UN's climate report 'one-sided'

From: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/uns-climate-report-one-sided/story-e6frg6so-1225888714749


THE IPCC's report on climate change failed to make clear it often presented a worst-case scenario on global warming, an investigation has found.

THE UN body that advises governments on climate change failed to make clear how its landmark report on the impact of global warming often presented a worst-case scenario, an investigation has concluded.
A summary report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on regional impacts focused on the negative consequences of climate change and failed to make clear that there would also be some benefits of rising temperatures.
The report adopted a "one-sided" approach that risked being interpreted as an "alarmist view".
For example, the IPCC had stated that 60 per cent of the Great Barrier Reef was projected to suffer regular bleaching by 2020 but had failed to make clear that this was the worst projected outcome and the impact might be far smaller.
The wording of a statement on between 3000 and 5000 more heat-related deaths a year in Australian cities had suggested that all of the projected increase would be the result of climate change, whereas most of it would be caused by the rising population and an increase in the number of elderly people.The report, which underpinned the Copenhagen summit last December, wrongly suggested that climate change was the main reason communities faced severe water shortages and neglected to make clear that population growth was a much bigger factor.
The inquiry into the IPCC was ordered by the Dutch government after the UN body admitted its 2007 report contained two important errors.
It is the first of two studies this week into the veracity of climate science. The second, focusing on emails stolen from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, will be published today. That study, led by Muir Russell, is expected to dismiss claims the unit's scientists manipulated their findings but may say they should have been more willing to share their data.
The IPCC's report, used by governments around the world to develop emissions policies, falsely claimed that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. Most glaciologists believe that they will take at least 300 years to melt. The report also said that more than half of The Netherlands was below sea level (the correct figure is 26 per cent).
The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, which published the results of its investigation yesterday, concluded that the IPCC's main findings were justified and climate change did indeed pose substantial risks.
But it said the IPCC could strengthen its credibility by describing the full range of possible outcomes, rather than picking on the most alarming projections. It concluded: "Without proper explanation, the results at the summary level of Working Group II (which focused on regional impacts) could easily be interpreted as being an alarmist view."
It said the report had chosen to highlight the most serious risks but had "lacked a clear explanation of the choice of approach and its consequences".
The Times

Is the Fox Guarding the Henhouse?

Questions Swirl Around U.N.'s Climate Auditors (Fox News)

A little-known group called the InterAcademy Council has been made the voice of authority on the credibility of climate change, leaving critics scratching their heads -- and some key questions unanswered.
Acknowledging the rising tide of public skepticism toward global warming, the United Nations announced on March 10 that the IAC would act as an independent reviewer for its climate-science arm, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But a week later, the IAC remains a mystery, and it still hasn't explained who will be on the review panel or how the panel will operate.
...

If the IAC's panel of scientists is composed of people who already believe that global warming is manmade, "then the review is a foregone conclusion and worthless," Easterbrook said.

A Blizzard Of Lies From Al Gore

Via Investors Business Daily.

A Blizzard Of Lies From Al Gore

Posted 03/01/2010 06:41 PM ET

Climate Fraud: Al Gore resurfaces in an op-ed to say that nobody's perfect, everybody makes mistakes and climate change is still real. And he has some oceanfront property in the Himalayas to sell you.
If hyperbole and chutzpah had a child, it would be the opening paragraph of Gore's op-ed in Sunday's New York Times. Gore surfaced from the global warming witness-protection program to opine that despite admissions of error and evidence of fraud by various agencies, we still face "an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it."
Perhaps he's trying to protect his investments as he knows them, for he is heavily involved in enterprises that deal with carbon offsets and green technology. If the case for climate change is shown to be demonstrably false, a lot of his green evaporates like moisture from the ocean.
Interestingly, it's that moisture from the ocean that he uses to defend his failed hypothesis. The blizzards that have buried the Northeast, he writes, are proof of global warming because record evaporation due to warming is what produces record snows. Except that supporters of his theory not long ago argued exactly the opposite.
He writes that we should "not miss the forest for the trees, neither should we miss the climate for the snowstorm." He should explain why last year Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., warned that lack of snow in the mountains was threatening California's water supply.
Boxer, who along with Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, is trying to ram through a Senate version of the House's Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, said: "Looking at the United States of America, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) clearly warned that unchecked global warming will lead to reduced snowpack in the western mountains, critically reducing access to water, which is our lifeblood."
So global warming simultaneously causes mountain snow to vanish and Himalayan glaciers to recede while blanketing the northeastern United States with snowfalls measured in feet. Clearly, this is an untenable position. One phenomenon cannot simultaneously produce two different results.
He speaks of "recent attacks on the science of global warming." These presumably include the unearthing of e-mails between researchers associated with Britain's Climatic Research Unit that revealed an effort to discredit skeptics and deny them peer-review, the destruction and manipulation of data, and the use of "tricks" to "hide the decline" in global temperatures.
CRU director Phil Jones has admitted that temperatures in the Middle Ages may have been even higher than they are today. Jones also confessed that there's been no statistically significant warming in the past 15 years.
Exposure of the CRU e-mails was not an attack on science but an attempt to restore science to its rightful place.
Gore says the e-mails were "stolen." The New York Times used to call such revelations investigative journalism worthy of a Pulitzer Prize. We guess it depends on whose ox is, uh, gored. He says the CRU scientists were "besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics." That used to be called defending your thesis and proving your facts.
As for the Himalayan fraud, Gore says it's one of "at least two mistakes in thousands of pages of careful scientific work" from the IPCC and its chief, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri. Yet Dr. Murari Lal, an editor of IPCC's Fourth Assessment report, has admitted to the London Daily Mail that he knew the 2035 data were false, but included them in the report "purely to put political pressure on world leaders."
That's what it was all about, the creation of scary scenarios based on flawed computer models and manipulated data to promote government action and control. Now the curtain has been pulled back to reveal Al Gore shivering in the cold like the rest of us.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

• Print
• Back to story

Hoax of the Century

Pat Buchanan Pat Buchanan Tue Mar 2, 3:00 am ET

Creators Syndicate – With publication of "On the Origin of Species" in 1859, the hunt was on for the "missing link." Fame and fortune awaited the scientist who found the link proving Darwin right: that man evolved from a monkey.
In 1912, success! In a gravel pit near Piltdown in East Sussex, there was found the cranium of a man with the jaw of an ape.
"Darwin Theory Proved True," ran the banner headline.
Evolution skeptics were pilloried, and three English scientists were knighted for validating Piltdown Man.
It wasn't until 1953, after generations of biology students had been taught about Piltdown Man, that closer inspection discovered that the cranium belonged to a medieval Englishman, the bones had been dyed to look older and the jaw belonged to an orangutan whose teeth had been filed down to look human.
The scientific discovery of the century became the hoax of the century. But Piltdown Man was not alone. There was Nebraska Man.
In 1922, Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History, identified a tooth fossil found in Nebraska to be that of an "anthropoid ape." He used his discovery to mock William Jennings Bryan, newly elected to Congress, as "the most distinguished primate which the State of Nebraska has yet produced."
Invited to testify at the Scopes trial, however, Osborn begged off. For, by 1925, Nebraska Man's tooth had been traced to a wild pig, and Creationist Duane Gish, a biochemist, had remarked of Osborn's Nebraska Man, "I believe this is a case in which a scientist made a man out of a pig, and the pig made a monkey out of the scientist."
These stories are wonderfully told in Eugene Windchy's 2009 "The End of Darwinism." But if Piltdown Man and his American cousin Nebraska Man were the hoaxes of the 20th century, global warming is the great hoax of the 21st. In a matter of months, what have we learned:
— In its 2007 report claiming that the Himalayan glaciers are melting, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change relied on a 1999 news story in a popular science journal, based on one interview with a little-known Indian scientist who said this was pure "speculation," not supported by any research. The IPCC also misreported the supposed date of the glaciers' meltdown as 2035. The Indian had suggested 2350.
— The IPCC report that global warming is going to kill 40 percent of the Amazon rainforest and cut African crop yields 50 percent has been found to be alarmist propaganda.
— The IPCC 2007 report declared 55 percent of Holland to be below sea level, an exaggeration of over 100 percent.
— While endless keening is heard over the Arctic ice cap, we hear almost nothing of the 2009 report of the British Antarctica Survey that the sea ice cap of Antarctica has been expanding by 100,000 square kilometers a decade for 30 years. That translates into 3,800 square miles of new Antarctic ice every year.
— Though America endured one of the worst winters ever, while the 2009 hurricane season was among the mildest, the warmers say this proves nothing. But when our winters were mild and the 2005 hurricane season brought four major storms to the U.S. coast, Katrina among them, the warmers said this validated their theory.
You can't have it both ways.
— The Climate Research Center at East Anglia University, which provides the scientific backup for the IPCC, apparently threw out the basic data on which it based claims of a rise in global temperatures for the century. And a hacker into its e-mail files found CLC "scientists" had squelched the publication of dissenting views.
What we learned in a year's time: Polar bears are not vanishing. Sea levels are not rising at anything like the 20-foot surge this century was to bring. Cities are not sinking. Beaches are not disappearing. Temperatures have not been rising since the late 1990s. And, in historic terms, our global warming is not at all unprecedented.
Dennis Avery of Hudson Institute wrote a decade ago that from A.D. 900 to 1300, the Earth warmed by 4 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit, a period known as the Little Climate Optimum.
How horrible was it?
"The Vikings discovered and settled Greenland around A.D. 950. Greenland was then so warm that thousands of colonists supported themselves by pasturing cattle on what is now frozen tundra. During this great global warming, Europe built the looming castles and soaring cathedrals that even today stun tourists with their size, beauty and engineering excellence. These colossal buildings required the investment of millions of man-hours — which could be spared from farming because of higher crop yields."
Today's global warming hysteria is the hoax of the 21st century. H.L. Mencken had it right: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
Patrick Buchanan is the author of the book "Churchill, Hitler and 'The Unnecessary War." To find out more about Patrick Buchanan, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2010 CREATORS.COM

Copyright © 2010 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

• Questions or Comments
• Privacy Policy
• About Our Ads
• Terms of Service
• Copyright/IP Policy

Special Edition: Phil Jones’s Revelations and the The Meltdown of Global Warming Alarmism

Source 

Highlights added for emphasis.

Special Edition: Phil Jones’s Revelations and the The Meltdown of Global Warming Alarmism

By E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D.

Forget all you've heard about unprecedented global warming; global warming so rapid it can't be natural but must be anthropogenic; global warming threatening to devastate economies, ecosystems, and perhaps even human civilization itself; global warming on which "the science is settled" and "the debate is over."

Forget it all.

Last Saturday (February 13), Dr. Phil Jones, long-time director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (until he stepped down in December under investigation for scientific misconduct) and the provider of much of the most important data on which the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and many governments have based fears of unprecedented global warming starting in the mid-1970s, gave an interview to the BBC in which he made some shocking revelations.

Keep in mind as you read the list of those revelations below and then, if you click to it, the BBC transcript, that the BBC has been a major proponent of belief in dangerous anthropogenic global warming (DAGW) and indeed has billions of dollars of its pension funds invested in ventures that stand to benefit from that belief. Its interviewer was by no means hostile to Jones, did not follow up when Jones's answers were less than forthcoming, and generally simply gave Jones a platform from which to attempt to vindicate himself and the theory he has long promoted.

Jones's Shocking Revelations

Nonetheless, in the interview Jones:

1. admitted that he did not believe that "the debate on climate change is over" and that he didn't "believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this" (Al Gore, Barack Obama, Barbara Boxer, did you hear that? Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund, Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, Union of Concerned Scientists, did you hear that? Ed Begley, Robert Kennedy, Richard Cizik, Jim Ball, did you hear that?);
2. admitted that there was no statistically significant difference between rates of warming from 1860-1880 and 1910-1940 and the rate from 1975-1998, though he and other DAGW believers had for years said the rate in the last period was unprecedented and therefore couldn't be natural but must be manmade;
3. admitted that there has been no statistically significant warming for the last 15 years (though he personally believes this is only a temporary pause in manmade warming);
4. admitted that natural influences could have contributed to the 1975-1998 warming (significantly mentioning only the sun and volcanoes--the latter a brief cooling factor--and completely omitting reference to ocean circulations such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, and changes in cloudiness stemming from both the ocean circulations and changes in influx of cosmic rays, all of which have been demonstrated to have strong effect on global temperature);
5. admitted that the revelation of data handling failures at CRU and elsewhere (e.g., the U.K. Meteorological Office) had shaken the trust many people have in science;
6. admitted that the Medieval Warm Period might well have been as warm as the Current Warm Period (1975-present), or warmer, and that if it was "then obviously the late-20th century warmth would not be unprecedented" (though he persisted in doubting the MWP to have been global and as warm as the present);
7. dodged a question about a change of rules at the IPCC allowing lead authors to cite scientific papers not published by deadline, despite the Climategate emails record having shown that he was actively involved in precisely that change;
8. said that his "life has been awful" since Climategate broke in November;
9. dodged a question about why he had asked a colleague to delete emails relating to the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report, asked the colleague to ask others to do likewise, and said he had already done so himself;
10. dodged a question about whether some of his handling of data had crossed the line of acceptable scientific practice;
11. dodged a question about the significance of his having written in one email that he had used a "trick" to "hide the decline" in tree-ring temperature data

As a former journalist, having conducted many interviews, and now often interviewed myself by journalists and talk show hosts, I can't avoid the strong impression that Jones was given the questions, or at least some, in advance and probably made lack of tough follow-up questions a condition of submitting to be interviewed. (By the way, I have never either required or granted such conditions.) His obviously having been prepared with a statistical table to refer to in answer to the first question is one of the evidences of that.

Poor Data Documentation

In related news, the UK's Mail Online reported that Jones has admitted having trouble "keeping track" of the data he has used in constructing the research papers claiming unprecedented recent warming. The Mail Online said Jones said there was truth in colleagues' observations "that he lacked organizational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is 'not as good as it should be'." It also reported that colleagues say "the reason . . . Jones refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers." Though admitting his failure at record keeping, however, Jones "denied he had cheated over the data or unfairly influenced the scientific process." Nonetheless, Jones told the Sunday Times "that he had contemplated suicide" over the revelations that he had "misjudged" the "handling of requests for information."

BBC environmental editor Roger Harrabin also interviewed Jones. Harrabin's report tells of Jones's saying American data centers suffered similar poor record keeping--which implies that none of the datasets on which the IPCC and other bodies have relied is really trustworthy. (This is the same Roger Harrabin, by the way, who admits that the IPCC needs major reforming to regain credibility but rejects its abolition because "without a mutually-accepted source of information it is inconceivable that nations of the world will be able to agree a joint resolve to cut emissions"--i.e., he already knows the conclusion and what policy should be, and the crucial thing is to ensure that the world stays on message. For all you non-logicians out there, this is called begging the question.)

Replicability is a hallmark of truly scientific research, and meticulous record keeping is essential to replicability. And, as Dr. Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation and editor of CCNet, the Cambridge Conference Network newsletter, points out, Jones's excuse for his failure to share data in response to requests rings hollow in light of the fact that the Climategate emails leaked from the CRU demonstrate that he readily shared the data with sympathetic researchers.

Indur Goklany Critiques Jones's Responses

Dr. Indur M. Goklany, who has worked with the IPCC as an author, U.S. delegate, and reviewer and was an analyst with the U.S. Department of the Interior, and the author of a book and numerous scholarly papers on climate change, posted annotations to Jones's BBC interview at WattsUpWithThat, a leading site critical of DAGW. A few of his points:

• Jones's dismissal of the lack of warming over the last 15 years and cooling over the last 8 hides the fact that "this is at odds with the IPCC's model-based claim that were emissions frozen at 2000 levels then we would see a global temperature increase of 0.2°C per decade. This, in turn, suggests that the IPCC models have overestimated climate sensitivity for greenhouse gases, underestimated natural variability, or both. This also suggests that there is a systematic upward bias in the impacts estimates [forecasts of damage from warming] based on these models."
• Jones's saying he still believes the post-1975 warming is anthropogenic because it can't be explained by solar and volcanic forcing "is based on laughable logic. It is an 'argument from ignorance'! . . .What about internal natural variability and other 'natural influences'? How well do we know the external and internal sources of natural variability?"
• Jones's attempt to whitewash his claim in an email to have used "Mike's Nature trick" to "hide the decline" was mere obfuscation. Although Jones rightly pointed out that he wasn't trying to hide a decline in instrumental temperate observations, the reality is that he was trying to hide a decline in tree-ring temperature proxy observations from about 1960 to 1999--a decline that put the tree-ring proxies in direct opposition to thermometer measures for that period, what paleoclimatologists now refer to in shorthand as "the divergence problem." Goklany comments, "1. Given the divergence problem, how can it be assumed that tree rings are valid proxies for temperature for other places at other times?" But if they aren't, then the alarmists have lost all basis for their "hockey stick" graphs purporting to show stable global temperature for thousands of years leading to unprecedented warming in the last century. "2. The divergence problem may be well known among tree ring researcher but laymen and policy makers for whom the IPCC Summary for Policy Makers was supposedly written are generally ignorant of it. I also suspect that scientists in other disciplines were not aware of the divergence problem. They were owed this information up front, in the only document on climate change they were likely to read. Another sin of omission." I.e., however technically accurate Jones's explanation of the event might be, hiding the decline still resulted in deceiving decision makers and hiding the much more important implication of the divergence problem: The basis for claims of long-term stability brought to an end by human carbon dioxide emissions was wrong.

The Implications

Jones's concessions are no tempest in a teapot. They strike at the very root of DAGW fears and of the credibility of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments around the world have based those fears and consequent policies. As the editors of Sunday's Mail Online put it,

Untold billions of pounds have been spent on turning the world green and also on financing the dubious trade in carbon credits.

Countless gallons of aviation fuel have been consumed carrying experts, lobbyists and politicians to apocalyptic conferences on global warming.

Every government on Earth has changed its policy, hundreds of academic institutions, entire school curricula and the priorities of broadcasters and newspapers all over the world have been altered – all to serve the new doctrine that man is overheating the planet and must undertake heroic and costly changes to save the world from drowning as the icecaps melt.

You might have thought that all this was based upon well-founded, highly competent research and that those involved had good reason for their blazing, hot-eyed certainty and their fierce intolerance of dissent.

But, thanks to the row over leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit, we now learn that this body’s director, Phil Jones, works in a disorganised fashion amid chaos and mess.

Interviewed by the highly sympathetic BBC, which still insists on describing the leaked emails as ‘stolen’, Professor Jones has conceded that he ‘did not do a thorough job’ of keeping track of his own records.

His colleagues recall that his office was ‘often surrounded by jumbled piles of papers’.

Even more strikingly, he also sounds much less ebullient about the basic theory, admitting that there is little difference between global warming rates in the Nineties and in two previous periods since 1860 and accepting that from 1995 to now there has been no statistically significant warming.

He also leaves open the possibility, long resisted by climate change activists, that the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ from 800 to 1300 AD, and thought by many experts to be warmer than the present period, could have encompassed the entire globe.

This is an amazing retreat, since if it was both global and warmer, the green movement’s argument that our current position is ‘unprecedented’ would collapse.

It is quite reasonable to suggest that human activity may have had some effect on climate.

There is no doubt that careless and greedy exploitation has done much damage to the planet.

But in the light of the ‘Climategate’ revelations, it is time for governments, academics and their media cheerleaders to be more modest in their claims and to treat sceptics with far more courtesy.

The question is not settled.

IPCC's Crumbling Credibility

The Wall Street Journal wrote similarly in an editorial today that before even getting to the story of Jones's admissions led off:

It has been a bad—make that dreadful—few weeks for what used to be called the "settled science" of global warming, and especially for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is supposed to be its gold standard.

First it turns out that the Himalayan glaciers are not going to melt anytime soon, notwithstanding dire U.N. predictions. Next came news that an IPCC claim that global warming could destroy 40% of the Amazon was based on a report by an environmental pressure group. Other IPCC sources of scholarly note have included a mountaineering magazine and a student paper.

Since the climategate email story broke in November, the standard defense is that while the scandal may have revealed some all-too-human behavior by a handful of leading climatologists, it made no difference to the underlying science. We think the science is still disputable. But there's no doubt that climategate has spurred at least some reporters to scrutinize the IPCC's headline-grabbing claims in a way they had rarely done previously.

Take the rain forest claim. In its 2007 report, the IPCC wrote that "up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state."

But as Jonathan Leake of London's Sunday Times reported last month, those claims were based on a report from the World Wildlife Fund, which in turn had fundamentally misrepresented a study in the journal Nature. The Nature study, Mr. Leake writes, "did not assess rainfall but in fact looked at the impact on the forest of human activity such as logging and burning."

The IPCC has relied on World Wildlife Fund studies regarding the "transformation of natural coastal areas," the "destruction of more mangroves," "glacial lake outbursts causing mudflows and avalanches," changes in the ecosystem of the "Mesoamerican reef," and so on. The Wildlife Fund is a green lobby that believes in global warming, and its "research" reflects its advocacy, not the scientific method.

The IPCC has also cited a study by British climatologist Nigel Arnell claiming that global warming could deplete water resources for as many as 4.5 billion people by the year 2085. But as our Anne Jolis reported in our European edition, the IPCC neglected to include Mr. Arnell's corollary finding, which is that global warming could also increase water resources for as many as six billion people.

The IPCC report made aggressive claims that "extreme weather-related events" had led to "rapidly rising costs." Never mind that the link between global warming and storms like Hurricane Katrina remains tenuous at best. More astonishing (or, maybe, not so astonishing) is that the IPCC again based its assertion on a single study that was not peer-reviewed. In fact, nobody can reliably establish a quantifiable connection between global warming and increased disaster-related costs. In Holland, there's even a minor uproar over the report's claim that 55% of the country is below sea level. It's 26%.

Ongoing Investigations

It has already been concluded that Jones and the CRU violated Britain's Freedom of Information Act, though the conclusion came too late for prosecution. An inquiry by the University of East Anglia into whether Jones is guilty of serious scientific misconduct continues--following the resignation from the inquiry panel of Dr. Philip Campbell, editor in chief of Nature, after it was revealed that, shortly after the Climategate emails were released, he had "told Chinese state radio . . . that he did not believe that the emails had shown any evidence of improper conduct." The comment clearly demonstrated Campbell's bias in the matter and disqualified him from participating on the panel, though he did not reveal the fact himself. Ironically, Nature is the journal in which Dr. Michael Mann used the tactic that Jones referred to in one of the most famous of the Climategate emails as "Mike's Nature trick."

A crucial question for the panel to address is what Jones knew when in 1990 he co-authored an article titled "Assessment of urbanization effects in time series of surface air temperature over land" that argued that the "urban heat island effect" on apparent global temperate data was insignificant. That paper has been a controlling factor in alarmists' claims ever since and has been cited repeatedly by the IPCC, particularly in a crucial chapter of the 2007 Assessment Report of which Jones himself was lead author. In the 1990 paper Jones and co-authors, particularly Wei-Chyung Wang, claimed that temperature data source stations in China "were selected on the basis of station history: we chose those with few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location or observation times."

But as Doug Keenan pointed out in an article in the Journal Energy & Environment in 2007, sources cited by Jones and his co-authors themselves specified that “station histories are not currently available” and “details regarding instrumentation, collection methods, changes in station location or observing times … are not known” for 49 out of the 84 stations, making it impossible for the authors to have known what they claimed to know about those stations. And later research demonstrated that indeed there were major problems of instrumentation, collection methods, and station locations for the remaining 35 stations.

Keenan says Jones probably didn't know of the errors when he published the paper in 1990. But in 2001 Jones co-authored a new paper that, Keenan says, "correctly describes how the stations had undergone relocations, and it concludes that those relocations substantially affected the measured temperatures—in direct contradiction to the claims of [the 1990 paper]. Thus, by 2001, Jones must have known that the claims of Wang were not wholly true."

Yet Jones, knowing this, and even after Keenan emailed him in 2007 saying “this proves that you knew there were serious problems with Wang’s claims back in 2001; yet some of your work since then has continued to rely on those claims, most notably in the latest report from the IPCC," still has never published a correction to the 1990 paper, though under questioning he has now told Nature he "will give it some thought. It's worthy of consideration."

Investigations also continue at Pennsylvania State University into whether paleoclimatologist Michael Mann, another author of many of the Climategate emails, committed scientific misconduct.

Conclusion

When even the Times of London, long a promoter of DAGW, forthrightly reports, in the midst of all the news of the collapse of credibility of data purported to support DAGW, that other serious scientists say the world is not warming, you know the gig is up. The Times quotes Dr. John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama at Huntsville and a former lead author for the IPCC, as saying, "The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change" and then goes on to explain Christy's and others' criticisms at length. “The story is the same for each” region he has analyzed, Christy said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”

The Times also cites Dr. Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada (and a co-author of the Cornwall Alliance's Renewed Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Examination of the Theology, Science, and Economics of Global Warming) as saying that his service as an IPCC reviewer "turned him into a strong critic." "We concluded," McKitrick said, "with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC's climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialization and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias." And the Times refers to a study of U.S. weather stations by Anthony Watts and Joseph D'Aleo that demonstrates that most do not meet standards for siting, construction, and maintenance, resulting in the strong warm bias.

Let's face it. The case for DAGW has suffered mortal wounds. Never truly strong, the belief has been subjected to serious critiques by many of the world's top independent scientists, arguing along many lines not only that the science doesn't uphold it but also that policies meant to fight it could themselves be the true causes of disaster. Climategate is simply the death knell that confirms many suspicions of fraud and collusion among leading alarmists.

[Update] A Newsletter reader points out that the remaining data set for post-1979 temperature was the satellite data, which showed no significant warming from then to now. (HT Tom Sheahen, president of the Institute for Theological Encounter with Science and Technology.)

Low-carbon living is anything but easy…

Lights on – or off? Low-carbon living is anything but easy…

An article written by Tim Harford on the 2nd January, 2010.
Published on Undercover Economist.

Those of us resolving to lead a lower-carbon life in 2010 could do worse than acquire a copy of Prashant Vaze’s new book, The Economical Environmentalist, in which the author picks over the fine details of his life. He works out how much CO2 he could save by driving more slowly, installing loft insulation or becoming a vegetarian. The result will be a little dense for some, but it is delightfully geeky and has the virtue of being right more often than not.
This virtue is underrated. Environmentalists have been slow to realise that the fashionable eco-lifestyle is riddled with contradictions. The one that particularly exasperates me is the “food miles” obsession, whereby we eschew tomatoes from Spain and roses flown in from Kenya, in favour of local products grown in a heated greenhouse with a far greater carbon footprint.
Other less-than-obvious truths are: that pork and chicken have substantially lower carbon footprints than beef and lamb (yes, even organic beef and lamb); that milk and cheese also have a substantial footprint; that dishwashers are typically more efficient than washing dishes by hand; and that eco-friendly washing powders may be distinctly eco-unfriendly because they tend to tempt people to use hotter washes.
My conclusion is that a well-meaning environmentalist will make counterproductive decisions several times a day. I don’t blame the environmentalists: the problem is intrinsically complicated. Over a vegetarian curry in London recently, Vaze ruefully described to me the “six bloody months” he spent trying to research an eco-renovation of his home.
Even the experts can tie themselves in knots. Duncan Clark, author of The Rough Guide to Green Living, unveiled “10 eco-myths” in a Guardian podcast in November. Many of them were well chosen, but unfortunately his number one “myth” was not a myth at all: that switching off lights will reduce CO2 emissions. Clark’s logic is seductive: some European carbon emissions, including those generated by electricity, are subject to a cap. Clark is right to say that conserving electricity will allow other sectors to take up the resulting slack, because they will be able to buy permits to emit more cheaply than if we left our lights blazing.
Where Clark goes wrong is in assuming the cap will remain fixed forever. If we all turn out our lights, the price of permits will fall and politicians will find it politically easier to tighten the cap. So, keep installing those energy-efficient light bulbs. (Another less-than-obvious truth is that it’s not worth waiting for your old bulbs to burn out before you fit the new ones.)
After picking through the ideas of Vaze, Clark, David MacKay (a Cambridge physicist) and others, my view is that it is hopeless to expect that volunteers will navigate this maze of decisions.
That is why a broad-based, credible carbon price will be the foundation of any successful policy on climate change. The price would affect the cost of every decision we make; it would take away the guesswork. Current carbon pricing schemes, such as the European emissions trading scheme, are a good start, but they leave out too many sectors, and permits are too cheap.
And a final admission: not every feature of the low-carbon lifestyle is impossibly obscure. I felt rather smug when I realised I could stop drinking cappuccino in favour of espresso, saving 90kg of CO2 a year. Then I totted up my carbon footprint from air travel in 2009. It is the equivalent of almost 50 tonnes of CO2 – or more than the entire footprint of a typical British family of three. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how to shrink that particular footprint. This year I shall do better.
Also published at ft.com.

Here Comes The Sun

via Investors.com

Here Comes The Sun

Posted 12/15/2009 07:28 PM ET

Global Warming: Drip by drip, like a glacier melting in the sun, the claim that man is changing the climate is dissolving into irrelevance. The recent findings of Swiss researchers expose another hole.

Former Vice President Al Gore has for years warned that man-made global warming is melting the world's glaciers — a tactic commonly used by alarmists who want to whip up hysteria. Swiss researchers, however, have presented evidence that weakens the argument.

Scientists at Zurich's Federal Institute of Technology have found that solar activity caused Alpine glaciers to melt in the 1940s at rates faster than today's pace, even though it's warmer now.

The study found that the sun in the 1940s was 8% stronger than average and far more powerful than it is today. It also concluded that solar activity was weaker from the 1950s to the 1980s, an era in which the glaciers advanced.

The Swiss researchers are spinning their own work, saying that the evidence doesn't mean the public can stop worrying about man-made warming. But their finding validates other researchers who have said solar activity has a far greater impact on temperatures than human CO2 emissions.

This report from Zurich reminds us of another myth perpetrated by Gore. In his Academy Award-winning documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," he contends the snowcap on Mount Kilimanjaro has retreated because of human greenhouse-gas emissions. Yet scientists have been telling a different story.

They say the melting on the 19,340-foot mountain has been going on for more than a century, beginning long before man accelerated CO2 emissions. They also report that temperatures at the top of Kilimanjaro never fall below freezing, so the reason for snowcap loss has to be due to one or more causes not related to temperature. A lack of snowfall is likely one of those.

Just as the Swiss researchers tried to soft-pedal their findings, the scientists who have studied Kilimanjaro also refuse to let the narrative unravel. They say the facts about the snowcap shouldn't be used to raise doubts about the official line that man is warming the planet. Nothing to see here, they say in effect, so move on.

Another sign that the alarmists' claims are falling apart is the statement made Monday by Gore at the global warming conference in Copenhagen: "Some of the models suggest ... that there is a 75% chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years."

How to Manufacture a Climate Consensus (Wall Street Journal)

How to Manufacture a Climate Consensus

The East Anglia emails are just the tip of the iceberg. I should know.

By PATRICK J. MICHAELS

Few people understand the real significance of Climategate, the now-famous hacking of emails from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU). Most see the contents as demonstrating some arbitrary manipulating of various climate data sources in order to fit preconceived hypotheses (true), or as stonewalling and requesting colleagues to destroy emails to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the face of potential or actual Freedom of Information requests (also true).

But there's something much, much worse going on—a silencing of climate scientists, akin to filtering what goes in the bible, that will have consequences for public policy, including the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) recent categorization of carbon dioxide as a "pollutant."

The bible I'm referring to, of course, is the refereed scientific literature. It's our canon, and it's all we have really had to go on in climate science (until the Internet has so rudely interrupted). When scientists make putative compendia of that literature, such as is done by the U.N. climate change panel every six years, the writers assume that the peer-reviewed literature is a true and unbiased sample of the state of climate science.

View Full Image

Martin Kozlowski

That can no longer be the case. The alliance of scientists at East Anglia, Penn State and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (in Boulder, Colo.) has done its best to bias it.

A refereed journal, Climate Research, published two particular papers that offended Michael Mann of Penn State and Tom Wigley of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. One of the papers, published in 2003 by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas (of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), was a meta-analysis of dozens of "paleoclimate" studies that extended back 1,000 years. They concluded that 20th-century temperatures could not confidently be considered to be warmer than those indicated at the beginning of the last millennium.

In fact, that period, known as the "Medieval Warm Period" (MWP), was generally considered warmer than the 20th century in climate textbooks and climate compendia, including those in the 1990s from the IPCC.

Then, in 1999, Mr. Mann published his famous "hockey stick" article in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), which, through the magic of multivariate statistics and questionable data weighting, wiped out both the Medieval Warm Period and the subsequent "Little Ice Age" (a cold period from the late 16th century to the mid-19th century), leaving only the 20th-century warming as an anomaly of note.

Messrs. Mann and Wigley also didn't like a paper I published in Climate Research in 2002. It said human activity was warming surface temperatures, and that this was consistent with the mathematical form (but not the size) of projections from computer models. Why? The magnitude of the warming in CRU's own data was not as great as in the models, so therefore the models merely were a bit enthusiastic about the effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Mr. Mann called upon his colleagues to try and put Climate Research out of business. "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal," he wrote in one of the emails. "We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board."

After Messrs. Jones and Mann threatened a boycott of publications and reviews, half the editorial board of Climate Research resigned. People who didn't toe Messrs. Wigley, Mann and Jones's line began to experience increasing difficulty in publishing their results.

This happened to me and to the University of Alabama's Roy Spencer, who also hypothesized that global warming is likely to be modest. Others surely stopped trying, tiring of summary rejections of good work by editors scared of the mob. Sallie Baliunas, for example, has disappeared from the scientific scene.

GRL is a very popular refereed journal. Mr. Wigley was concerned that one of the editors was "in the skeptics camp." He emailed Michael Mann to say that "if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official . . . channels to get him ousted."

Mr. Mann wrote to Mr. Wigley on Nov. 20, 2005 that "It's one thing to lose 'Climate Research.' We can't afford to lose GRL." In this context, "losing" obviously means the publication of anything that they did not approve of on global warming.

Soon the suspect editor, Yale's James Saiers, was gone. Mr. Mann wrote to the CRU's Phil Jones that "the GRL leak may have been plugged up now w/ new editorial leadership there."

It didn't stop there. Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory complained that the Royal Meteorological Society (RMS) was now requiring authors to provide actual copies of the actual data that was used in published papers. He wrote to Phil Jones on March 19, 2009, that "If the RMS is going to require authors to make ALL data available—raw data PLUS results from all intermediate calculations—I will not submit any further papers to RMS journals."

Messrs. Jones and Santer were Ph.D. students of Mr. Wigley. Mr. Santer is the same fellow who, in an email to Phil Jones on Oct. 9, 2009, wrote that he was "very tempted" to "beat the crap" out of me at a scientific meeting. He was angry that I published "The Dog Ate Global Warming" in National Review, about CRU's claim that it had lost primary warming data.

The result of all this is that our refereed literature has been inestimably damaged, and reputations have been trashed. Mr. Wigley repeatedly tells news reporters not to listen to "skeptics" (or even nonskeptics like me), because they didn't publish enough in the peer-reviewed literature—even as he and his friends sought to make it difficult or impossible to do so.

Ironically, with the release of the Climategate emails, the Climatic Research Unit, Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley have dramatically weakened the case for emissions reductions. The EPA claimed to rely solely upon compendia of the refereed literature such as the IPCC reports, in order to make its finding of endangerment from carbon dioxide. Now that we know that literature was biased by the heavy-handed tactics of the East Anglia mob, the EPA has lost the basis for its finding.

Mr. Michaels, formerly professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia (1980-2007), is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

Copenhagen Update: The Other Shoe Just Dropped--Climategate II Begins

http://www.cornwallalliance.org/blog/item/copenhagen-update-the-other-shoe-just-dropped-climategate-ii-begins/

Copenhagen Update: The Other Shoe Just Dropped--Climategate II Begins

By E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D.

It’s a fitting event set right near the climax of the UN climate summit in Copenhagen: Russian scientists confirm suspicions that UK climate scientists have mishandled Russian temperature data, resulting in exaggerated apparent global warming trend.

As James Delingpole reports in Telegraph.co.uk, “Climategate just got much, much bigger. And all thanks to the Russians who, with perfect timing, dropped this bombshell just as the world’s leaders are gathering in Copenhagen to discuss ways of carbon-taxing us all back to the dark ages.”

The original climategate involved thousands of emails, computer codes, and other documents leaked or hacked from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, revealing widespread fabrication, fudging, cherry picking, massaging, suppressing, and destruction of data, and intimidation of dissenting scientists and journal editors who might consider publishing them. The culprits: a couple of dozen prominent global warming alarmist scientists around the world. The result: undermining the credibility of much of the temperature data on which the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and others have relied for more than two decades.

Climategate II involves the Hadley Center for Climate Change at the British Meteorological Office in Exeter, Devon, England. The Russians have revealed that the Hadley folks “have probably tampered with Russian climate data,” as Icecap reports--and, because they depend on Hadley for the Russian data, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as well.

The gist: Hadley’s scientist cherry-picked data from Russian temperature monitoring stations in a manner that overrepresented urban stations (affected by urban heat island effect) and underrepresented rural, especially Siberian, stations. The consequence: a fabricated, falsely strong signal of global warming for Russia, an area large enough to greatly affect the global average estimates. Hadley’s mistreatment of the data created an apparent 2.06C rise in temperature since 1860, while the full Russian raw data show 1.4C rise instead.

All the more reason why, as I suggested in an earlier blog post, there should be a moratorium on all international, national, state or provincial, and local climate-change related treaty making, legislating, and regulating until a comprehensive, independent, forensic investigation of climategate--and now climategate II--has been completed.