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Whether it’s weather or climate – it’s all in the accuracy of the models and the accuracy model assumptions and data that the models are fed.
If the assumptions and/or data are off, what can be said about the results?
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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is getting a lot of heat these days on the claim that the Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035.
While the information used by the IPCC is supposed to be peer-reviewed and well vetted, it turns out that this gem is derived from a magazine article in New Science several years ago that was based on a single phone call to an Indian scientist.
An IBD Editorial says:
The scientists who said that Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035 have admitted the claim has as much credibility as sightings of the mythical Yeti. It’s their fraudulent claims that are melting away.
We hesitate to call it Glacier-gate, but the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N. body tasked with scaring us to death about global warming, has admitted that the claim in its 2007 report about the Himalayan glaciers disappearing was not based on any scientific study or research. It was instead based on one scientist’s speculation in a telephone interview with a reporter.
This issue has been hitting a number of other media sites over the last week or so.
Read the rest of the IBD Editorial at Investors.com.
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Telegraph.uk.co, December 14, 2009, quoting Tony Blair
Following the ‘climategate scandal’, Mr Blair said the science may not be “as certain as its proponents allege”.
But he said the world should act as a precaution against floods, droughts and mass extinction caused by climate change, in fact it would be “grossly irresponsible” not to.
BBC News, December 14, 2009
Negotiations at the UN climate summit have been suspended after developing countries withdrew their co-operation.
Delegations were angry at what they saw as moves by the Danish host government to sideline talks on more emission cuts under the Kyoto Protocol.
GlobalWarming.org, December 14, 2009
Today’s dominant mindset that any climate change at all is bad is puzzling. It implicitly assumes that today’s climate is the best of all possible climates. Maybe that’s true. But maybe it isn’t. The trouble is that few climate activists seem to have had that thought. The idea of change is so scary that nobody has the presence of mind to ask if that’s a problem or not.
Reuters.com, December 14, 2009
The head of the Asian Development Bank said on Sunday that rich countries’ offers of funds to developing countries for measures to mitigate or adapt to climate change remain insufficient a week into U.N. talks.
ADB President Haruhiko Kuroda also told Reuters in an interview that if governments were to fail to reach a climate deal in Copenhagen, it could lead to a collapse of the carbon market which would hit efforts to deal with climate change.
GlobalWarming.org, December 14, 2009
It has always been hard to persuade the public that invisible gases could somehow warm the planet, and that they had to make sacrifices to prevent that from happening. It seemed, on the verge of Copenhagen, as if that might be about to be achieved.
“But he says all that ended on Nov. 20. ‘The e-mails represented a seminal moment in the climate debate of the last five years, and it was a moment that broke decisively against us. I think the CRU leak is nothing less than catastrophic.’”
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While I’m moving on – or back – to other things, climate issues will continue to be an interest. With 5 of my last 6 posts being on the subject, it’s time to look at other things. I’ll try to figure out a way to continue to share some of what I learn, though, without this becoming a climate change blog.
I’m still happy with Windows 7. My computer at work uses XP, though, and moving back and forth between Windows 7 and XP makes getting used to Windows 7 a little harder, I think.
Yes, I am still working. A contract extension has been approved and, assuming the VP signs the funding paperwork, I will be there until about the middle of March. After that, I plan not to work for at least the rest of 2010.
Regular visitors to Exit 78 may recognize that my theme has changed once again. I have moved to the Thesis theme, which allows a lot more control over the appearance. I’ve got the basic structure down pretty good now, but I’ll be tweaking on it, so there may be subtle changes day to day.
I still have a little bit of material to post from our September trip, photo galleries to develop and publish and images from the great depression to share.
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I made a decision after my last post on Climategate that I would scale back on my interest in anthropogenic global warming.
Before the emails and documents surfaced, I already knew there were issues with the some of the scientists and their data at East Anglia. Unfortunately, it’s likely that similar issues related to climate change exist in other places.
I am now very satisfied that my doubt in anthropogenic global warming is justified and don’t feel the need to follow what’s happening with climate change quite so closely.
I’ve already stopped my Google alert on the phrase climate change, which has significantly reduced the amount of items that I see in my feed reader.
This is my final post on climate change for the foreseeable future and I’m sharing here just a few of the many things I’ve learned before I get back to my regular posting.
I’m not looking to try to change any one’s mind, just share what I’ve learned. I’ll still be learning as things show up in my feed reader – I just won’t be studying as aggressively .
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Many scientists and others who are skeptical of anthropogenic global warming would like the answer to one question that, so far, has not been answered:
While there is laboratory evidence that carbon dioxide acts as a greenhouse gas and carbon dioxide and global temperature have both been rising, real world proof that CO2 has caused the rise in global temperature does NOT exist.
While, at times, there appears to be a rough correlation between CO2 and global temperature, correlation does not prove causation.
Even though anthropogenic global warming is an unproven hypothesis, it is likely that some historical warming resulted from carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere by humans. However, because of the physical properties of CO2, it’s done all the warming it can do.
Predictions of rising temperatures and the dire consequences of anthropogenic global warming are based on computer climate models. The climate models include the assumption that global temperatures will rise as CO2 continues to rise.
Over the last decade, global temperatures have leveled off while CO2 continued to rise. Temperature is trending below all of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predictions.
Joanne Nova, an Australian freelance science presenter & writer: Professional speaker, author, and former TV host, has prepared and published two excellent — and free — booklets on global warming. The first, The Skeptics Handbook, has been translated by volunteers into many other languages, including German, French, Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, Turkish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Danish.
Carbon dioxide acts as a greenhouse gas by absorbing infrared radiation in three narrow bands of frequencies, (2.7, 4.3 and 15 micrometers (µM)), meaning that most of the heat producing infrared radiation frequencies escapes absorption by CO2. The main peak, 15 µM, is absorbed completely within about 10 meters of the ground meaning that there is no more to absorb. Doubling the human contribution of CO2 would reduce this distance. Reducing the distance for absorption would not result in an increase in temperature.
The sun appears to have entered a less active period and is providing less warmth to the Earth. The sun is in an extended solar minimum that was predicted to end in March 2008, nearly 20 months ago. Since 2004 there have been 770 days without sunspots. A typical solar minimum averages about 485 days. Solar magnetic activity continues to drop.
A number of scientists are projecting that global warming is over, for now, and that global average temperatures will be dropping for the next 20 to 30 years.
“Tricks” apparently have been performed on more climate data than just the tree ring proxy information. The figure below shows the adjustments made to the historical temperature record of Darwin, Australia. The blue lines show the values for the original, “raw” temperature data. The red lines are the official NOAA/GHCN ( National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — Global Historical Climate Network) data after the values have been “homogenized” and averaged. The black line are the values for the adjustment that was made (uses the scale on the right of the figure).
“Before getting homogenized, temperatures in Darwin were falling at 0.7 Celcius per century … but after the homogenization, they were warming at 1.2 Celcius per century. And the adjustment that they made was over two degrees per century …” – Willis Eschenbach, The Smoking Gun At Darwin Zero
American climate sceptics are now demanding a thorough investigation of NASA’s earth science programme, including the possibility that instruments on its satellites have been “tweaked” to give a “correct” result, and pointing out that the agency has repeatedly had to correct its data, going back to the 1930s. The common factor between CRU East Anglia and NASA is the destruction or withholding of research models and data which, if they are reliable, should be their pride and joy – documentation that would secure these institutions’ place in history, like Einstein’s equations. Telegraph.co.uk
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“They’ve lost the raw data on which all the models, all the computer generated forecasts, the graphs and projections, are based.”
“Poor Al Gore”
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The university says Phil Jones will relinquish his position until the completion of an independent review into allegations that he worked to alter the way in which global temperature data was presented.
Climate politics continue to be interesting. Australia’s opposition Liberal Party has ousted its leader, Malcolm Turnbull, after the resignation last week of several senators from their “front-seat” positions. The Aussie government’s climate change bill is now in jeopardy, raising the potential of an early general election in 2010.
The Climategate emails and documents are being investigated by a number of organizations, including an inquiry by Penn State University, where Michael Mann, creator of the discredited hockey stick graph – used by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth – is a professor. Inquiries are also under way at the University of East Anglia, the source of the leaked material. Government investigations are either ongoing or pending and there has been at least one civil lawsuit filed.
At a minimum, the emails document the violation of UK Freedom of Information laws.
Many believe that the leaker was not a hacker, but, rather, was an insider acting as a anonymous whistleblower by leaking the emails and documents, including information that had been unsuccessfully been sought under the UK FOI statutes.
The emails are not the only incriminating material. Computer codes and their documentation show fudged numbers and “blatant data-cooking” that tell a story of twisting reality to a desired view.
Many of the fantastic claims in the media about climate change are likely predicated on the same sort of skewed science.
An article in the Wall Street Journal titled The Climate Science Isn’t Settled, by Richard S. Lindzen, professor of meteorology at MIT gives a more balanced view of the state of climate science.
Claims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre. There is general support for the assertion that GATA has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century. The quality of the data is poor, though, and because the changes are small, it is easy to nudge such data a few tenths of a degree in any direction. Several of the emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) that have caused such a public ruckus dealt with how to do this so as to maximize apparent changes.
While I have been skeptical of global warming claims for quite some time, this Climategate fiasco appears to show a conspiracy to doctor the evidence.
In my interest in climate change, I wasn’t looking for a conspiracy, just the truth.
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Click on any of the images to go to the associated webpage.
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While I have spent a bit of time reading some of the emails that were leaked earlier the week, I simply do not have the time – or desire – to delve deeply into the files. There are many others around the world digging into this.
I think that there have been serious consequences that have resulted from the actions of some of the scientists whose correspondence has been leaked. In their zeal to “prove” — at all costs — CO2 as the cause of anthropogenic global warming, other potential causes have been marginalized. Evidence is mounting that changes in land use may have a significantly greater impact on climate change than rising CO2. If true, mitigation and adaptation to successfully address human impacts on climate could be done at a fraction of the cost of the drastic actions and expenses that are being called for today. It may be that efforts could have been started a decade ago, but for an obsession on CO2 as the global warming culprit.
On Examiner.com, Thomas Fuller is writing a series of articles regarding the actions and communications of a group of climate scientists and paleoclimatologists known as The Team. Click here to read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 , Part 6, and Part 7.
My first post on this was Climategate.
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While I haven’t blogged about it for a while, I read material related to global warming climate change every day, so it was with great interest yesterday morning that I read of the release of allegedly stolen anthropogenic global warming climate change correspondence.
I had woken early for some reason and was unable to get back to sleep. By 4:30, I was up and checking email, blogs and the news-feeds that I subscribe to.
A little over an hour later, I was downloading the files.
It’s going to be interesting to see where this is going to end up. Articles are already appearing in the mainstream media.
See new article: Climategate update.
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The Sun has lost its spots – part 4.
September 17, 2010
I check the status of solar activity and sunspots regularly – usually once a day, just a quick check, along with several other things I’m interested in.
I’ve also had a few related blog posts:
The sun isn’t as completely spotless as it was a year ago, but spotless days are still occurring – and, according to a new study discussed in Science, sunspots may soon disappear for decades.
The study is also discussed in a Financial Post article by Lawrence Solomon:
If this study proves out – and it is consistent with other studies and indicators – we are likely faced with declining global temperatures rather than global warming.
And that would not be good – far more people suffer and die as a result of cold than of heat. Extended periods of cold would have an adverse affect on crops. Frigid winters and cold summers during the Dalton Minimum, which lasted from about 1790 to 1830, resulted in massive crop failures, famine and death. The Maunder Minimum, also known as the Little Ice Age, lasted for about 70 years, from about 1645 to 1715, and “was marked by bitter cold, widespread crop failures, and severe human privation.”¹ The Dalton and Maunder Minimum were periods of low solar activity and low sunspot count.
The sun has not fully escaped the solar minimum between solar cycles 23 and 24. A typical solar minimum will see 486 days without sunspots. Since 2004, there has been 809 blank days, 41 so far in 2010, and the most recent just in the past week. If scientists were to use the telescopes of the Dalton or Maunder Minimum, the number of blank days would likely be quite a bit higher and many of the recent sunspots would not have been counted.
What do you think about the possibility of a colder future?
Of course, some may say that for long term forecasting, one would have just as much fortune depending upon the Old Farmer’s Almanac. Ironically, though, sunspots are taken into consideration in the Old Farmer’s Almanac forecasts.
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