Follow Us 
Insider
-
Secure your seat before the music ends
-
Pioneering resilience efforts at the state level
Comments
New Forum Topics
lmcdel: 1 day 8 hours ago
Jim H: 1 day 23 hours ago
JamesTerry: 6 days 12 hours ago
JamesTerry: 1 week 2 days ago
Mohave: 1 week 3 days ago
nedyne: 1 week 5 days ago
FreeNL: 1 week 5 days ago
Judd: 1 week 6 days ago
sand_puppy: 1 week 6 days ago
JamesTerry: 2 weeks 16 hours ago
Newest groups
-
A resource for planning for & reacting to the unexpected (storms, natural disasters and other shocks)
-
Members to support one another in investing endeavors
-
Preparing those people on Ise Lodge (Kettering) Northants, interested in the future post fossil fuel.
-
A meeting place for all who are interested in building or sharing a resilient lifestyle up here in the North.
-
A group to form alliances for survival
Arctic ice disappearance …
National Geographic in summer 2008:
Arctic warming has become so dramatic that the North Pole may melt this summer, report scientists studying the effects of climate change in the field.
“We’re actually projecting this year that the North Pole may be free of ice for the first time [in history],” David Barber, of the University of Manitoba, told National Geographic News aboard the C.C.G.S. Amundsen, a Canadian research icebreaker. …
But this summer’s forecast—and unusual early melting events all around the Arctic—serve as a dire warning of how quickly the polar regions are being affected by climate change.
National Geographic this week:
This year’s cooler-than-expected summer means the Arctic probably won’t experience ice-free summers until 2030 or 2040, scientists say.
Some models had previously predicted that the Arctic could be ice free in summer by as soon as 2013, due to rising temperatures from global warming.
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/09/23/about-that-arctic-ice-disappearance/
Global Warming Blues
I spent my working life as a computer engineer and entrepreneur. I have a long history of tilting at windmills having been involved in numerous causes and crusades during my life. So when my retirement started it was natural for me to look for something to get involved with. I picked global warming. Since I had completed the course work for a Ph.D. in physics I felt that I could deal with the technical side of global warming theory. As a computer expert I though that I would have insight to the giant computer models of the earth's climate that are central to global warming science.
I smelled a rat right from the beginning. As a 20-something activist I had a job as the Director of Operations for Zero Population Growth, Inc. ZPG was a 70's environmental organization that at one time had 25,000 members. I knew that professional environmentalism has an ethics problem. Exaggeration promotes contributions.
In my quest to investigate and understand global warming I joined the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society. At scientific meetings, like an anthropologist, I cultivated native informants.
I learned that most scientists don't have a good grasp of the big picture because they are narrowly specialized and don't think about much outside of their immediate interests. The scientists that do have a grasp of the big picture can be divided into global warming advocates, skeptics and the majority of passive observers who play it safe by not taking a position. The global warming advocates have the upper hand and the most power. The skeptics, including quite a few excellent scientists, are marginalized and frankly persecuted. They are whistle blowers. A lot of skeptics are retired. The warmers can't cancel pensions, at least not yet. The most famous promoter of global warming, James Hansen, wants to put his opponents on trial for crimes against humanity.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/08/global_warming_blues.html
Svensmark: global warming stopped and a cooling is beginning
This opinion piece from Professor Henrik Svensmark was published September 9th in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.
While the Sun sleeps
Henrik Svensmark, Professor, Technical University of Denmark, Copenhagen
“In fact global warming has stopped and a cooling is beginning. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth – quite the contrary. And this means that the projections of future climate are unreliable,” writes Henrik Svensmark.
So in many ways we stand at a crossroads. The near future will be extremely interesting. I think it is important to accept that Nature pays no heed to what we humans think about it. Will the greenhouse theory survive a significant cooling of the Earth? Not in its current dominant form. Unfortunately, tomorrow’s climate challenges will be quite different from the greenhouse theory’s predictions. Perhaps it will become fashionable again to investigate the Sun’s impact on our climate.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/10/svensmark-global-warming-stopped-a...
Now if you'd like to read what climate scientists from around the world have found since the 2007 IPCC report:
http://www.unep.org/compendium2009/
Stocks,
You are making a mistake in thinking that AGW advocates can be persuaded by facts. They have their "consensus" (which excludes the 9000+ PhD scientists who signed a petition to the contrary) and their computer models (which are demonstably wrong in the tropospheric temperature distribution) and they don't want an honest discussion. They would rather revel in their anticipation of impending doom. Happily, in a few more years of the present global cooling they will be as forgotten as the ice age doomers of forty years ago.
Stan
Stan
Could you cite your source for the "9000+ PhD scientists who signed a petition to the contrary"? You're probably referring to petition that the Oregon Institute has been circulating for the past decade or so. If so:
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/global_warming_contrarians/global-warming-skeptic.html
The Marshall Institute co-sponsored with the OISM a deceptive campaign -- known as the Petition Project -- to undermine and discredit the scientific authority of the IPCC and to oppose the Kyoto Protocol. Early in the spring of 1998, thousands of scientists around the country received a mass mailing urging them to sign a petition calling on the government to reject the Kyoto Protocol. The petition was accompanied by other pieces including an article formatted to mimic the journal of the National Academy of Sciences. Subsequent research revealed that the article had not been peer-reviewed, nor published, nor even accepted for publication in that journal and the Academy released a strong statement disclaiming any connection to this effort and reaffirming the reality of climate change. The Petition resurfaced in 2001.
Spin: There is no scientific basis for claims about global warming. IPCC is a hoax. Kyoto is flawed.
Funding: Petition was funded by private sources.
Affiliated Individuals: Arthur B. Robinson, Sallie L. Baliunas, Frederick Seitz
Or possibly you're referring to the Leipzig Declaration, a similar European document largely sponsored by the same discredited sources:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Leipzig_Declaration_on_Global_Climate_Change
When journalist David Olinger of the St. Petersburg Times investigated the Leipzig Declaration, however, he discovered that most of its signers have not dealt with climate issues at all and none of them is an acknowledged leading expert. Twenty-five of the signers were TV weathermen - a profession that requires no in-depth knowledge of climate research. Some did not even have a college degree, such as Dick Groeber of Dick's Weather Service in Springfield, Ohio. Did Groeber regard himself as a scientist? "I sort of consider myself so," he said when asked. "I had two or three years of college training in the scientific area, and 30 or 40 years of self-study." Other signers included a dentist, a medical laboratory researcher, a civil engineer, and an amateur meteorologist. Some were not even found to reside at the addresses they had given. [2]
A journalist with the Danish Broadcasting Company attempted to contact the declaration's 33 European signers and found that four of them could not be located, 12 denied ever having signed, and some had not even heard of the Leipzig Declaration. Those who did admit signing included a medical doctor, a nuclear scientist, and an expert on flying insects. After discounting the signers whose credentials were inflated, irrelevant, false, or unverifiable, it turned out that only 20 of the names on the list had any scientific connection with the study of climate change, and some of those names were known to have obtained grants from the oil and fuel industry, including the German coal industry and the government of Kuwait (a major oil exporter).[1]
If you go back and read through this thread you will see that Damnthematrix, myself and a few others have consistently posted actual scientific studies that cumulatively contribute to the concensus of scientists who agree that global warming is happening, is largely caused by human influences and that a certain amount of continued warming is already programmed into the system. Even the true skeptics agree to this. Just how much warmer it will get, how much ice will melt, how far oceans will rise and how much earth's various ecosystems will be affected are subjects for further research and experience. But, the fact is we continue to add CO2 and CH4 to the atmosphere, to overpopulate and to clear cut forests, all of which add to climate change.
By contrast, Stocks and other denialists (notably Greg Roberts and gyrogearloose, both of whom have been notably silent of late) who regularly post here almost without exception cite denialist websites consisting of very little actual scientific information or, at best, warped interpretations of scientific findings. Stock's contributions are particularly egregious because he rarely adds his own interpretations, just blocks and copies screeds from the usual suspect sites.
If you're interested in facts (i.e., science) I suggest you look back at the studies and documents we've cited, actually read the information we've provided, look for credible refutations in Stock's and the others' cites and then come to your own conclusions. In the area of climate change, truth lies in science.
Scientific fraud -- Warmers cherry pick tree ring data
Still tryng to get rid of Medieval warm period . And their data did exactly that. But how did they get their data? By ignoring a whole heap of data and just picking out a tiny subset of trees that suited their preconceptions. And if you use ALL the tree-ring data, you get totally opposite results
Here’s a re-cap of this saga that should make clear the stunning importance of what Steve has found. One point of terminology: a tree ring record from a site is called a chronology, and is made up of tree ring records from individual trees at that site. Multiple tree ring series are combined using standard statistical algorithms that involve detrending and averaging (these methods are not at issue in this thread). A good chronology–good enough for research that is–should have at least 10 trees in it, and typically has much more.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/27/quote-of-the-week-20-ding-dong-the...
The Dog Ate Global Warming
Interpreting climate data can be hard enough. What if some key data have been fiddled?
In the early 1980s, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, scientists at the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia established the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) to produce the world’s first comprehensive history of surface temperature. It’s known in the trade as the “Jones and Wigley” record for its authors, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley, and it served as the primary reference standard for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) until 2007. It was this record that prompted the IPCC to claim a “discernible human influence on global climate.”
Putting together such a record isn’t at all easy. Weather stations weren’t really designed to monitor global climate. Long-standing ones were usually established at points of commerce, which tend to grow into cities that induce spurious warming trends in their records. Trees grow up around thermometers and lower the afternoon temperature. Further, as documented by the University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Sr., many of the stations themselves are placed in locations, such as in parking lots or near heat vents, where artificially high temperatures are bound to be recorded.
Roger Pielke Jr., an esteemed professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, then requested the raw data from Jones. Jones responded:
Since the 1980s, we have merged the data we have received into existing series or begun new ones, so it is impossible to say if all stations within a particular country or if all of an individual record should be freely available. Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e., quality controlled and homogenized) data.
The statement about “data storage” is balderdash. They got the records from somewhere. The files went onto a computer. All of the original data could easily fit on the 9-inch tape drives common in the mid-1980s. I had all of the world’s surface barometric pressure data on one such tape in 1979.
If we are to believe Jones’s note to the younger Pielke, CRU adjusted the original data and then lost or destroyed them over twenty years ago. The letter to Warwick Hughes may have been an outright lie. After all, Peter Webster received some of the data this year. So the question remains: What was destroyed or lost, when was it destroyed or lost, and why?
All of this is much more than an academic spat. It now appears likely that the U.S. Senate will drop cap-and-trade climate legislation from its docket this fall — whereupon the Obama Environmental Protection Agency is going to step in and issue regulations on carbon-dioxide emissions. Unlike a law, which can’t be challenged on a scientific basis, a regulation can. If there are no data, there’s no science. U.S. taxpayers deserve to know the answer to the question posed above.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZTBiMTRlMDQxNzEyMmRhZjU3ZmYzODI5MGY...
CHASING A MORE ACCURATE GLOBAL TREND
Hadley Center Global Annual Mean Temperature since 1895 shows a warming of about 1C the last century.
The long term global temperature trends have been shown by numerous peer review papers to be exaggerated by 30%, 50% and in some cases much more by issues such as urbanization, land use changes, bad siting, bad instrumentation, and variable ocean measurement techniques that changed over time. NOAA made matters worse by removing the satellite ocean temperature measurement which provided more complete coverage and was not subject to the local issues except near the coastlines and islands. The result has been the absurd and bogus claims by NOAA and the alarmists that we are in the warmest decade in 100 or even a 1000 years or more. See this earlier story that summarizes the issues.
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/CHASING_A_MORE_ACCURATE_GLOBAL_TREND.pdf
Even the business community is waking up and smelling the coffee:
http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2009/09/28/companies-desert-the-climate-deniosphere/
Last week, Pacific Gas & Electric (possibly best known nationally as the villain in the movie Erin Brockovich”) left the US Chamber of Commerce over “fundamental differences” on how to approach climate change caused by a build-up of greenhouse gases in earth’s atmosphere.
Then New Mexico-based PNM Resources announced it would let its membership in the Chamber expire over similar concerns. And in a statement, Nike expressed its discontent with the Chamber’s obfuscating approach to climate change.
In a letter [PDF], PG&E chairman and CEO Peter Darbee said:
An excerpt of PNM’s statement in the Albuquerque Journal:
A Nike statement said:
Scientific fraud -- Warmers cherry pick tree ring data
Still tryng to get rid of Medieval warm period . And their data did exactly that. But how did they get their data? By ignoring a whole heap of data and just picking out a tiny subset of trees that suited their preconceptions. And if you use ALL the tree-ring data, you get totally opposite results
Here’s a re-cap of this saga that should make clear the stunning importance of what Steve has found. One point of terminology: a tree ring record from a site is called a chronology, and is made up of tree ring records from individual trees at that site. Multiple tree ring series are combined using standard statistical algorithms that involve detrending and averaging (these methods are not at issue in this thread). A good chronology–good enough for research that is–should have at least 10 trees in it, and typically has much more.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/27/quote-of-the-week-20-ding-dong-the...
The tree ring data was hand-picked to get the desired result.
2: Steve attempts to replicate Michael Mann's tree ring work in the paper MBH98, but is stymied by lack of data archiving. He sends dozens of letters over the years trying to get access to data but access is denied. McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, of the University of Guelph publish a paper in 2004 criticizing the work. A new website is formed in 2004 called Real Climate, by the people who put together the tree ring data and they denounce the scientific criticism:
3: Years go by.McIntyre is still stymied trying to get access to the original source data so that he can replicate the Mann 1998 conclusion. In 2008 Mann publishes another paper in bolstering his tree ring claim due to all of the controversy surrounding it. A Mann co-author and source of tree ring data (Professor Keith Briffa of the Hadley UK Climate Research Unit) used one of the tree ring data series (Yamal in Russia) in a paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 2008, which has a strict data archiving policy. Thanks to that policy, Steve McIntyre fought and won access to that data just last week.
4: Having the Yamal data in complete form, McIntyre replicates it, and discovers that one of Mann's co-authors, Briffa, had cherry picked 10 tree data sets out of a much larger set of trees sampled in Yamal.
5: When all of the tree ring data from Yamal is plotted, the famous hockey stick disappears. Not only does it disappear, but goes negative. The conclusion is inescapable. The tree ring data was hand-picked to get the desired result.
http://planetgore.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Y2Q5ZGExZTc3ZTlmMTA5OTdhOGR...
Cherry Picking of Historic Proportions -- The sheer effrontery and gall appears to be breathtaking.
Hiding data in science is equivalent to a company issuing it’s annual report and telling the auditors that the receipts are commercial in confidence and they would just have to trust them. No court of law would accept that, yet at the “top” levels of science, papers have been allowed to sit as show-pieces for years without any chance that anyone could seriously verify their findings. In science, getting the stamp of Peer Review has become like a free pass to “credibility”.
http://joannenova.com.au/2009/09/breaking-news-cherry-picking-of-histori...
Hi Doug,
If you are genuinely interested in a look at the underlying physics and real data related to global warming, go to Lubos Motl's web site and download the word document in which he delves into the details.
http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/07/carbon-dioxide-and-temperatures-ice.html
Better yet, try to provide data and calculations that refute his conclusions. Most of the global warming alarmists are not interested in any kind of discussion of the facts and instead try to claim a consensus of their own while denying the validity or existence of large numbers of Ph.D. level scientists who disagree. FYI Sallie Baliunas, Frederick Seitz and Willie Soon are accomplished and reputable scientists who certainly did not try to mislead anyone with the article that they wrote. If you take the trouble to check their credentials and read what they wrote, you will find that their arguments are sensible.
I think that Greg, gyro, Stocks and others are like me; tired of arguing with people who are either incapable or unwilling to engage relevant facts and arguments. Prove me wrong by showing where Lubos went wrong.
Stan
I forgot to mention that Frederick Seitz is a former chairman of the National Academy of Sciences and that the article that was the subject of so much overblown consternation is highly recommended reading and available at
http://www.oism.org/pproject/GWReview_OISM150.pdf
The petition, including the lists of signers can be found here.
http://www.petitionproject.org/index.php
I think that Greg, gyro, Stocks and others are like me; tired of arguing with people who are either incapable or unwilling to engage relevant facts and arguments. Prove me wrong by showing where Lubos went wrong.
I have posted fact after fact with cites to real scientific findings and studies. You and others don't. Lubos is a long time denier, but I will look at your link when Ihave time.
I am familiar withOISM. I suggest you go back and look at posts I made specifically addressing it and Seitz. The NAS has firmly repudiated the petition and the phony findings supposedly put out by OISM. It's a joke organization with no credibility and no published studies.
Doug
Two points re: hockey stick:
1. The Mann study is not an isolated study. Similar anomalies have been found by a variety of methods, including model simulations and instrument readings.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/temperaturevariations-in-past-centuries-and-the-so-called-hockey-stick/
Estimates of Northern Hemisphere average temperature changes from climate model simulations employing estimates of long-term natural (e.g. volcanic and solar) and modern anthropogenic (greenhouse gas and sulphate aerosol) radiative forcings of climate agree well, in large part, with the empirical, proxy-based reconstructions. One notable exception is a study by Gonzalez-Rouco et al (2003) that makes use of a dramatically larger estimate of past natural (solar and volcanic) radiative forcing than is accepted in most studies, and exhibits greater variability than other models (Figure 2). Yet, as in all of the other simulations, even in this case unprecedented warmth is indicated for the late 20th century.
The simulations all show that it is not possible to explain the anomalous late 20th century warmth without including the contribution from anthropogenic forcing factors, and, in particular, modern greenhouse gas concentration increases. A healthy, vigorous debate can be found in the legitimate peer-reviewed climate research literature with regard to the precise details of empirically and model-based estimates of climate changes in past centuries, and it remains a challenge to reduce the substantial uncertainties that currently exist. Despite current uncertainties, it nonetheless remains a widespread view among paleoclimate researchers that late 20th century hemispheric-scale warmth is anomalous in a long-term (at least millennial) context, and that anthropogenic factors likely play an important role in explaining the anomalous recent warmth.
2. As Mann, et.al. has maintained all along, the reality of climate change does not rest on the hockey stick alone. It is one representation of what temperatures have been doing over time in the northern hemisphere. There is an ever growing mountain of evidence supporting climate change from scientists all over the world. If your belief for or against climate change rests on the hockey stick alone, you're floating on a very small reed. There's an ocean liner of evidence supporting AGW.
Incidentally, McIntyre does not come to the subject with an unbiased viewpoint. His career is in the mining and mineral exploration business. In 2005 he admitted being new to academia and expressed a desire to bend scientific method to business principles. It's an ill fit.
I spent about 35 years in the mining and mineral exploration business. During the last 20 years of this, I worked in the micro-cap exploration business and have a great deal of practical experience in dealing with prospectus and securities issues from the company point of view. Concepts like audit trails, due diligence and full, true and plain disclosure become second nature when you work in such an environment.
This is not to totally discount McIntyre's findings. I'm not qualified to do that, but I will certainly wait until the pros weigh in.
Doug
Quote:
"I have posted fact after fact with cites to real scientific findings and studies. You and others don't. Lubos is a long time denier, but I will look at your link when Ihave time.
I am familiar withOISM. I suggest you go back and look at posts I made specifically addressing it and Seitz. The NAS has firmly repudiated the petition and the phony findings supposedly put out by OISM. It's a joke organization with no credibility and no published studies."
Does Lubos holding a position for a long time somehow discredit his arguments? And how is a petition repudiated? Do you execute the signers? I can vouch for the validity of my own credentials and signature and for those of a majority of the scientists from my own state. How about engaging the arguments from physics and supporting data and quit trying to discredit people with a differing viewpoint.
In Doug's post was the following:
"The simulations all show that it is not possible to explain the anomalous late 20th century warmth without including the contribution from anthropogenic forcing factors, and, in particular, modern greenhouse gas concentration increases."
Simulations are not capable of showing what has been claimed. The simulations have totally neglected the contribution of solar variability to cloud cover. What the simulations demonstrate is that the models are inadequate at present. Further, they are demonstrably wrong in their predictions of the tropical tropospheric temperature profile. They unequivocally predict a hot zone in the upper troposphere in equatorial regions that is contradicted by actual satellite measurements. They just are not credible in their extrapolations for the next century. If one considers all of the historical climate data, especially that revealed from polar ice core studies of deglaciation periods, it is pretty clear that carbon dioxide is not the major driver of climate change. If not for the flawed computer models there would be no support at all for alarmist positions.
Stan
Stan
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Oregon_Institute_of_Science_and_Medicine
[quote]The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM) describes itself as "a small research institute" that studies "biochemistry, diagnostic medicine, nutrition, preventive medicine and the molecular biology of aging." It is headed by Arthur B. Robinson, an eccentric scientist who has a long history of controversial entanglements with figures on the fringe of accepted research. OISM also markets a home-schooling kit for "parents concerned about socialism in the public schools" and publishes books on how to survive nuclear war.
The OISM is located on a farm about 7 miles from the town of Cave Junction, Oregon (population 1,126)...The OISM would be equally obscure itself, except for the role it played in 1998 in circulating a deceptive "scientists' petition" on global warming in collaboration with Frederick Seitz, a retired former president of the National Academy of Sciences...Robinson established the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine in 1980. In its early years, the OISM focused much of its attention on a new theory that Robinson had developed regarding "molecular clocks" that he thought might influence aging[/quote]
[quote]The Oregon Petition, sponsored by the OISM, was circulated in April 1998 in a bulk mailing to tens of thousands of U.S. scientists. In addition to the petition, the mailing included what appeared to be a reprint of a scientific paper. Authored by OISM's Arthur B. Robinson, Sallie L. Baliunas, Willie Soon, and Zachary W. Robinson, the paper was titled "Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide" and was printed in the same typeface and format as the official Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Also included was a reprint of a December 1997, Wall Street Journal editorial, "Science Has Spoken: Global Warming Is a Myth", by Arthur and Zachary Robinson. A cover note signed "Frederick Seitz/Past President, National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A./President Emeritus, Rockefeller University", may have given some persons the impression that Robinson's paper was an official publication of the academy's peer-reviewed journal. The blatant editorializing in the pseudopaper, however, was uncharacteristic of scientific papers.
Robinson's paper claimed to show that pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is actually a good thing. "As atmospheric CO2 increases," it stated, "plant growth rates increase. Also, leaves lose less water as CO2 increases, so that plants are able to grow under drier conditions. Animal life, which depends upon plant life for food, increases proportionally." As a result, Robinson concluded, industrial activities can be counted on to encourage greater species biodiversity and a greener planet:
In reality, neither Robinson's paper nor OISM's petition drive had anything to do with the National Academy of Sciences, which first heard about the petition when its members began calling to ask if the NAS had taken a stand against the Kyoto treaty. Robinson was not even a climate scientist. He was a biochemist with no published research in the field of climatology, and his paper had never been subjected to peer review by anyone with training in the field. In fact, the paper had never been accepted for publication anywhere, let alone in the NAS Proceedings. It was self-published by Robinson, who did the typesetting himself on his own computer. (It was subsequently published as a "review" in Climate Research, which contributed to an editorial scandal at that publication.)
None of the coauthors of "Environmental Effects of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide" had any more standing than Robinson himself as a climate change researcher. They included Robinson's 22-year-old son, Zachary, along with astrophysicists Sallie L. Baliunas and Willie Soon. Both Baliunas and Soon worked with Frederick Seitz at the George C. Marshall Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank where Seitz served as executive director. Funded by a number of right-wing foundations, including Scaife and Bradley, the George C. Marshall Institute does not conduct any original research. It is a conservative think tank that was initially founded during the years of the Reagan administration to advocate funding for Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative--the "Star Wars" weapons program. Today, the Marshall Institute is still a big fan of high-tech weapons. In 1999, its website gave prominent placement to an essay by Col. Simon P. Worden titled "Why We Need the Air-Borne Laser," along with an essay titled "Missile Defense for Populations--What Does It Take? Why Are We Not Doing It?" Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the Marshall Institute has adapted to the times by devoting much of its firepower to the war against environmentalism, and in particular against the "scaremongers" who raise warnings about global warming.
"The mailing is clearly designed to be deceptive by giving people the impression that the article, which is full of half-truths, is a reprint and has passed peer review," complained Raymond Pierrehumbert, a meteorlogist at the University of Chicago. NAS foreign secretary F. Sherwood Rowland, an atmospheric chemist, said researchers "are wondering if someone is trying to hoodwink them." NAS council member Ralph J. Cicerone, dean of the School of Physical Sciences at the University of California at Irvine, was particularly offended that Seitz described himself in the cover letter as a "past president" of the NAS. Although Seitz had indeed held that title in the 1960s, Cicerone hoped that scientists who received the petition mailing would not be misled into believing that he "still has a role in governing the organization."
The NAS issued an unusually blunt formal response to the petition drive. "The NAS Council would like to make it clear that this petition has nothing to do with the National Academy of Sciences and that the manuscript was not published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences or in any other peer-reviewed journal," it stated in a news release. "The petition does not reflect the conclusions of expert reports of the Academy." In fact, it pointed out, its own prior published study had shown that "even given the considerable uncertainties in our knowledge of the relevant phenomena, greenhouse warming poses a potential threat sufficient to merit prompt responses. Investment in mitigation measures acts as insurance protection against the great uncertainties and the possibility of dramatic surprises."[/quote]
Stan, the last paragraph is what I meant by repudiate.
[quote]The names of the signers are available on the OISM's website, but without listing any institutional affiliations or even city of residence, making it very difficult to determine their credentials or even whether they exist at all. When the Oregon Petition first circulated, in fact, environmental activists successfully added the names of several fictional characters and celebrities to the list, including John Grisham, Michael J. Fox, Drs. Frank Burns, B. J. Honeycutt, and Benjamin Pierce (from the TV show M*A*S*H), an individual by the name of "Dr. Red Wine," and Geraldine Halliwell, formerly known as pop singer Ginger Spice of the Spice Girls. Halliwell's field of scientific specialization was listed as "biology." Even in 2003, the list was loaded with misspellings, duplications, name and title fragments, and names of non-persons, such as company names. The current web page of the petition itself states "31,478 American scientists have signed this petition, including 9,029 with PhDs."[/quote]
And, this is what I meant by joke.
Wait a minute, you signed it? What are your credentials?
More later
Skeptics of the current global warming now refer to the period between 1998 and 2008 and claim that global warming has ended. Some go one step further and claim that global cooling has begun. Of course, the observed data shows that this is nonsense. GISS, HadCRU, RSS, and UAH represent the four organizations that publish online the global average temperature estimates. (Note: GISS data is the only set that uses all regions of the globe. HadCRU, RSS, and UAH do not include some polar regions.)
View the data and trends between 1998 and 2008 at:
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/images/temperature_trends_1998-2008.png
Three of the four global average temperatures indeed are decreasing in their trends (although the actual global mean temperatures are still warmer than the previous decades).
Now view the data and trends between 1999 and present at:
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/images/temperature_trends_1999-2009.png
Simply by shifting our starting point by one year, all four global average temperatures are increasing in their trends!
So why did the 1998 - 2008 plot show cooling? 1998 experienced an historic El Nino event (more than 2 standard deviations above the mean) which caused a large warming spike that year. 2008 experienced a La Nina which causes cooling and also an absence of sunpsots which also caused some cooling.
The point made here is that if one cherry-picks a small subset of the data, one can make just about any claim with a nice plot to back it up. The correct way to view global temperature trends is to look at ALL of the data.
View: http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/images/temperature_trends_1880-2009.png
This plot shows the global average temperatures along with trends from 1880 to present. (Note: UAH and RSS data does not exist before 1980) It is quite obvious that global temperatures have been increasing since 1880 and at a faster rate in the past two decades!
Here is a more technical analysis of why global temperatures have not "cooled since 1998" nor "cooled since 2001" as some global warming critics claim: Embarrassing Questions from the Open Mind Blog at: http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/06/26/embarrassing-questions/
Furthermore, much of the heat that is delivered by the sun is stored in the Earth's oceans while only a fraction of this heat is stored in the atmosphere. Therefore, a change in the heat stored in the ocean is a better indicator of climate change than changes in atmospheric heat.
Change in energy content in different components of the earth system for two periods: 1961-2003 (blue bars) and 1993-2003 (pink bars).
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/images/energy_content_copenhagen.jpg
The two links below are plots of ocean heat content which shows warming.
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/images/ocean_heat_content_copenhag.jpg
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/images/heat_content55-07.png
(Tamino, 2009) clearly shows that surface temperatures north of latitude 60o are warming at an accelerated rate in the past few decades. Tamino (2009) retrieved 113 station records at latitude 60oN or higher with at least 30 years of data.
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/images/tamino_arctic%20warming-1.jpg
Further signs of this warming trend can be seen in the Northern Hemisphere Sea Ice Extent from the National Snow and Ice Data Center. As the link below shows, sea ice extent has been dramatically reduced since 1979.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/n_plot_hires.png
Sea ice extent is just part of the picture. Sea ice thickness is also being measured since 2004 and there has been a dramatic decrease in thickness according to NASA's press release, NASA Satellite Reveals Dramatic Arctic Ice Thinning dated July, 2009. Some excerpts:
Using ICESat measurements, scientists found that overall Arctic sea ice thinned about 0.17 meters (7 inches) a year, for a total of 0.68 meters (2.2 feet) over four winters. The total area covered by the thicker, older "multi-year" ice that has survived one or more summers shrank by 42 percent.
In recent years, the amount of ice replaced in the winter has not been sufficient to offset summer ice losses. The result is more open water in summer, which then absorbs more heat, warming the ocean and further melting the ice. Between 2004 and 2008, multi-year ice cover shrank 1.54 million square kilometers (595,000 square miles) -- nearly the size of Alaska's land area.
During the study period, the relative contributions of the two ice types to the total volume of the Arctic's ice cover were reversed. In 2003, 62 percent of the Arctic's total ice volume was stored in multi-year ice, with 38 percent stored in first-year seasonal ice. By 2008, 68 percent of the total ice volume was first-year ice, with 32 percent multi-year ice.
Figure 27f (NASA, 2009) below shows that overall ice thickness and multi-year ice (MY) thickness are decreasing.
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/images/NASA_sea_ice_thickness.jpg
Honestly, anybody who claims that “there has been global cooling or that global warming has halted since 2000 (or whatever)” really does not understand climatic trends nor the difference between a long-term underlying trend vs. short-term fluctuations which have a larger magnitude (in both directions) than the trend. Or, if they do, they are purposely misleading (lying) to support some agenda.
Stan,
Before human activities, CO2 was controlled by natural forcing mechanisms that took place over thousands of years. When the climate warmed, more CO2 entered the atmosphere. This increase in CO2 then accelerated the warming so CO2 may not have caused the initial warming but it definitely drove the climate later on. The "CO2 increase lags the temperature increase" argument is moot in today's world because human activities are now driving the CO2 change on very short time scales. CO2 concentrations are known accurately for the past 650,000 years. During that time, they varied between 180 ppm and 300 ppm. As of August 2009, CO2 is 386 ppm which took about 100 years to increase. For comparison, it took over 5,000 years for an 80 ppm rise after the last ice age. Higher values than today have only occurred over many millions of years. So you are comparing apples to oranges. The unprecedented global warming experienced recently is well explained by the measured increases in greenhouse gases.
The Great Global Wamring Swindle was frought with mistakes. Just go to the Wiki site to read about all of the problems with this film.
Soon and Baliunas have been funded by the fossil fuel industry so one might be cautious about their work on climate change.
See:
http://www.desmogblog.com/sallie-baliunas
http://www.desmogblog.com/willie-soon
Baliunas hasn't published anything in a peer-reviewed journal since 2003. She is not a player.
In 2003, Baliunas and Astrophysicist Willie Soon published a review paper on historical climatology which concluded that "the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium." With Soon, Baliunas investigated the correlation between solar variation and temperatures of the earth's atmosphere. When there are more sunspots, the total solar output increases, and when there are fewer sunspots, it decreases. Soon and Baliunas attribute the Medieval warm period to such an increase in solar output, and believe that decreases in solar output led to the Little Ice Age, a period of cooling from which the earth has been recovering since 1890.[11]
Shortly thereafter, 13 of the authors of papers cited by Baliunas and Soon refuted her interpretation of their work.[12] There were three main objections: Soon and Baliunas used data reflective of changes in moisture, rather than temperature; they failed to distinguish between regional and hemispheric temperature anomalies; and they reconstructed past temperatures from proxy evidence not capable of resolving decadal trends. More recently, Osborn and Briffa repeated the Baliunas and Soon study but restricted themselves to records that were validated as temperature proxies, and came to a different result.[13]
Half of the editorial board of Climate Research, the journal that published the paper, resigned in protest against what they felt was a failure of the peer review process on the part of the journal.[14][15] Otto Kinne, managing director of the journal's parent company, stated that "CR [Climate Research] should have been more careful and insisted on solid evidence and cautious formulations before publication" and that "CR should have requested appropriate revisions of the manuscript prior to publication."[16] Source: Wiki
Willie Soon's most recent peer-reviewed paper Centennial Variations of the Global Monsoon Precipitation in the Last Millennium: Results from ECHO-G Model actually appears to SUPPORT AGW with the following statement in the abstract:
The prominent upward trend in the GM precipitation occurring in the last century and the notable strengthening of the global monsoon in the last 30 yr (1961–90) appear unprecedented and are due possibly in part to the increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration.
His last peer-reviewed paper before that was the notorious 2003 paper. Soon is certainly not a well-published scientist in climate change.
Stan,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change
Since 2007, no scientific body of national or international standing has maintained a dissenting opinion from IPCC 2007. Yes there are a VERY FEW scientists that are skeptical or even denialists, even fewer of these have published in peer-reviewed journals, and those can probably fit into a bathroom.
Suppose you are feeling very sick. You visit ten doctors and here are the replies:
Doctor #1: "You have cancer and you must quickly start chemotherapy. It will not be pleasant but it can cure you." Doctor #1 is well-respected and well-published in the field of oncology.
Doctor #2: "You have cancer and you must quickly start chemotherapy. It will not be pleasant but it can cure you." Doctor #2 is well-respected and well-published in the field of oncology.
Doctor #3: "You have cancer and you must quickly start chemotherapy. It will not be pleasant but it can cure you." Doctor #3 is well-respected and well-published in the field of oncology.
Doctor #4: "You have cancer and you must quickly start chemotherapy. It will not be pleasant but it can cure you." Doctor #4 is well-respected and well-published in the field of oncology.
Doctor #5: "You have cancer and you must quickly start chemotherapy. It will not be pleasant but it can cure you." Doctor #5 is well-respected and well-published in the field of oncology.
Doctor #6: "You have cancer and you must quickly start chemotherapy. It will not be pleasant but it can cure you." Doctor #6 is well-respected and well-published in the field of oncology.
Doctor #7: "You have cancer and you must quickly start chemotherapy. It will not be pleasant but it can cure you." Doctor #7 is well-respected and well-published in the field of oncology.
Doctor #8: "You have cancer and you must quickly start chemotherapy. It will not be pleasant but it can cure you." Doctor #8 is well-respected and well-published in the field of oncology.
Doctor #9: "You have cancer and you must quickly start chemotherapy. It will not be pleasant but it can cure you." Doctor #9 is well-respected and well-published in the field of oncology.
Doctor #10: "You have bad allergies that will likely not continue if you wait a few years. Waiting will not kill you and it might actually help you. There is no cure but you will save money by taking no action." Doctor #10 is well-respected and well-published in the field of allergies.
So, who are you going to listen to?
Stan,
Before human activities, CO2 was controlled by natural forcing mechanisms that took place over thousands of years. When the climate warmed, more CO2 entered the atmosphere. This increase in CO2 then accelerated the warming so CO2 may not have caused the initial warming but it definitely drove the climate later on. The "CO2 increase lags the temperature increase" argument is moot in today's world because human activities are now driving the CO2 change on very short time scales. CO2 concentrations are known accurately for the past 650,000 years. During that time, they varied between 180 ppm and 300 ppm. As of August 2009, CO2 is 386 ppm which took about 100 years to increase. For comparison, it took over 5,000 years for an 80 ppm rise after the last ice age. Higher values than today have only occurred over many millions of years. So you are comparing apples to oranges. The unprecedented global warming experienced recently is well explained by the measured increases in greenhouse gases.
Why is it moot that CO2 increase lagged the temperature increase during deglaciation? If CO2 were the driver of the warming during deglaciation it would necessarily lead the increase of temperature. It is a simple thing known as cause and effect. While it is true that human activities are driving the presently increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, there is no proof whatsoever that this is the only, or even the most important, driver of global warming. During deglaciaton periods, carbon dioxide concentrations were inadequate to produce the observed warming. The major positive feedbacks came from water vapor and decreased albedo as snow and ice cover were replaced by a darker exposed surface. Please provide evidence besides computer models that take the assumed driving as an input. In fact, mean atmospheric temperature has been decreasing for the past decade and this has not been predicted by any of the computer models. The models also predict tropical tropospheric temperature distributions in disagreement with satellite observations. How wrong for how long must the computer models be before we admit that they are not presently reliable for forecasting the climate of the next 100 years?
Go read the analysis of Lubos Motl and then tell me where he has it wrong. Carbon dioxide concentrations have risen about as much in the last 150 years as they did during the entire last deglaciation period. We ought to be baking, but are not. The dependence of temperature on carbon dioxide concentration is not at all linear. If carbon dioxide was the driver for the last 150 years, then what we might expect for the next hundred years is about the same one degree Fahrenheit warming that we got in the last 150 years. That assumes that there is enough fuel left to burn to raise the carbon dioxide concentration by about the same amount. As Lubos noted, nature already accounted in the last 150 years for the feedback mechanisms that should be contribute for the next 100 years.
Lastly, global warming alarmists seem to think that science is settled by a consensus of people debating rather than by observations. We are told that the science is settled when it most definitely is not. The variables controlling climate are at least as numerous and complex as those controlling the economy. How many economic simulations predicted the recent crisis conditons? I think that your faith in the current simulations is badly misplaced in the same way. The simulations cannot presently reproduce the details of temperature for the past 150 years and are known to be inadequate in their treatment of the effects of clouds. Believe them if it satisfies some primal need for fear, but don't make my grandchildren and the people of underdeveloped countries pay for the folly.
This is probably the last that I will post on this subject. I will be happy to engage in private discussions of historical climate data, the physics of the sun, oceans, atmosphere, clouds and the requirements for credible simulations with any alarmist who has the interest and expertise.
Stan
Stan,
Deglaciation was likely started by Milankovic forcing but was accelerated by the subsequent CO2 and associated feedbacks.
I think you need to consider time scales and rates. These things occurred over millenia while the climate changes today are occurring over decades! In the past few decades the warming is approximately 0.18C per decade which appears to be unprecedented. It is also likely that this rate is accelerating.
The Industrial Revolution, especially post-WWII, spewed out greenhouse gases but also aerosols that block the sun. These aerosols masked global warming to a degree until pollution laws in the 1970s and 1980s began to clean things up. Presently, China and India are spewing massive amounts of aerosols which is also offsetting some of the observed warming.
The oceans have taken in almost 1/2 of what has been released by humans and that has greatly delayed the observed warming. However, the chemical buffering of the oceans can only do so much and it is quite well understood that even if carbon emissions from industry are curbed, the oceans have much "in the pipeline" that is going to vent to the atmposphere. Also important to know, the oceans typically lag the climate by a few deacdes regarding temperature changes.
It is for these reasons that most experts believe there will be a 2C - 5C warming by 2100. We have already had about 0.8C since 1900 with most of that ocurring in the past 20 years. If a 5C warming would occur by 2100 there is no evidence that that rate was matched anywhere in the past 50 million years!
You stated: In fact, mean atmospheric temperature has been decreasing for the past decade and this has not been predicted by any of the computer models. The models also predict tropical tropospheric temperature distributions in disagreement with satellite observations.
Did you read my earlier post that shows global cooling is not happening - not even close. And if you refer to the tropical tropospheric hot spot then you also are not ware that that is NOT a signature of global warming and is in fact not missing. I discuss this on my Website. In the past 5 years there have been several papers that show satellites do a very good job matching radiosonde temp data now. Science has been able to respond to the unknowns about global warming and will continue to do so.
Just because you see a bird flying in the sky does not prove gravity isn't real. There are some things that are still unknown that do not appear to fit with global warming but they are very few and scientists are trying to figure them out.
If you do not like the models, then the other "smoking gun for AGW" in my opinion, is that the troposphere is warming and the stratosphere is cooling. If the sun were the cause of climate change (or other natural phenomena such as ENSO, PDO, PDI, NAO, low clouds, etc.) the stratopshere would not be cooling. Only if there is something trapping heat from below would cause this. I address this on my site as well at
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/greenhouse_gases.html#stratospheric_cooling
Regarding consensus and science I think Naomi Oreskes sums it up well:
"Scientific knowledge is the intellectual and social consensus of affiliated experts based on the weight of available empirical evidence, and evaluated according to accepted methodologies. If we feel that a policy question deserves to be informed by scientific knowledge, then we have no choice but to ask, what is the consensus of experts on this matter."
Should we seek the allergist?
It appears that you are getting your information from Websites and blogs instead of the scientific literature. Please take a moment and read the sources here:
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/suggested_reading_climate_change.html
Whew, thanks ProfMandia. I'm used to getting my science in small doses. Your posts are like trying to take a sip from a firehose. Well reasoned, informative and lots of data. I hope you continue to contribute when the persistent denialists repeat the non-science from the denialosphere.
Doug
Broken Hockey Stick Fallout: Leading UK Climate Scientists Must Explain or Resign
Mr McIntyre has previously showed problems with the mathematics behind the ‘hockey stick’. But scientists at the Climate Research Centre, in particular Dr Briffa, have continuously republished claiming the upswing in temperatures over the last 100 years is real and not an artifact of the methodology used – as claimed by Mr McIntyre. However, these same scientists have denied Mr McIntyre access to all the data. Recently they were forced to make more data available to Mr McIntyre after they published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - a journal which unlike Nature and Science has strict policies on data archiving which it enforces.
This week’s claims by Steve McInyre that scientists associated with the UK Meteorology Bureau have been less than diligent are serious and suggest some of the most defended building blocks of the case for anthropogenic global warming are based on the indefensible when the methodology is laid bare.
This sorry saga also raises issues associated with how data is archived at the UK Meteorological Bureau with in complete data sets that spuriously support the case for global warming being promoted while complete data sets are kept hidden from the public – including from scientific sceptics like Steve McIntyre.
It is indeed time leading scientists at the Climate Research Centre associated with the UK Meteorological Bureau explain how Mr McIntyre is in error or resign.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/29/leading-uk-climate-scientists-must...
The Climate Fear Death Spiral
1. U.S. rejects cap-and-trade in 2009, leaving a climate bill in serious trouble for election-year 2010 and beyond.
2. Copenhagen flounders without any U.S. commitment and from developing country opposition, among other things. The failed Kyoto Protocol creeps toward its 2012 expiration date with an all pain, no gain tag.
3. EPA action is delayed by court action and public/political opposition, negating implementation for years and effective implementation for longer. Congressional action to de-authorize EPA becomes more and more likely as businesses, and electric utilities in particular, demand certainty to meet growing U.S. electricity demand coming out of a recession.
4. The climate continues its decade long trend of non-warming for another 10 years, as some scientists have predicted. The return of bitterly cold winters, and more years “without a summer” increases public skepticism about climate science. More revelations come out about data manipulation by NASA, and cherry-picking by scientists trying to paint a false picture of recent warming in historical perspective.
5. Climate initiatives (renewable energy subsidies, etc.) are increasingly scrutinized and attacked as job-destroying corporate welfare by the Right and political capitalism by the Left.
6. Grassroots opposition builds against wind and solar farms because of landscape, wildlife, and people issues–and with the knowledge that such are not going to make a climatological difference. Environmentalists continue to block renewable projects at the local level, making it increasingly obvious that the U.S. risks energy shortages as conventional power generation is also stalled
7. Given the political impasse, and feeling somewhat duped, more and more science writers and academics will start covering hard climate data/trends rather than uncritically flogging the latest garbage-in/garbage-out forecasting. [Okay, this could be wishful thinking on my part, based on a mistaken belief that left-leaning science writers actually care about balanced reporting, and that academics dependent on government grants might develop something resembling a spine, but a person can dream, can't they?]
8. More attention focuses on adaptation and climate engineering, both of which spark furious debates on the Left as, respectively, “defeatist” and “playing God with climate.”
9. The “Great Climate Scare” becomes scrutinized for bad behavior and lessons-learned–which magnifies the intellectual and media turnaround on the issue.
10. Political support ebbs for government-dependent wind, solar, and energy efficiency companies, deflating the bubble and leaving a sad industrial trail of broken, obsolete, or uneconomic wind turbines and solar panels.
Conclusion
In the face of the risks to the climate crisis agenda outlined above, we can expect the climate crisis industry to grow increasingly shrill, and increasingly hostile toward anyone who questions their authority. Politicians are likely to try to ram as much through as they can for their favored constituencies and technologies before the climate crisis runs out of steam, and public concern drops even lower. This is the time for those concerned about public policy to be on high alert, as panicked activists and politicians will be trying every trick in the book to enact their agenda by hook or by crook.
http://masterresource.org/?p=5036
Re: hockey stick kerfuffle
Real Climate has answered McIntyre's charge.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/09/hey-ya-mal/
McIntyre has based his ‘critique’ on a test conducted by randomly adding in one set of data from another location in Yamal that he found on the internet. People have written theses about how to construct tree ring chronologies in order to avoid end-member effects and preserve as much of the climate signal as possible. Curiously no-one has ever suggested simply grabbing one set of data, deleting the trees you have a political objection to and replacing them with another set that you found lying around on the web.
The statement from Keith Briffa clearly describes the background to these studies and categorically refutes McIntyre’s accusations. Does that mean that the existing Yamal chronology is sacrosanct? Not at all – all of the these proxy records are subject to revision with the addition of new (relevant) data and whether the records change significantly as a function of that isn’t going to be clear until it’s done.
What is clear however, is that there is a very predictable pattern to the reaction to these blog posts that has been discussed many times. As we said last time there was such a kerfuffle:
Plus ça change…
The timeline for these mini-blogstorms is always similar. An unverified accusation of malfeasance is made based on nothing, and it is instantly ‘telegraphed’ across the denial-o-sphere while being embellished along the way to apply to anything ‘hockey-stick’ shaped and any and all scientists, even those not even tangentially related. The usual suspects become hysterical with glee that finally the ‘hoax’ has been revealed and congratulations are handed out all round. After a while it is clear that no scientific edifice has collapsed and the search goes on for the ‘real’ problem which is no doubt just waiting to be found. Every so often the story pops up again because some columnist or blogger doesn’t want to, or care to, do their homework. Net effect on lay people? Confusion. Net effect on science? Zip.
Having said that, it does appear that McIntyre did not directly instigate any of the ludicrous extrapolations of his supposed findings highlighted above, though he clearly set the ball rolling. No doubt he has written to the National Review and the Telegraph and Anthony Watts to clarify their mistakes and we’re confident that the corrections will appear any day now…. Oh yes.
But can it be true that all Hockey Sticks are made in Siberia? A RealClimate exclusive investigation follows:
I haven't had a chance to read all the way through yet, but, as usual, this baseless allegation is buried under an avalanche of real information.
Doug
Doug,
Thanks for posting that link. I thought I posted here about an hour ago but I do not see it. Weird. I wonder if I just hit Preview?
Anyway, I posted the RC link and I also mentioned that I was working on something like this (as you know) but the RC post is better than what I had already. I did add much to my Determining the Climate Record page while researching:
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/determining_climate_record.html
I think boreholes will end up being the best proxy and, of course, they all show the hockey stick.
A person at RC posted an interesting observation. ClimateAudit.org, and subsequently WUWT, got into a tizzy because it appeared that only a subset of tree data was being used to reconstruct past climate. Posters at these two sites asked why not use ALL of the tree data instead of a subset?
Shouldn’t all of the data be better than a small subset?
Now let us think about surfacestations.org. The claim there (and often at WUWT) is that the full NOAA station record is contaminated by UHI and we should only use a SUBSET of validated rural stations. I think it was 70 out of 1221?
So is this cherry-picking (according to CA and WUWT) or is this just using the “best data” (Briffa) to get the correct reconstruction?
Touche’