just a thought:

How much more morally convicted does it seem a person is, that practices good stewardship without believing in an unproven hypothesis or some modeled graph saying it’s warmer?

Doesn’t it seem, that their efforts are independent of a temperture gauge?

Doesn’t it seem they do these acts out of love - not because someone instilled a fear into them?

That’s actually a very good point to make – I’ve often thought that an atheist who behaves morally deserves more credit than someone who is absolutely convinced they will go to hell if they don’t.

So the fact that you seem to act in a way consistent with the actions required to mitigate the effects of AGW is worthy.

The problem, to my mind, is that by presenting yourself as an expert who has researched the matters a great deal and found the theory wanting, you have the potential to convince far more people that it’s OK to not act in the same way, doing far more damage than your positive actions could ever hope to achieve. I can see that your research and your understanding are inadequate, but others may not, and may actually believe you.

At the end of the day, it’s better for people to be fully informed and make decisions based on the best information available; if that means they then act out of fear, well, so be it. It’s better for them to act out of fear if the situation warrants it than to mislead them about the reality of the situation and hope that they’ll do what is necessary in spite of what they believe so they get a chance to earn extra Brownie points.

 

[kimmielittle]

On Peer-review;

Note: It doesn’t matter if they succeeded or not - They admittedly tried

            **Andrew Bolt**

     Sunday,  November 22, 2009 at 12:02am       
       
 
 
               This time we’ll focus on the sheer thuggery of the “The Team” -  how this conspiracy of powerful alarmist scientists tried to drive  sceptics and non-allies out of their jobs, and even succeeded.

Here’s three examples:
Example one is the email from Tom Wigley to IPCC author Timothy Carter about the Climate Research journal, then edited by sceptic Chris de FreitasS Re CR, I do not know the best way to handle the specifics of the editoring. Hans von Storch is partly to blame—he encourages the publication of **** science ‘in order to stimulate debate’. One approach is to go direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their journal is perceived as being a medium for disseminating misinformation under the guise of refereed work. I use the word ‘perceived’ here, since** whether it is true or not is not what the publishers care about **-- it is how the journal is seen by the community that counts.I think we could get a large group of highly credentialed scientists to sign such a letter—50+ people.Note that I am copying this view only to Mike Hulme and Phil Jones. Mike’s idea to get editorial board members to resign will probably not work—must get rid of von Storch too, otherwise holes will eventually fill up with people like Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Michaels, Singer, etc. I have heard that the publishers are not happy with von Storch, so the above approach might remove that hurdle too.
Further emails from the team in its successful pursuit of de Freitas’ scalp:*#1047388489
This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think? *
*#1047390562
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… *
*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 ! *
*#1051156418 *
*This second case gets to the crux of the matter. I suspect that deFreitas deliberately chose other referees who are members of the skeptics camp. I also suspect that he has done this on other occasions. How to deal with this is unclear, since there are a number of individuals with bona fide scientific credentials who could be used by an unscrupulous editor to ensure that ‘anti-greenhouse’ science can get through the peer review process (Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Baliunas, Soon, and so on)…. *
Example two is the blocking of papers by sceptics and the less-alarmed to the IPCC deliberations:*1089318616.txt *
Phil
To: “Michael
Subject: HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL
Date: Thu Jul 8 16:30:16 2004 *
Mike, *
[personal and extraneous chat snipped] *
The other paper by MM is just garbage – as you knew. De Freitas again. Pielke is also losing all credibility as well by replying to the mad Finn as well – frequently as I see it. *
I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !
Cheers
Phil
Example three is the driving out of Professor James Saiers as editor of the Geophysical Research Letters journal, which under him had published a sceptical paper by sceptics Sallie Baliunas and Wille Soon.
Here’s Tom Wigley to Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann:*1106322460 txt *
Proving bad behavior here is very difficult. If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted.
Mann writes: *
Hi Malcolm, *
*[snip] *
*I’m not sure that GRL can be seen as an honest broker in these debates anymore, and it is probably best to do an end run around GRL now where possible. They have published far too many deeply flawed contrarian papers in the past year or so. There is no possible excuse for them publishing all 3 Douglass papers and the Soon et al paper. These were all pure ****. *
*There appears to be a more fundamental problem w/ GRL now, unfortunately… *
Mike

continued

 

[kimmielittle]

Continued

Mann again: *Thanks Tom, *
*Yeah, basically this is just a heads up to people that something might be up here. What a shame that would be. It’s one thing to lose “Climate Research”. We can’t afford to lose GRL. I think it would be useful if people begin to record their experiences w/ both Saiers and potentially Mackwell (I don’t know him–he would seem to be complicit w/what is going on here). *
*If there is a clear body of evidence that something is amiss, it could be taken through the proper channels. I don’t that the entire AGU hierarchy has yet been compromised! *
*[snip] *
mike
Mann again: *Dear All, *
*Just a heads up. Apparently, the contrarians now have an “in” with GRL. This guy Saiers has a prior connection w/ the University of Virginia Dept. of Environmental Sciences that causes m some unease. *
*I think we now know how the various Douglass et al papers w/ Michaels and Singer, the Soon et al paper, and now this one have gotten published in GRL, *
Mike
Saiers was soon gone.

From Mr Bolts Blog blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/the_global_warming_conspiracy_its_silencing_of_the_sceptics/

 

[JasonSB]

Go to f: coast.gkss.de/staff/storch/pdf/GKSS_2010_9.CLISCI.pdf

This is a survey done on climate scientists around the world. Over 300 participated. From the survey results, the following figures can be pulled out -

Oh, come now, a lot more than that can be pulled out. I’ll come to those shortly.

• Only 12% agree or strongly agree that data availability for climate change analysis is adequate. More than 21% disagree or strongly disagree.

I’m surprised that even 12% agree or strongly agree. Scientists always want more data. Put me in the strongly disagree – the way Bush mothballed that satellite was a travesty.

• Only 25% agree or strongly agree that “Data collection efforts are currently adequate,” while 16% disagree or strongly disagree.

Again, I’m surprised it’s that high. Put me in the disagree camp.

• Only 17.75% agree or strongly agree with the statement, “The state of theoretical understanding of climate change phenomena is adequate.” And equal percentage disagreed or strongly disagreed.

When’s the last time you read a scientific paper that ended “No further research is neccessary”? I’d be a “Disagree”, once again.

The others all sounded about right.

Now for the ones that, oddly, you seem to have overlooked:

• 86.53% agreed or strongly agreed that climate change is occuring now. 0.54% disagreed or strongly disagreed.
• 66.48% agreed or strongly agreed that most of recent or near future climate change is, or will be, a result of anthropogenic causes. 4.32% disagreed or strongly disagreed.
• 62.43% agreed or strongly agreed that climate change poses a very serious and dangerous threat to humanity. 5.22% disagreed or strongly disagreed.
• 68.29% thought that the potential for catastrophe in the next 50 years resulting from climate change if we do nothing to mitigate or adapt is high or very high. 4.88% thought it was low or very low.
• 60.11% agreed or strongly agreed that the potential impact of global climate change is one of the leading problems for eco-systems. 4.58% disagreed or strongly disagreed.
• 52.97% agreed or strongly agreed that the potential impact of global climate change is one of the leading problems for humanity in terms of social and economic issues. 4.59% disagreed or strongly disagreed.

(I followed your convention of only counting the two most extreme responses on the scale of 1 to 7, although it tends to make the figures look lower. For example, for the last question, 1 is “not at all” while 7 is “very much”, and only 1.35% said “not at all”. 77.29% gave a value of 5, 6, or 7, i.e. above the midpoint of the scale.)

I find it odd that you cherry-picked the questions with the predictable answers (scientists never say “oh, yes, we’ve got everything we need, thank you very much – please don’t give us any more funding”) and completely overlooked the really important ones.

Now go here for the [Global Warming Petition (Global Warming Petition Project), signed by 31487 American scientists, of whom 9029 have PhDs.

Oh, please; I’m surprised they couldn’t get more than 0.3% of all American scientists to agree, given that they include medicine, mechanical engineering, metallurgy, etc., in their list of “appropriate scientific fields”. You could mention that they got 39 climate scientists to sign, but I guess that wouldn’t sound as impressive and, besides, was already covered in my earlier post on the difference in credentials. skepticalscience.com/OISM-Petition-Project-intermediate.htm

Then head across to good old Wikipedia, where climate change dissenters even have their own page - [scientists who have made statements that conflict with the mainstream assessment of global warming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...tream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming)

Shhh… Don’t tell kimmielittle, she thinks Wikipedia is controlled by the AGW crowd.

Of course, that list is also covered by my earlier post on the difference in credentials. It was lists such as that that were used to identify “skeptical” scientists in the first place so that their credentials could be compared.

Meanwhile, despite the unsettled nature of the science, the pro-AGW brigade march on with their plans to tax carbon and use it as an income redistribution tool. On global scale. The Gren lobby has hijacked much of the debate and their position is extreme. They are economically regressive and socially progressive. Carbon is their excuse.

I really wish people would learn to separate the science from their favourite conspiracy theory so they could rationally judge the science on its merits. These repeated claims that “the science must be wrong because [X] will benefit from it” just cast doubts on the impartiality of your assessment of the science – like the way you somehow managed to overlook that just 5% of the scientists in the report you linked to thought that climate change did not pose a very serious and dangerous threat to humanity and thought the potential for catastrophe in the next 50 years was low or very low.

Seriously, if only 5% of firemen thought a fire did not pose a very serious and dangerous threat to your house, would you say “Well, that’s OK then”.

78.92% of the scientists in your report agree AGW poses a very serious and dangerous threat to humanity. 9.27% disagree. Your response is “the science isn’t settled and the debate has been highjacked”. Wow.

 

[kimmielittle]

The problem, to my mind, is that by presenting yourself as an expert

Can you please offer evidence of this statement?

who has researched the matters a great deal and found the theory wanting,

My research has led me to distrust the hypothesis offered - If it can’t be refuted it can not be proven by emerical scientific evidence, to be proven correct. There is no one to blame, in this - Except those in the AGW camp who wish us to take this hypothesis on faith - in them, and their abilities.

I must admit that the leaked emails did not help in my already mistrust in this hypothesis. You see I saw a problem with the accounting of such things as UH, Clouds, ENSO, PDO , Water vapor, Solar, and EM influences. Let alone the outrageous ties to such people / organizations as Stearn, WWF, GreenPeace, Marie Stopes, Hanson.

you have the potential to convince far more people that it’s OK to not act in the same way, doing far more damage than your positive actions could ever hope to achieve.

Again, I’ll as you to prove that the solutions offered by the IPCC mitigate 1C

At the end of the day, it’s better for people to be fully informed

EXACTLY - Both sides.

Not Peer-reviewed by the same authors.

This email from Phil Jones to Michael Mann is illuminating, because it appears to suggest among other things that Mann might have been in a position to review studies dealing with his own work (he produced the MBH paper Jones refers to. It also shows Jones is peer reviewing a paper criticizing the data produced by Jones’ CRU unit. If that’s not incestuous, I don’t know what is:
Filename: 1077829152.txt
From: Phil Jones To: “Michael E. Mann”
Subject: **** Papers
Date: Thu Feb 26 15:59:xxx xxxx xxxx
Mike,
Just agreed to review a paper for GRL – it is absolute rubbish. It is having a go at the CRU temperature data – not the latest vesion, but the one you used in MBH98 !! We added lots of data in for the region this person says has Urban Warming ! So easy review to do.
Sent Ben the Soon et al. paper and he wonders who reviews these sorts of things. Says GRL hasn’t a clue with editors or reviewers. By chance they seem to have got the right person with the one just received.
Can I ask you something in CONFIDENCE – don’t email around, especially not to Keith and Tim here. Have you reviewed any papers recently for Science that say that MBH98 and MJ03 have underestimated variability in the millennial record – from models or from some low-freq proxy data. Just a yes or no will do. Tim is reviewing them – I want to make sure he takes my comments on board, but he wants to be squeaky clean with discussing them with others. So forget this email when you reply.
Cheers
Phil

 

[JasonSB]

On Peer-review;

Note: It doesn’t matter if they succeeded or not - They admittedly tried

Yes, we’ve already gone over this. Scientists aren’t supposed to just sit around and ignore bad science, they’re supposed to make a big deal about it. Obviously you didn’t follow my advice before, so here it is again:

Download the Russell Report: cce-review.org/pdf/FINAL%20REPORT.pdf

Go to page 126.

Read what the editor of The Lancet has to say about the peer review process. Learn.

The point that they didn’t actually succeed is just to illustrate how the claims that they were subverting the process don’t even pass the sniff test. The IPCC referenced those papers. If anything, the stolen emails should bolster your opinion of the IPCC and yet, mysteriously, they don’t.

And I’m not surprised in the least that you read Bolt’s blog, given your demonstrated inability to assess source credibility reliably.

 

[kimmielittle]

Shhh… Don’t tell kimmielittle, she thinks Wikipedia is controlled by the AGW crowd.

You simply can’t get over yourself or making snide remarks, can you

1 That page is hardly complimentary, now is it? One only needs to go to the title - List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming ].

William Connelly

                                                                                        Lawrence Solomon: Wikipedia’s climate doctor
                                                          Posted:                          December 19, 2009, 2:53 AM                         by                         NP Editor                                                                          [lawrence solomon](http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/fullcomment/archive/tags/lawrence+solomon/default.aspx), [climate change](http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/fullcomment/archive/tags/climate+change/default.aspx), [Wikipedia](http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/fullcomment/archive/tags/Wikipedia/default.aspx)
                 
    [network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/White/Larryhdsml.jpg](http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/White/Larryhdsml.jpg)***How Wikipedia’s green doctor rewrote 5,428 climate articles ***

By Lawrence Solomon
T
he Climategate Emails describe how a small band of climatologists cooked the books to make the last century seem dangerously warm.

The emails also describe how the band plotted to rewrite history as well as science, particularly by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period that began around 1000 AD.

The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world — Wikipedia — in the wholesale rewriting of this history.

The Medieval Warm Period, which followed the meanness and cold of the Dark Ages, was a great time in human history — it allowed humans around the world to bask in a glorious warmth that vastly improved agriculture, increased life spans and otherwise bettered the human condition.

But the Medieval Warm Period was not so great for some humans in our own time — the same small band that believes the planet has now entered an unprecedented and dangerous warm period. As we now know from the Climategate Emails, this band saw the Medieval Warm Period as an enormous obstacle in their mission of spreading the word about global warming. If temperatures were warmer 1,000 years ago than today, the Climategate Emails explain in detail, their message that we now live in the warmest of all possible times would be undermined. As put by one band member, a Briton named Folland at the Hadley Centre, a Medieval Warm Period “dilutes the message rather significantly.”

Read more: network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/12/18/370719.aspx#ixzz10u9yFkfX

continued

 

[kimmielittle]

Continued

Even before the Climategate Emails came to light, the problem posed by the Medieval Warm Period to this band was known. “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period” read a pre-Climategate email, circa 1995, as attested to at hearings of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works. But the Climategate transcripts were more extensive and more illuminating — they provided an unvarnished look at the struggles that the climate practitioners underwent before settling on their scientific dogma.

The Climategate Emails showed, for example, that some members of the band were uncomfortable with aspects of their work, some even questioning the need to erase the existence of the Medieval Warm Period 1,000 years earlier.

Said Briffa, one of their chief practitioners: “I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. … I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.”

In the end, Briffa and other members of the band overcame their doubts and settled on their dogma. With the help of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the highest climate change authority of all, they published what became the icon of their movement — the hockey stick graph. This icon showed temperatures in the last 1,000 years to have been stable — no Medieval Warm Period, not even the Little Ice Age of a few centuries ago.

But the UN’s official verdict that the Medieval Warm Period had not existed did not erase the countless schoolbooks, encyclopedias, and other scholarly sources that claimed it had. Rewriting those would take decades, time that the band members didn’t have if they were to save the globe from warming.

Instead, the band members turned to their friends in the media and to the blogosphere, creating a website called RealClimate.org. “The idea is that we working climate scientists should have a place where we can mount a rapid response to supposedly ‘bombshell’ papers that are doing the rounds” in aid of “combating dis-information,” one email explained, referring to criticisms of the hockey stick and anything else suggesting that temperatures today were not the hottest in recorded time. One person in the nine-member Realclimate.org team — U.K. scientist and Green Party activist William Connolley — would take on particularly crucial duties.

Connolley took control of all things climate in the most used information source the world has ever known – Wikipedia. Starting in February 2003, just when opposition to the claims of the band members were beginning to gel, Connolley set to work on the Wikipedia site. He rewrote Wikipedia’s articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling. On Feb. 14, he began to erase the Little Ice Age; on Aug.11, the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned his attention to the hockey stick graph. He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band. Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world’s most distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets, followed by others that the band especially hated, such as Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, authorities on the Medieval Warm Period.

All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.

The Medieval Warm Period disappeared, as did criticism of the global warming orthodoxy. With the release of the Climategate Emails, the disappearing trick has been exposed. The glorious Medieval Warm Period will remain in the history books, perhaps with an asterisk to describe how a band of zealots once tried to make it disappear.

Financial Post
LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com
Normal 0 0 1 32 184 1 1 225 11.512 0 0 0

Read more: network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/12/18/370719.aspx#ixzz10uBILc5Q

 

[kimmielittle]

The point that they didn’t actually succeed is just to illustrate how the claims that they were subverting the process don’t even pass the sniff test. The IPCC referenced those papers. If anything, the stolen emails should bolster your opinion of the IPCC and yet, mysteriously, they don’t.

It wasn’t because they weren’t trying every underhanded trick

From Phil Jones (forging of dates):
Gene/Caspar, Good to see these two out. Wahl/Ammann doesn’t appear to be in CC’s online first, but comes up if you search. You likely know that McIntyre will check this one to make sure it hasn’t changed since the IPCC close-off date July 2006! Hard copies of the WG1 report from CUP have arrived here today. Ammann/Wahl - try and change the Received date! Don’t give those skeptics something to amuse themselves with.

---

 

[JasonSB]

Can you please offer evidence of this statement?

Are you serious? You repeatedly make statements of “fact” that uninformed readers would assume are facts being presented by an informed person simply because of the way in which you present them. For example, “I will use IPCC’s own numbers. Which support man is the ONLY Driver of climate - a premise we know to be a lie.” A premise, of course, that is a lie, because the IPCC clearly does not say that man is the only driver of climate, but the casual reader would assume that it was the IPCC that is lying and not you. And then, of course, you proceeded to not use IPCC numbers – in fact, the source of that particular argument from never even mentioned the IPCC at all.

You don’t say “I don’t really understand what this means, but this site I found says …”, when that’s clearly the case, because not only are the statements verbatim copies from postings by well-known “skeptics”, but the “facts” are anything but and what “we know”, you don’t.

Contrast the typical tone of your own posts with the following by me when Ender raised a question that I didn’t feel adequately qualified to present an informed opinion on at the time:

JasonSB:

I am not sufficiently qualified in the field to judge whether Landsea is right about the IPCC report in relation to tropical cyclones or not, but RealClimate has a pretty detailed update on the current state of knowledge that Landsea is acknowledged for feedback on: …]

Was his objection that the use of the word “likely” was unjustified on the evidence at the time? How does that falsify AGW?

If I speak authoritatively on something then it means I am willing to be judged by what I say. If I am unsure then I alert the reader to that fact so they don’t assign more weight to my opinions than I feel is warranted. I expect others to do the same.

My research has led me to distrust the hypothesis offered - If it can’t be refuted it can not be proven by emerical scientific evidence, to be proven correct. There is no one to blame, in this - Except those in the AGW camp who wish us to take this hypothesis on faith - in them, and their abilities.

Then I’m afraid your understanding of science is lacking.

Firstly, no scientific theory can be “proved by empirical scientific evidence” – only disproved, and even then, it is very unlikely to actually be disproved in the way that you think. To quote Isacc Asimov on “The Relativity of Wrong”: “when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.” (chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm) Science is always “wrong”, but it gets less “wrong” over time, and it’s a mistake to think that any day now AGW could be proved false (and an even bigger mistake to think it could be proved true) and we’d go back to the drawing board – as new work is done, it gets added to the theory, improving the theory’s accuracy.

So when the IPCC forecasts temperature change for the next 90 years, there is a considerable range of uncertainty. As more research is done, that range of uncertainty should narrow. It is highly unlikely that the range will change completely.

Secondly, there are many fields of science where empirical scientific evidence is only a small part. Climate Science is a systems science (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_science) – the theory is the result of thousands of independent lines of evidence leading to a particular conclusion. No single experiment and no single observation will disprove AGW – an unexpected result would need to be investigated, assessed, replicated, and integrated into the existing body of knowledge. This is nobody’s fault, it’s a fact of life, and complaining about it doesn’t change anything. To suggest that this somehow means you shouldn’t act is like suggesting that you shouldn’t look both ways before crossing the street until someone can prove that you’ll get hit by a car if you don’t.

The video by Stephen Schneider I linked to recently covers this very well. Again, I strongly urge you to find a way to get access to YouTube so you can hear it straight from the horse’s mouth.

I must admit that the leaked emails did not help in my already mistrust in this hypothesis. You see I saw a problem with the accounting of such things as UH, Clouds, ENSO, PDO , Water vapor, Solar, and EM influences. Let alone the outrageous ties to such people / organizations as Stearn, WWF, GreenPeace, Marie Stopes, Hanson.

Well, as long as you think in terms of “outrageous ties” in the first place – let alone with highly respected scientists like Hanson – I hold little hope for change.

 

[kimmielittle]

The problem, to my mind, is that by presenting yourself as an expert

Actually, the “*problem” *as I see it - is that you can’t convince an inexpert kid on the validity or honesty behind the AGW’ers hypothesis. This is not your fault - you have tried to excuse every act done by this AGW camp.

Your problem, lies not with me, or other thinking members of the public.

It is death by their own hands you need to contend with.

It is their individual acts / choices made…that undermine their credibility. No one else.

To my mind, nothing underhanded or as you excuse as being rude ] would need to be done, by these Scientists - If there was no fear in their “Science”.

 

[JasonSB]

Again, I’ll as you to prove that the solutions offered by the IPCC mitigate 1C

Is there any point? What was the outcome of my demonstration to you of how Gavin’s climate model worked and why the whole “2 x lambda” claim and assertions that there was somehow a connection between that model and the Apollo moon landings were ludicrous? I didn’t notice you asking any more questions but I also didn’t notice you accepting that those claims were ridiculous and that your source could not be trusted.

How about this instead: when I talked about how Pat Michaels admitted getting 40% of his funding from the fossil fuel industry, you said: “C’mon he’s a circuit lecturer.”

I take that response to mean that you do not rate him highly. And, given your stance on “outrageous ties”, how could you? Clearly to trust him after we saw how he asked for and received funding from vested interests after telling them why they should fund him would be a blatant double standard.

And yet he’s the source for your belief in the futility of action to prevent climate change: worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2009/04/30/what-you-cant-do-about-global-warming/

Even worse, his stated position is that AGW is real, the world is warming, man has something to do with it, and you shouldn’t deny the obvious facts because then you will discredit them all – but what he thinks we should do is just wait until all the oil runs out and hope we invent some cool new technology to save our bacon in the meantime. That’s the message that the funding from vested interests is paying for, and that’s precisely the message that you’re spreading by copying-and-pasting his work.

EXACTLY - Both sides.

You can’t count, can you? So far I’ve seen:

1. The scientific opinion supported by the overwhelming majority of scientists with relevant credentials, as helpfully demonstrated (yet again) by the paper John21652 linked to a few posts back.
2. The theory that the world isn’t really warming, it’s all UHI, “suspicious adjustments”, and “discredited” hockey sticks.
3. The theory that it was warming for a little while, but it’s all part of natural variability and has been cooling/flat since 1998/1999/insert favourite period.
4. The theory that it is warming, but it’s not our fault (the sun is commonly blamed, despite direct measurements of irradiance debunking this theory. The fact that Mars shows some signs of warming without any SUVs is a favourite observation; the fact that most other bodies in the solar system do not is ignored. The fact that even if the sun was responsible, the physical theory of greenhouse gases hasn’t been disproved and we should try even harder to not add to the problem seemingly never occurs to them).
5. The theory that it is warming, and it is our fault, but it’s too expensive to do anything about it or anything we could reasonably do would be ineffective so we’d be better off putting all our resources into adaptation rather than mitigation.
6. The theory that it is warming, it is man, but it’s good because CO2 is plant food!

I’ve probably missed a few others. Oh, yes – your favourite one about black bodies. Not sure where to put that in there.

Interestingly, those who subscribe to all except the first theory often seem to subscribe to more than one of them at once, which is an impressive display of mental gymnastics.

Unfortunately, presenting BOTH SIDES to the public, pitting the overwhelming majority of people qualified to make an informed opinion on one side against a handful of scientists who all believe different things on the other is hardly informative.

And claiming that you have “scientists” on your side, when you don’t agree with what those scientists actually claim – and, indeed, when they don’t agree with each other – is dishonest.

Not Peer-reviewed by the same authors.

Oh, dear – if you think that’s bad, wait to you learn how comments are handled!

Seriously, reviewers don’t determine what is published, editors do. You obviously haven’t read the article on peer review yet. The editor will assess the reviewer’s comments taking into account any obvious conflict of interest the reviewer has. It would actually be common for a paper critical of someone’s work to be reviewed by the person it is critical of, because they’re most likely to find any flaws in the paper. It’s still up to the editor to accept it.

 

[kimmielittle]

Well, as long as you think in terms of “outrageous ties” in the first place – let alone with highly respected scientists like Hanson – I hold little hope for change.

Before we get too worried about NASA’s latest stamping-its-little-feet claims that the world is getting hotter it is it is it IS, let us first remind ourselves why we should trust their temperature records slightly less far than we can spit.
Then let’s have a closer look at the character and motives of the man in charge of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), Dr James Hansen. Last year, he was described by his former course supervisor at NASA, Dr John Theon, as an “activist” and an embarrassment.
Or as the Great Booker puts it:
If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)
Now reader Michael Potts has drawn my attention to yet further evidence of Dr Hansen’s radical, virulently anti-democratic instincts. He has lent his support to an eco-fascist book advising on ways to destroy western industrialisation through propaganda, guile and outright sabotage.
In a scary new book called Time’s Up – whose free online version titled A Matter Of Scale you can read here – author Keith Farnish claims:
The only way to prevent global ecological collapse and thus ensure the survival of humanity is to rid the world of Industrial Civilization.
Like so many deep greens, Farnish looks forward to the End Times with pornographic relish (masquerading as mild reasonableness):
I’m rarely afraid of stating the truth, but some truths are far harder to give than others; one of them is that people will die in huge numbers when civilization collapses. Step outside of civilization and you stand a pretty good chance of surviving the inevitable; stay inside and when the crash happens there may be nothing at all you can do to save yourself. The speed and intensity of the crash will depend an awful lot on the number of people who are caught up in it: greater numbers of people have more structural needs – such as food production, power generation and healthcare – which need to be provided by the collapsing civilization; greater numbers of people create more social tension and more opportunity for extremism and violence; greater numbers of people create more sewage, more waste, more bodies – all of which cause further illness and death.
He believes – as the Hon Sir Jonathon Porritt does – that mankind is a blot on the landscape and that breeding (or for that matter, existence) should be discouraged:
In short, the greatest immediate risk to the population living in the conditions created by Industrial Civilization is the population itself. Civilization has created the perfect conditions for a terrible tragedy on the kind of scale never seen before in the history of humanity. That is one reason for there to be fewer people, providing you are planning on staying within civilization – I really wouldn’t recommend it, though.
Among his proposed solutions to this problem are wanton destruction:
Unloading essentially means the removal of an existing burden: for instance, removing grazing domesticated animals, razing cities to the ground, blowing up dams and switching off the greenhouse gas emissions machine. The process of ecological unloading is an accumulation of many of the things I have already explained in this chapter, along with an (almost certainly necessary) element of sabotage.
Needless to say, our friend Dr James Hansen thinks this book is the bees knees. Here is his puff on the Amazon website:

blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100023339/james-hansen-would-you-buy-a-used-temperature-data-set-from-this-man/

 

[kimmielittle]

Is there any point? What was the outcome of my demonstration to you of how Gavin’s climate model worked and why the whole “2 x lambda” claim and assertions that there was somehow a connection between that model and the Apollo moon landings were ludicrous? I didn’t notice you asking any more questions but I also didn’t notice you accepting that those claims were ridiculous and that your source could not be trusted.

My statement on lambda could have been figured out by a 10 year old… IMHO…Just what one of the different values is used? If you look at Gavins 2/lambda it seems that indeed he used 2X lambda

Surface: [tex] S + \lambda A = G[/tex]
Atmosphere: [tex]\lambda G = 2 \lambda A [/tex]
Planet: [tex]S = \lambda A + (1-\lambda) G[/tex]
The factor of two for A (the radiation emitted from the atmosphere) comes in because the atmosphere radiates both up and down. From those equations you can derive the surface temperature as a function of the incoming solar and the atmospheric emissivity as:

realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/04/learning-from-a-simple-model/

‘Moon Paper’ Exposes Climate Theory Fraud

What ignited this latest Climategate-linked rumpus is a sensational new research paper, ‘A Greenhouse Effect on the Moon?’ otherwise called the ‘Moon Paper.’
Researchers for the paper scientifically proved that since at least 1997 climate scientists knew that guesswork was underpinning the whole greenhouse gas theory. In fact, so flaky are these numbers that they can be rendered to show a GHG effect on Earth’s moon, where no greenhouse gases exist! Thus, skeptics argue, the burning embers of political heat generated by the discredited theory should now finally and unequivocally be extinguished.
But more sinisterly, it turns out that NASA climate scientists, with access to better climate equations used for the Apollo Moon mission, forsook those in favor of dodgy Dr. Schmidt’s ‘back of an envelope’ numbers.
With nothing short of religious fervour, government-funded climatologists, in cahoots with the IPCC, trumpeted this flim-flam to political leaders who now claim they can limit global warming to ‘two degrees’ on the back of green cap and trade energy taxes. Priceless!
Schmidt’s Fake Carbon Accounting

The ‘Moon Paper’ spectacularly reveals that Apollo mission scientists devised a three-dimensional model for accurately determining Earth’s energy budget far more practicable than the rudimentary flat blackbody numbers of Stefan-Boltzmann. But those numbers contradicted any greenhouse warming effect and have thus been ignored by global warming tax advocates.
In addition, it appears Siddons has uncovered intentional fraud, as explained in an earlier of his online publications, ‘The Greenhouse Hustle’ that reveals the almighty multiplication ‘error’ of NASA climatologist, Gavin Schmidt.
In 2007, Schmidt blogging on ‘Real Climate’ sought to explain how government climatologists obtain the “full surface energy balance equations” referred to by Dr. Judith Curry (below).
Schmidt’s ‘Up and Down’ Scam

Schmidt wrote that he and his colleagues took the Stefan-Boltzmann blackbody numbers and multiplied them by an additional factor of two to devise NASA’s official Earth energy budget. But why multiply by two? Schmidt explains:
“The factor of two for A (the radiation emitted from the atmosphere) comes in because the atmosphere radiates both up and down.”—Gavin Schmidt (Real Climate, April 10, 2007)
It is Schmidt’s lunatic “up and down” elaboration on Stefan-Boltzmann’s numbers that Siddons proves contradicts the laws of physics. Gases do not radiate “up and down”- their radiation is isotropic, meaning the intensity is equal in all directions-not just ‘up and down’ as Schmidt describes. Thus multiplying CO2 by a factor of two is at the very least junk science, or worse: criminal fraud.
Pointedly, Schmidt soon entered the dark side by appearing to cover up his gaffe. Within a month he snuffed out all debate by closing the comments thread on his heavily censored website.

**canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/23800
**

 

[kimmielittle]

Continued

Stefan-Boltzmann Blackbody Equations

Our junk science back story involves explaining how climate doomsayers misused the long-established Stefan-Boltzmann blackbody equation to invent the greenhouse gas theory of climate. The theory incorporates the two-dimensional flat body numbers to ‘calculate’ how much of the Sun’s energy enters and leaves the Earth’s atmosphere.
But the problem is Stefan-Boltzmann never intended for his numbers to be applied to a three-dimensional rotating planet.
Schmidt merely repeated the errors shown in the Kiehl and Trenberth diagram (1997). The Kiehl-Trenberth graphic calls Schmidt’s “up and down” effect the ‘back-radiation’ with a heat flux. Thus we may reasonably infer that Schmidt’s shenanigans are inextricably intertwined with those of his fellow warmist climatologists, K. E. Trenberth and J.T. Kiehl who, 13 years ago, first applied the bogus “full surface energy balance equations.”
Yet the idea that the science or the energy budget is “settled” is blown apart by Trenberth, himself. When asked by his colleague, Tom Wigley, “where’s the Global warming?” Trenberth admits they can’t answer the question. “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t… Our observing system is inadequate.” (Leaked Climategate email: Oct. 14, 2009: Filename:1255496484.txt)
Trenberth then re-iterated his confusion to the American Meteorological Society in January 2010 when lamenting the current woeful state of climate models

 

[kimmielittle]

Is there any point? What was the outcome of my demonstration to you of how Gavin’s climate model worked and why the whole “2 x lambda” claim and assertions that there was somehow a connection between that model and the Apollo moon landings were ludicrous? I didn’t notice you asking any more questions but I also didn’t notice you accepting that those claims were ridiculous and that your source could not be trusted.

Evidently, your reference work - needs work…Just what figure is lambda figured at? Was my question and I gave a number of values…

How about this instead: when I talked about how Pat Michaels admitted getting 40% of his funding from the fossil fuel industry, you said: “C’mon he’s a circuit lecturer.”

I take that response to mean that you do not rate him highly. And, given your stance on “outrageous ties”, how could you? Clearly to trust him after we saw how he asked for and received funding from vested interests after telling them why they should fund him would be a blatant double standard.

You are dead in the water on this insane claim, IMHO Until the money is equal…It can not be a double standard. The overwhelming Oil / energy money is to AGW’ers.

So repeat it ALL you want - it holds no weight at all.

And yet he’s the source for your belief in the futility of action to prevent climate change: worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2009/04/30/what-you-cant-do-about-global-warming/

Prove this, please. I never heard of the man - until you pointed him out.

Unfortunately, presenting BOTH SIDES to the public, pitting the overwhelming majority of people qualified to make an informed opinion on one side against a handful of scientists who all believe different things on the other is hardly informative.

I disagree, maybe if the information wasn’t hidden in the first place - You AGW’ers wouldn’t be back at square one.

And claiming that you have “scientists” on your side, when you don’t agree with what those scientists actually claim – and, indeed, when they don’t agree with each other – is dishonest.

If you can’t even keep the posts / posters here separate…How would you know dishonest?