Update: Prof Ian Enting from University of Melbourne has provided a detailed, point-by-point critique of Heaven and Earth. You can download the 46-page PDF here (version 2.0).
Edit: The Australian newspaper has published an article on Brook vs Plimer (see here).
Today I attended the formal launch of Professor Ian Plimer’s new book “Heaven and Earth” (held in the historic balcony room of South Australia’s Parliament House). Ian had kindly sent me an invitation and I thought it a good opportunity to get a summary of his recent opinion, straight from the horse’s mouth. The book went on sale a few days before, and having been lent a copy, I’d read through it on-and-off over the last few days. Here is what the blurb suggests the book achieves:
The Earth is an evolving dynamic system. Current changes in climate, sea level and ice are within variability. Atmospheric CO2 is the lowest for 500 million years. Climate has always been driven by the Sun, the Earth’s orbit and plate tectonics and the oceans, atmosphere and life respond. Humans have made their mark on the planet, thrived in warm times and struggled in cool times. The hypothesis tha humans can actually change climate is unsupported by evidence from geology, archaeology, history and astronomy. The hypothesis is rejected. A new ignorance fills the yawning spiritual gap in Western society. Climate change politics is religious fundamentalism masquerading as science. Its triumph is computer models unrelated to observations in nature. There has been no critical due diligence of the science of climate change, dogma dominates, sceptics are pilloried and 17th Century thinking promotes prophets of doom, guilt and penance. When plate tectonics ceases and the world runs out of new rocks, there will be a tipping point and irreversible climate change. Don’t wait up.
I’ve been critical of Ian’s views before (see here and here). In short, my view was that Ian’s assertions about man’s role in climate change were naive, reflected a poor understanding of climate science, and relied on recycled and distorted arguments that had been repeatedly refuted. Ian and I have regularly ‘debated‘ on this issue, so I’m probably more familiar than most with his lines of argument. (I actually think it’s rather silly to debate the science, because this the role of the scientific community as a whole, and in doing so they’ve reached a view that this is a serious problem — but one-on-one debate is what the media demands.) Anyway, after reading the 500+ page tome that is H+E, I find that nothing has fundamentally changed.
Plimer tackles literally hundreds of lines of argument in his book. He claims that mainstream science – including the ‘experts’ in each area (those that focus on particular focused questions within narrow discipline areas) are ALL wrong – every argument, every one of those scientists. I quote (from a recent Adelaide Advertiser article on the book): Professor Plimer said his book would “knock out every single argument we hear about climate change”, to prove that global warming is a cycle of the Earth. “It’s got nothing to do with the atmosphere, it’s about what happens in the galaxy. You’ve got to look at the whole solar system and, most importantly, we look back in time.”
There are a lot of uncertainties in science, and it is indeed likely that the current consensus on some points of climate science is wrong, or at least sufficiently uncertain that we don’t know anything much useful about processes or drivers. But EVERYTHING? Or even most things? Take 100 lines of evidence, discard 5 of them, and you’re still left with 95 and large risk management problem. It’s an unscientific and disingenuous claim. As is his oft repeated assertion that a single apparently contradictory piece of information axiomatically overturns all other lines of evidence. Plimer apparently thinks Popperian falsification is the dominant deductive modus operandi in the natural sciences. I’ve got other news for him (I’m happy to email people my full article from BioScience if they email me a request).
Ian Plimer’s book is a case study in how not to be objective. Decide on your position from the outset, and then seek out all the facts that apparently support your case, and discard or ignore all of those that contravene it. He quotes a couple of thousand peer-reviewed scientific papers when mounting specific arguments. What Ian doesn’t say is that the vast majority of these authors have considered the totality of evidence on the topic of human-induced global warming and conclude that it is real and a problem. Some researchers have show that the Earth has been hotter before, and that more CO2 has been present in the atmosphere in past ages. Yes, quite — this is an entirely uncontroversial viewpoint. What is relevant now is the rate of climate change, the specific causes, and its impact on modern civilisation that is dependent, for agricultural and societal security, on a relatively stable climate. Ian pushes mainstream science far out of context, again and again.
Ian also claims that a huge body of scientific evidence — indeed, whole disciplines such as geology and astronomy — have been ignored. This is an extraordinary proposition and quite at odds with the published literature, as reviewed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I wonder if Ian has ever read their reports to find out what they actually do say. Terms like ‘solar’ and ‘volcano’ get frequent mentions, and there is a whole chapter on ‘paleoclimate’. Ian’s stated view of climate science is that a vast number of extremely well respected scientists and a whole range of specialist disciplines have fallen prey to delusional self interest and become nothing more than unthinking ideologues. Plausible to conspiracy theorists, perhaps, but hardly a sane world view — and insulting to all those genuinely committed to real science.
There is another important general point about the book. In the final chapter (pg 473), Ian quotes Charles Babbage; this quote is relevant to the thrust of his book, and underscores to me why it is so distorted. Babbage outlined three criteria for detecting non-science: trimming, cooking and forgery. Here is a useful description of what Babbage said:
“Trimming “consists of clipping off little bits here and there from those observations which differ most in excess from the mean, and in sticking them on to those which are too small.” Babbage believed trimming was not a serious threat to the search for truth because it merely reinforced the average results and eliminated some odd outlying data. In contemporary clinical research, however, rare adverse effects can be literally a matter of life and death. Thus, clinical investigators today are not so complacent on this point.
Cooking is the selective reporting of a group of results, picking out the data from among several measurements that most supports the desired conclusion. Babbage had in mind the actions of a single investigator, but selective reporting might also draw concern as a cause of publication bias. Is an investigator who does not report the results of a study with a negative finding committing fraud? This is a question that has not yet been answered by the research community.
Blatant forgery, as in reporting measurements on imaginary patients, was for Babbage the most nefarious type of fraud. Yet as medical research and its relationship to the pharmaceutical industry and to consumers has grown more complex, it has become more difficult to clearly define investigator fraud. Medical professor and ethicist Robert Levine defines “fraud” as “the deliberate reporting in the scientific literature or at scientific meetings of ‘facts’ that the reporter knows are unsubstantiated.” But the scientific community, Levine says, has not yet agreed on how to distinguish between “felonies and misdemeanors” in the context of research misconduct.”
Trimming might include surreptitiously deleting outliers that do not fit with models or theory. Cooking is good old cherry-picking, a la the “1998 was the hottest year on record and so the Earth has cooled since” meme. Forgery is typified by Fig 3 in the Introduction of Plimer’s book. Guess where that came from?
Here (first edition of the Great Global Warming Swindle). This is the original version of his Fig 3:
The above figure contains fabricated data, as can be seen in this comparison (Ian used the purple version):
I wonder what happened to the last 20-odd years of warming in Ian’s plot, and where did all that smoothing and flattening come from? There are numerous other examples of Babbage’s misdemeanours in the book. (A bunch more are listed below).
Ian says that creationists use all three tricks — I’d agree. But he then says that the IPCC uses at least two of them, and rants on for a few pages as to why. But of course herein is the great irony of Plimer’s position: a rogue accuses others of what he is most guilty. The pseudo-sceptics of climate science, like the tobacco lobby, liberally undertake all three malpractices to convince their audience of their position. Their twisted logic goes something like this: We know we do it, so surely the ‘other side’ (climate scientists, IPCC etc.) must do it too! Of course, the other side deny that they do it, so we must deny as well. And so it goes on.
The irony of the distortion of Babbage seems to be lost on Ian. Or perhaps it’s all part of the illusionist’s box of magic.
Ian’s book contains over 2,000 references to the scientific literature, although the most cited journal by far is Energy and Environment. What the unsuspecting reader might not realise, however, is that a large number of the scientists he cites in footnotes would agree with the mainstream consensus — just a casual look turns up names like Broeker, Alley, Barnosky, Rampino, Lambeck, Royer, Berner, etc. (even Brook, heh, heh). It’s all about the context, and Ian is not averse to implicit extrapolation…
Here are some notes on the numerous figures contained in the book (see comments above on Fig 3):
Fig 1 — Contrasts actual yearly temperatures to mean model projections (not individual, variable, simulation runs) — and doesn’t include the data beyond the low point in January 2008. This is comparing apples and orange (illustrating a complete lack of understanding of stochastic modelling) and it’s trimming to boot (elsewhere in the book, data up to early 2009 is included, so why not here?). Edit: Apparently this figure, originally created by John Christy, is scooting around the net.
Fig 8 — No citation, I have no idea where this weird temperature reconstruction of the last few thousand years comes from (it puports to show a systematic decline in temperature), but it isn’t from the science literature.
Fig 11 — The lower figure is not Europe, as claimed, it is central England (see section “Central England is not the world!” in link).
Fig 15 — Sunspots and temp correlation — this is the UNCORRECTED version of the Friis-Christensen and Lassen study with mathematical errors retained (for that link, see section entitled “Temperature matches solar activity exactly!”). See also this BoM rebuttal. Was the corrected version rather too inconvenient?
He makes an argument at one point that volcanoes could be the cause of rising CO2 (rather strangely, after trying to convince the audience that CO2 doesn’t change climate — one wonders why he then bothers about volcanoes, since this trace gas is apparently unimportant anyway). He’s claimed this before, but doesn’t seem to want to listen to the facts.
Fig 23 — A cartoon diagram of glacial-interglacial temperatures with no citation — why not use the real data, and why hide the fact that these are polar, not global, temperatures?
Fig 24 — That notorious cartoon plot of CO2 vs temperature throughout the Phanerozoic, purporting to show no relationship. Hmmm — that’s a rather strange source for a geological reference…
Fig 40 — A sea surface temperature plot with no citation, so I have no idea where this data come from. Yet it is flat and the one from Fig 38 is rising. Why the difference? Never explained.
Fig 42 and 49 — UAH satellite temperature PRIOR to the bias adjustment for satellite drift that caused it to erroneously show no trend! Was this incorrect series more convenient to his argument that there as been almost no warming over the past 25 years?
Fig 44 — Says 98% of greenhouse effect comes from water vapour — errr, no.
Fig 52 — Plots chemical measures of CO2, fluctuating between 300 to 450 ppm over two centuries and as much as 120 ppm over 10 years — did he bother to work out implications of this? (literally hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon released and sequestered again, within a few years, without anyone ever noticing where it came from or where it went)
Fig 54 — This seems to be the original Mann et al. 1999 hockey stick (not updated 2008 version or 2007 IPCC mutli-proxy version) — but with the uncertainty bounds deleted. Plimer then (and throughout the book, in fact), claims that climate scientists ignore uncertainty. Yes, well…
Pg 491 he says: “Even if the IPCC’s high “climate sensitivity” to CO2 were correct, disaster would not be likely to follow. The peer-reviewed literature is near-unanimous in not predicting climate catastrophe. 2304” Ref 2304 is Schulte, K.-M. 2008: Scientific consensus on climate change? E&E 19:281-286. Ahh, you’ve got to chuckle.
Pg 492, says DDT ban killed 40 million children before the UN ended it. Is that really the best he can do to discredit environmentalism?
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Update: Tim Lambert continues the page-by-page debunking here: The science is missing from Ian Plimer’s “Heaven and Earth”
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The launch ended with a statement of conviction from the master of ceremonies that this book will become a classic, alongside the other great works of modern science. Well, it may well be held up as an example for the future. An example of just how deluded and misrepresentative the psuedo-sceptical war against science really was in the first decade of the 21st century.
Brave New Climate 
1,053 replies on “Ian Plimer – Heaven and Earth”
On the CRU “storm in a teacup” – have a look at other opinions to those of our resident denier “Vangel”
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack/
http://www.skepticalscience.com/What-do-the-hacked-CRU-emails-tell-us.html
http://www.desmogblog.com/climategate-perspective-featuring-isaac-newton
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/11/on_those_stolen_cru_emails.php
I prefer to ignore the excuses and to look at the evidence. On that front the evidence of misconduct is very clear.
Here is Trenberth
“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming, and it is a travesty that we can’t. The [government satellite radiation data] shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. . . .”
He was the guy who stood up and said that there was a link between AGW and hurricane activity even as the IPCC had admitted that the evidence showed otherwise.
How about Phil Jones? He is the guy who destroyed the raw temperature data because he did not have filing cabinets. Dr. Jones writes, “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” This is not subject to misinterpretation because the computer code, which had been hidden from view shows exactly what was done. In the code we read:
“; Plots 24 yearly maps of calibrated (PCR-infilled or not) MXD reconstructions
; of growing season temperatures. Uses “corrected” MXD – but shouldn’t usually
; plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to
; the real temperatures.”
Jones may claim that his e-mail was ‘taken out of context’ but the programmer makes it very clear what was going on. Since the dendro data diverges after 1960, the program will turncate the data at that point and the surface data supplied by Dr. Jones will take its place. The problem with that is that the Jones global temperature diverges from the US record and Jones has no way of proving that his curve is real because he claims to have destroyed the original raw data supplied by various countries.
So what we have, no matter how you try and spin it, is an artificial construction that is not supported by available data. That construction was created by people who have already admitted to making all kinds of ‘adjustments’ and destroying records rather than have them verified by independent outsiders. In case you are looking for motivation, let me point out that Dr. Jones has received more than $20 million in grants and has been able to travel to exotic locations, stay in five star hotels, make paid speeches, etc., for most of his career because of the AGW myth. Had that myth been exposed he would have to make due with a lot less money and a great deal less prestige.
And let me point out that all of the problems revealed by the leak of the e-mails and code were discovered by the Wegman review of MBH98/MBH99. Wegman noted that there was a closed clique of around 40 individuals that wrote most of the papers on which the warming story was based and that the group was very poor at statistical methods because it made some very obvious errors. He noted that the review process was not independent and that data that should have been transparent was withheld from other scientists who wanted to verify or disprove the results. The Wegman testimony in front of Congress is available for review and makes very good reading that sheds a great deal more light than the people that are trying to cover up the problem.
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[…] getting air-time given the special interests in this debate. Go here to see climate scientists Barry Brook and Ian Enting spending their valuable time eradicating much of the garbage in Plimer’s […]
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http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack-context/
Real Climate puts those supposedly “shocking” emails into context.
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Just downloaded all the e-mails that got stolen from the UN and started reading them to verify what we were being told by the media, they are real and criminal. AGW was changed to “climate change” why? its hard to sell AGW when we have had cooler summers and colder Winters. Ice ages happen, hot spells happen, and fraud happens
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vangel: Typical gish gallop comments. Settle down and look at, for
example, Trenberth. Read the paper RC links to:
Click to access EnergyDiagnostics09final.pdf
Great paper. My view of Trenberth’s integrity (I hadn’t read
much of his in the past) is rock solid as a result of my reading this paper. He
is doing exactly what good scientists should be doing when working on
something as important is global warming. Looking
to cross the t’s and dot the i’s. What does his paper say? That the ultimate
destination of the extra energy which has arrived since about 2003 isn’t
well understood. I’ve watched accountants solve this kind of problem
in the past. They usually just invest a transfer and everything balances!
Trenberth wants to do better than that. He should be applauded.
Vangel, can you present a suitable theory and energy budget
using only natural forcings that explains the rapid warming post
1980 and the behaviour of the past decade? Can you explain
any part of this behaviour … quantitatively … with data …
… even a little bit?
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Great paper. My view of Trenberth’s integrity (I hadn’t read much of his in the past) is rock solid as a result of my reading this paper. He is doing exactly what good scientists should be doing when working on something as important is global warming.
A good scientist does not hold a press conference and talk about links between AGW and hurricane activity when the actual studies do not support him. He sticks with the evidence. I refer you to the letter written by Christopher Landsea, which explained why he resigned from the IPCC. (http://www.climatechangefacts.info/ClimateChangeDocuments/LandseaResignationLetterFromIPCC.htm)
An Open Letter to the Community from Chris Landsea (Resignation Letter of Chris Landsea from IPCC)
Dear colleagues,
After some prolonged deliberation, I have decided to withdraw from
participating in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC). I am withdrawing because I have come to view the
part of the IPCC to which my expertise is relevant as having become
politicized. In addition, when I have raised my concerns to the IPCC
leadership, their response was simply to dismiss my concerns.
With this open letter to the community, I wish to explain the basis for my
decision and bring awareness to what I view as a problem in the IPCC
process. The IPCC is a group of climate researchers from around the world
that every few years summarize how climate is changing and how it may be
altered in the future due to manmade global warming. I had served both as an
author for the Observations chapter and a Reviewer for the 2nd Assessment
Report in 1995 and the 3rd Assessment Report in 2001, primarily on the topic
of tropical cyclones (hurricanes and typhoons). My work on hurricanes, and
tropical cyclones more generally, has been widely cited by the IPCC. For the
upcoming AR4, I was asked several weeks ago by the Observations chapter Lead
Author—Dr. Kevin Trenberth—to provide the writeup for Atlantic
hurricanes. As I had in the past, I agreed to assist the IPCC in what I
thought was to be an important, and politically-neutral determination of
what is happening with our climate.
Shortly after Dr. Trenberth requested that I draft the Atlantic hurricane
section for the AR4’s Observations chapter, Dr. Trenberth participated in a
press conference organized by scientists at Harvard on the topic “Experts to
warn global warming likely to continue spurring more outbreaks of intense
hurricane activity” along with other media interviews on the topic. The
result of this media interaction was widespread coverage that directly
connected the very busy 2004 Atlantic hurricane season as being caused by
anthropogenic greenhouse gas warming occurring today. Listening to and
reading transcripts of this press conference and media interviews, it is
apparent that Dr. Trenberth was being accurately quoted and summarized in
such statements and was not being misrepresented in the media. These media
sessions have potential to result in a widespread perception that global
warming has made recent hurricane activity much more severe.
I found it a bit perplexing that the participants in the Harvard press
conference had come to the conclusion that global warming was impacting
hurricane activity today. To my knowledge, none of the participants in that
press conference had performed any research on hurricane variability, nor
were they reporting on any new work in the field. All previous and current
research in the area of hurricane variability has shown no reliable,
long-term trend up in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones,
either in the Atlantic or any other basin. The IPCC assessments in 1995 and
2001 also concluded that there was no global warming signal found in the
hurricane record.
Moreover, the evidence is quite strong and supported by the most recent
credible studies that any impact in the future from global warming upon
hurricane will likely be quite small. The latest results from the
Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (Knutson and Tuleya, Journal of
Climate, 2004) suggest that by around 2080, hurricanes may have winds and
rainfall about 5% more intense than today. It has been proposed that even
this tiny change may be an exaggeration as to what may happen by the end of
the 21st Century (Michaels, Knappenberger, and Landsea, Journal of Climate,
2005, submitted).
It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an
unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global
warming. Given Dr. Trenberth’s role as the IPCC’s Lead Author responsible
for preparing the text on hurricanes, his public statements so far outside
of current scientific understanding led me to concern that it would be very
difficult for the IPCC process to proceed objectively with regards to the
assessment on hurricane activity. My view is that when people identify
themselves as being associated with the IPCC and then make pronouncements
far outside current scientific understandings that this will harm the
credibility of climate change science and will in the longer term diminish
our role in public policy.
My concerns go beyond the actions of Dr. Trenberth and his colleagues to how
he and other IPCC officials responded to my concerns. I did caution Dr.
Trenberth before the media event and provided him a summary of the current
understanding within the hurricane research community. I was disappointed
when the IPCC leadership dismissed my concerns when I brought up the
misrepresentation of climate science while invoking the authority of the
IPCC. Specifically, the IPCC leadership said that Dr. Trenberth was speaking
as an individual even though he was introduced in the press conference as an
IPCC lead author; I was told that that the media was exaggerating or
misrepresenting his words, even though the audio from the press conference
and interview tells a different story (available on the web directly); and
that Dr. Trenberth was accurately reflecting conclusions from the TAR, even
though it is quite clear that the TAR stated that there was no connection
between global warming and hurricane activity. The IPCC leadership saw
nothing to be concerned with in Dr. Trenberth’s unfounded pronouncements to
the media, despite his supposedly impartial important role that he must
undertake as a Lead Author on the upcoming AR4.
It is certainly true that “individual scientists can do what they wish in
their own rights”, as one of the folks in the IPCC leadership suggested.
Differing conclusions and robust debates are certainly crucial to progress
in climate science. However, this case is not an honest scientific
discussion conducted at a meeting of climate researchers. Instead, a
scientist with an important role in the IPCC represented himself as a Lead
Author for the IPCC has used that position to promulgate to the media and
general public his own opinion that the busy 2004 hurricane season was
caused by global warming, which is in direct opposition to research written
in the field and is counter to conclusions in the TAR. This becomes
problematic when I am then asked to provide the draft about observed
hurricane activity variations for the AR4 with, ironically, Dr. Trenberth as
the Lead Author for this chapter. Because of Dr. Trenberth’s pronouncements,
the IPCC process on our assessment of these crucial extreme events in our
climate system has been subverted and compromised, its neutrality lost.
While no one can “tell” scientists what to say or not say (nor am I
suggesting that), the IPCC did select Dr. Trenberth as a Lead Author and
entrusted to him to carry out this duty in a non-biased, neutral point of
view. When scientists hold press conferences and speak with the media, much
care is needed not to reflect poorly upon the IPCC. It is of more than
passing interest to note that Dr. Trenberth, while eager to share his views
on global warming and hurricanes with the media, declined to do so at the
Climate Variability and Change Conference in January where he made several
presentations. Perhaps he was concerned that such speculation—though
worthy in his mind of public pronouncements—would not stand up to the
scrutiny of fellow climate scientists.
I personally cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I
view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being
scientifically unsound. As the IPCC leadership has seen no wrong in Dr.
Trenberth’s actions and have retained him as a Lead Author for the AR4, I
have decided to no longer participate in the IPCC AR4.
Sincerely,
Chris Landsea
17 January 2005
It has been clear that Trenberth cannot handle the conflicts between the IPCC goals and the empirical observations. Instead of coming clean about the issues that are in doubt he pretends that everything is settled and sates that the science is very clear even as it is obvious that the models are wrong and cannot predict events any better than a coin flip.
Trenberth needs to resign from the IPCC and the whole process needs to be cleaned up. Instead of keeping legitimate papers out of the IPCC reviews he and other lead authors need to be able to explain why those papers have views that should be ignored. For the record, Trenberth was wrong about hurricane activity just as he was about the predicted warming.
And let us get this straight. In the paper that you cite Trenberth admits that the science is far from settled and that we have a long way to go before we can figure out what is going on. That supports the position of the sceptics, who have pointed out the obvious about the inadequacy of the IPCC models and the AGW position. This means that there can’t possibly be a consensus and that there has to be honest debate about the issue of climate change.
Let me get back to the credibility issue once again and go over some of the revelations from the e-mail dump.
We can begin with Trenberth, who writes to Michael Mann last month, “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. … Our observing system is inadequate.” Yet, RC and the other AGW sites have been denying the cooling trend.
Let us move on to Michael Mann, who responded to the McIntyre critique of Briffa’s Yamal fiasco by suggesting, “Perhaps we’ll do a simple update to the Yamal post… As we all know, this isn’t about truth at all, its about plausibly deniable accusations.” Tom Wigley sees the problem and asks, “how does Keith explain the McIntyre plot that compares Yamal-12 with Yamal-all? And how does he explain the apparent “selection” of the less well-replicated chronology rather that the later (better replicated) chronology?”
Of course, Briffa is not the only one playing with the data and saying the wrong things. In a 2002 e-mail regarding Mann’s paper, he writes to Ed Cook, “I have just read this lettter – and I think it is crap. I am sick to death of Mann stating his reconstruction represents the tropical area just because it contains a few (poorly temperature representative) tropical series. He is just as capable of regressing these data again any other “target” series , such as the increasing trend of self-opinionated verbage he has produced over the last few years , and … (better say no more).” Cook agrees and writes back, “We both know the probable flaws in Mike’s recon, particularly as it relates to the tropical stuff. Your response is also why I chose not to read the published version of his letter. It would be too aggravating….It is puzzling to me that a guy as bright as Mike would be so unwilling to evaluate his own work a bit more objectively.” So these guys know that they are producing the wrong results but don’t care as long as it serves the agenda. How is that credible?
As the Tom Wrigley e-mail shows, they are not beyond changing the data. “So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 C, then this would be significant for the global mean — but we’d still have to explain the land blip. I’ve chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of these).”
I could go on but I trust that I have made my point. The e-mails show a great deal of doubt and uncertainty that is not being discussed in the IPCC review. They show data manipulation. They show a conspiracy to violate the FOI laws. They show a corruption of the peer review process. They show the use of faulty methods to hide divergences that do not support the AGW argument. They show a corrupt group of arrogant individuals that sees the warming movement as a way to get well paid and get a lot of attention. They are not credible. They are criminals and they belong in jail.
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Real Climate puts those supposedly “shocking” emails into context.
Given the fact that the e-mails implicate the RC contributors I see nothing credible in their response. You can’t spin your way around e-mails that clearly state that the conclusions hyped as evidence of warming are not robust and that they were constructed by hiding divergences that were not properly disclosed. You can’t spin your way out of e-mails that tell people to violate the FOI laws and to modify data to provide the desired results.
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New report before the Copenhaged meeting explains how the climate change impacts are exceeding those suggested by the last IPCC report.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/video/2009/11/24/2752509.htm
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“Climate changing faster than expected : scientists”
According to this report the sea level has risen 5cm over the past 15 years – 80% higher than predicted in the 2001 IPCC report.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/11/25/2752579.htm?site=news
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Vangel: We can differ in our views of Trenberth, but was it just me or
did anybody else notice that you forgot to answer my
substantive question. Where is your model which
explains the climate change of the past few decades? Does
it have CO2 in it? How about water vapour? Clouds? Sunshine?
Albedo? Aerosols? Methane?
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Vangel: We can differ in our views of Trenberth, but was it just me or did anybody else notice that you forgot to answer my substantive question. Where is your model which explains the climate change of the past few decades?
Which decades? It was cooling from 1940 to 1975 although CO2 emissions were exploding. It got so bad that people were worried about a new ice age and scientists were giving interviews about catastrophic cooling. Somewhere in my archives I actually have Lowell Ponte’s book plus articles about the coming ice age from popular and scientific magazines.
Does it have CO2 in it? How about water vapour? Clouds? Sunshine? Albedo? Aerosols? Methane?
I don’t need a model, thank you because a coin flip is better at making predictions than the best that the IPCC has. All I need to do is to look to the scientific literature and I can find plenty of empirical data that shows that the effects of the sun trump those of CO2. I can look at the literature and find out how the change in ENSO conditions impacts temperature change over the short term.
My point still stands. You have no empirical data that can show that CO2 emissions have a material effect on temperature trends. I have actually pointed out that you have no credible global surface data that would allow anyone to come up with an ‘average’ even if the concept of average global temperature made sense. Phil Jones has already admitted to destroying the raw data prior to 1980 and given the revelations in the released code there is a significant credibility issue for the CRU.
The bottom line is that no matter how you try to spin this issue, the CRU “evidence” for AGW is tainted. That means that all assumptions that use CRU data have to be re-evaluated in a transparent manner. That will suit most of the sceptics because once the ‘argument is settled,’ excuse is exposed for the fraud that it is the honest evaluation of the data will show just how bad the ‘science’ of AGW is.
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“Climate changing faster than expected : scientists”
According to this report the sea level has risen 5cm over the past 15 years – 80% higher than predicted in the 2001 IPCC report.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/11/25/2752579.htm?site=news
First, the satellite measurements show that the sea level increase has now stalled. Levels today are not any higher than they were in 2006. (http://sealevel.colorado.edu/)
Second, even if the recent slowdown does not persist and the previous trend continued, a 33 cm increase in sea level is nothing catastrophic. Do you really think that if Al Gore believed his warning about 20 foot increases in sea level he would have bought a waterfront condominium?
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New report before the Copenhaged meeting explains how the climate change impacts are exceeding those suggested by the last IPCC report.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/video/2009/11/24/2752509.htm
The report’s timing sucks.
First, there is no ‘accelerating global warming trend.’ Even the AGW proponents have admitted that the warming trend ended in 1998. The University of Colorado data shows that sea levels are not increasing any faster than they were the previous two centuries and the increase seems to have temporarily stalled. http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
Second, the IPCC modellers are now talking about no warming trend for another decade or more. (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7191/pdf/nature06921.pdf)
Third, the ice melting claim conflicts with other studies.
(http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009GL039186.shtml)
In their GRL paper referenced above, Marco Tedesco and Andrew Monaghan state, “A 30-year minimum Antarctic snowmelt record occurred during austral summer 2008–2009 according to spaceborne microwave observations for 1980–2009.”
And then there is the very simple but reliable eye test. Does this look to you as if there is an ice melting crisis?
I suggest that it won’t take more than a day or two before the latest bit of propaganda gets discredited.
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@Vangel, doyen of the illiterate and innumerate:
you allege in your farcical meanderings that IPCC modellers “are now talking about no warming trend for another decade or more”. You pretend to reference a paper in fact. But what you reference does not of course support what you and your ilk spew out as Big Coal and Oil shills (paid by the USA or by ex-KGB man Putin, perhaps?) day by day, viz.:
“Our results suggest that global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic warming.”
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you allege in your farcical meanderings that IPCC modellers “are now talking about no warming trend for another decade or more”. You pretend to reference a paper in fact. But what you reference does not of course support what you and your ilk spew out as Big Coal and Oil shills (paid by the USA or by ex-KGB man Putin, perhaps?) day by day, viz.:
“Our results suggest that global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic warming.”
I suggest that you pay attention. Latif was very clear that he does not expect any warming for more than a decade and everyone is now trying to come up with a way to explain the cooling trend since 1998. No amount of spinning can change the fact that the models failed to predict the cooling trend.
And I would not talk about shills being paid by special interests if I were you. It is the AGW supporters that get all of the funding from the UN, governments and corporations looking to cash in by writing the latest environmental legislation that will transfer wealth from the taxpayer to governments and corporations. (In case you haven’t noticed, there are more than $100 billion per year in subsidies for alternative energy projects and hundreds of billions are traded on the carbon markets.) As for money spent on research, the AGW side gets about 3,000 times more than the sceptics.
Frankly, I could care less if Australians choose to go back to the dark ages and cut their energy use by 50% or more. The poorer that Australians, Europeans or Americans become the more there is left for the rational in other countries. As for me personally, I actually benefit greatly from some of these alternative initiatives because they have made my REE investments far more profitable than I could ever have imagined when I purchased them. While I expected a 1,000% return by the time I sell I will gladly take 10,000% or more if the greens have their way and create an even bigger demand for the products that my companies have to sell.
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There’s some fairly heated debate from here up! Remember that all human behavior is rational (even though it may appear irrational), and we should not assume anything about peoples preferences. A climate sceptic and an anti climate sceptic behavior is designed to serve a purpose and reflects a preference rather than a truth. Uncovering this and explaining the preference is the best part. I refer anyone interested to a Professor Landsburg and his excellent book called the Armchair Economist. The context of this climate debate is very much an economics argument. Following the money is the easiest way to see through the fog of reason and politics. I’m content that the climate debate looks like just another exercise in economics. We have nothing to fear.. the sun will rise and the sun will set and human beings will continue to act rationally.
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Vangel: Judging by your comments about sea level being no higher than
2006, you would fail Statistics 101. And your Nature link was to a paper
about surface temperatures. There’s plenty of other places for energy
to work its magic. Melting ice, raising ocean temperatures, even down
below 700m. Read the Trenberth paper, read the Copenhagen Diagnosis,
see if you can recognise the difference between deep and detailed understanding and your own attempts at point scoring with out of context
citation and ridiculous highlighting of particular points in a statistical
distribution.
Click to access EnergyDiagnostics09final.pdf
http://copenhagendiagnosis.org/
Time to do something useful. Bye.
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Vangel: Judging by your comments about sea level being no higher than 2006, you would fail Statistics 101.
I would do a lot better than Michael Mann and the people that you keep citing. Those are the people that Dr. Wegman and his committee of statisticians found were incompetent in advanced statistician techniques. (http://republicans.energycommerce.house.gov/108/home/07142006_Wegman_Report.pdf)
And it is clear that sea levels, which have been brought up in the postings to which I have been responding, are not going up at rapid rates. (http://sealevel.colorado.edu/)
And your Nature link was to a paper about surface temperatures.
It was about surface temperatures. It shows that the IPCC modellers are stumped because temperatures have not gone up for more than a decade, something that their models failed to predict. Even that voice of AGW, the Nude Scientist, reported on Dr. Latif’s dillema. He pointed out that the effect of the AMO was much stronger than that of CO2, which is interesting given the lack of acknowledgement that the AMO was contributing to warming since the mid 1970s.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17742-worlds-climate-could-cool-first-warm-later.html
There’s plenty of other places for energy to work its magic. Melting ice, raising ocean temperatures, even down below 700m. Read the Trenberth paper, read the Copenhagen Diagnosis, see if you can recognise the difference between deep and detailed understanding and your own attempts at point scoring with out of context citation and ridiculous highlighting of particular points in a statistical distribution.
Trenberth merely admits to ignorance of the drivers of climate change and is looking for factors to explain why the models failed. He is looking for a way out but can’t seem to find one. I guess that he should have listened to Landsea instead of Mann. While he would have been poorer at least he would have a reputation that was intact rather than being seen as a fraud or a naive fool.
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In case any of you warmers missed it, it is now evident that the NZ data has also been adjusted to lower past readings and inflate current ones.
http://briefingroom.typepad.com/the_briefing_room/2009/11/breaking-nzs-niwa-accused-of-cru-style-temperature-faking.html
I expect more of these kinds of revelations in the weeks to come, particularly if we have a transparent investigation of the process that created the temperature profiles and the IPCC assessment reviews.
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Vangel you may like to read a more accurate commentary on that NZ issue:
http://hot-topic.co.nz/nz-sceptics-lie-about-temp-records-try-to-smear-top-scientist/
“Unfortunately for him, and for the credibility of any of the members of the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition, Treadgold’s approach to the issue is ignorant, his results meaningless, and he can have no excuse for not knowing he was wrong. Worse, Treadgold, Dunleavy and the rest of the NZ CSC seem determined to smear NZ’s best-known and most respected climatologist, Jim Salinger (who did much of the early work on NZ’s temperature record), based on little more than straightforward lies. “
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Vangel you may like to read a more accurate commentary on that NZ issue:
http://hot-topic.co.nz/nz-sceptics-lie-about-temp-records-try-to-smear-top-scientist/
“Unfortunately for him, and for the credibility of any of the members of the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition, Treadgold’s approach to the issue is ignorant, his results meaningless, and he can have no excuse for not knowing he was wrong. Worse, Treadgold, Dunleavy and the rest of the NZ CSC seem determined to smear NZ’s best-known and most respected climatologist, Jim Salinger (who did much of the early work on NZ’s temperature record), based on little more than straightforward lies. “
Nice try but the data speaks for itself. There is no warming in the raw temperatures; the warming is created when a signal is added to the station data as temperatures in the past are reduced and the present are increased.
The bottom line is a lack of credibility and certainty. To convince people that any of the proclamations are real will require an honest debate and access to both the data and the algorithms that created the reconstructions. And any changes will have to be justified and consistently applied.
For the record, Warwick Hughes explains how the Australian data was also biased. He points out that in 1986 Phil Jones and other researchers had examined 86 Australian stations. They rejected 46 of them. Of the 40 that were used 27 were short term stations whose records was truncated to eliminate any pre 1951 data. By doing so the data provided a warming trend that was not apparent if the full data set was used. Of the 13 long term stations 5 were in large cities and were biased by the UHI effect. By his convenient approach Dr. Jones managed to have Australia contribute a warming trend that is not readily apparent if the full data set were used. You can read all about it here. (http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=317)
Now you can try and spin the stories any way you want but you can’t change the fact that the available data does not support the temperature reconstruction graphs published by the IPCC. And without those graphs you have no claim of catastrophic warming and no way to get a public that is just catching on to buy into the AGW myth.
The clock is ticking and the desperation of the AGW industry is becoming more and more obvious. Dreams of becoming carbon millionaires are fading for many of the rent seekers who are going to find ways other than transfers from consumers and taxpayers for their income.
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Vangel: You keep citing stuff as if it supports your claims when it doesn’t. That probably works for you on Andrew Bolt’s blog but it won’t wash here.
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Geoff Russell:
Vangel: You keep citing stuff as if it supports your claims when it doesn’t. That probably works for you on Andrew Bolt’s blog but it won’t wash here.
Actually, I have pointed out the fact that science demands the research process be free of bias and fully transparent. Warmers have made many statements about AGW but have not pointed to any objective evidence to support their claims. All of the temperature reconstructions that show the false warming trend for the twentieth century come from ‘adjusted’ data that is unavailable for review and methods that have not been released for scrutiny.
No matter how you try to spin it you can’t point to a global data set that is free of adjustments or to metatadata that explains exactly which data points were adjusted and why. Without that data you cannot claim to have anything scientific that supports the AGW myth. Let me note that the code dumps now show that Briffa and Mann were hiding some very large divergences that were not included in the IPCC assessment process or the papers which were used to support the AR conclusions. The programs note the applications of very artificial ‘fudge factors,’ which even you can’t defend as scientific.
It is clear that what we have so far is a very large fraud that many of you fell for because you failed to do the necessary research and dig into the actual papers that have been available and known to contain very serious defects. That is your problem and your failing but do not make it worse by turning into a denier when the evidence of malfeasance is so clear.
And while you do some soul searching I suggest you go to the AGW proponent’s bible and look up the term ‘scientific method.’ If you do you will read the following condemnation of the IPCC and AGW tactics:
Another basic expectation is to document, archive and share all data and methodology so they are available for careful scrutiny by other scientists, thereby allowing other researchers the opportunity to verify results by attempting to reproduce them. This practice, called full disclosure, also allows statistical measures of the reliability of these data to be established.
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Vangel – Where is the data you ask – here it is.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/wheres-the-data/
No-one is hiding it as you imply.
Why have some of the hacked emails been strangely truncated?
Why has Trenberth’s paper been misrepresented?
Click to access EnergyDiagnostics09final.pdf
For further information on the true interpretations of the cherry picked emails, including their full context without the missing words people should read the above two posts from Real Climate.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack/#more-1853
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack-context/
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Vangel – Where is the data you ask – here it is.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/wheres-the-data/
No-one is hiding it as you imply.
Why have some of the hacked emails been strangely truncated?
Why has Trenberth’s paper been misrepresented?
Of course the data was hidden from the public and from independent researchers. In case you missed it, the e-mails clearly discuss destroying data rather than have outsiders look at it. The dendro data certainly did not include information past the selected arbitrary cut-off point, contrary to what RC may be claiming. And in case you missed it, CRU has ADMITTED to destroying the raw data that it used to create the reconstructed global temperature profile. Here is a sampling from the released e-mails:
[Deleted – my policy is not to reproduce any illegal emails on this website]
Does that sound like everything was available? And if it does, are you now saying that Jones lied about the destruction of the raw data?
As for Trenberth, I am not representing him. He admits in his paper that the state of knowledge is very poor. Of course, he is a lot more clear in his e-mail, where he states, [Deleted – my policy is not to reproduce any illegal emails on this website]
Instead of trying to make up excuses I suggest that you look at the evidence. CRU did not make the data available and Mann advised destroying data sets rather than comply with FOI requests. Given the fact that RC has been implicated I don’t see how you can expect them to be seen as a credible source by anyone who takes a rational approach.
For further information on the true interpretations of the cherry picked emails, including their full context without the missing words people should read the above two posts from Real Climate.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack/#more-1853
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack-context/
You can keep drinking the Kool-Aid if you wish but I doubt that many are going to go along with the lies spun by RC any longer. It is clear that the truth is now coming out and no amount of hand-waving and shouting will do anything to reverse the change in sentiment.
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Vangel and other deniers frothing at the mouth –
UAE-CRU are, sensibly, going to release their data for analysis by deniers and climate scientists alike. Obviously they are not worried about the scientific content.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/copenhagen-climate-change-confe/6678469/Climategate-University-of-East-Anglia-U-turn-in-climate-change-row.html
So – when you have finished your scientific analysis and can prove your libellous claims regarding scientific malpractice, I suggest, for your own sake as well as ours, that you moderate your manufactured outrage.
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UAE-CRU say 95% of data already released – the rest to follow
http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/2009/nov/homepagenews/CRUupdate
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it would seem the Copenhagen treaty will circumvent our Constitutions, there is a provision in it that will create a governing body that controls resources and markets in other words a world government, what dose this mean, well the loss of freedom yours and mine.
if you have common sense oppose Copenhagen, call you representatives and tell them not to ratify the treaty if our presidents signs it.
those e-mails prove there is a conspiracy against our planet. i would quote the e-mails, but it would be edited out, like the data in the climate models.
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It’s ‘government’ according to the definition of “direction; control; management; rule: the government of one’s conduct.”. What do you expect an internationally binding agreement to consist of — an anarchistic rabble?
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/10/janet_albrechtsen_warns_that_a.php
Anyway, no more time on this thread for me. You’re nothing more than a conspiratorial looney, “John Berns”, so begone with you and the rest of the foetid trolls who have infested this thread. I edit morons, not data.
Vangel, Berns, PeterW, JeffT, gianmarco, Wick: you’re all on moderation.
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cool icon at the right, typical of a highly educated elitist
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I’m just posting so I can see my cool elitist emotitron critter
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Cool
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Yep, the patience does kind of wear thin.
Even Nick Minchin has been quoted saying that climate change is a communist plot.
Problem is, there are people out there who believe him.
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I’m off too Barry – troll feeding is concluded :)
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Vangel and other deniers frothing at the mouth –
I think that you are using the term denier in the most inappropriate way, which is not surprising if one is losing a debate and does not have facts. From what I see it is your side that is denying the empirical data, which shows that the ‘warming’ comes from adjustments made to the raw data. The actual measurements show no appreciable warming since the 1930s for the US, NZ, Northern Europe, Australia, and most other places that I have looked at. It is your side that is or has been denying the fact that the Arctic has been warmer, that polar bear populations are larger, that global ice levels are not unusual, that the MWP existed, that hurricane activity is not correlated to global temperatures, that warming promotes biodiversity, etc., etc., etc.
UAE-CRU are, sensibly, going to release their data for analysis by deniers and climate scientists alike. Obviously they are not worried about the scientific content.
If they were not worried about the content they would not have denied requests for nearly a decade. And the fact that they have admitted to keeping their data secret means that they did not comply with the requirements of the scientific method. That makes all of their claims simple narratives.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/copenhagen-climate-change-confe/6678469/Climategate-University-of-East-Anglia-U-turn-in-climate-change-row.html
So – when you have finished your scientific analysis and can prove your libellous claims regarding scientific malpractice, I suggest, for your own sake as well as ours, that you moderate your manufactured outrage.
My ‘outrage’ is not made up. I am actually not outraged because I expected the fraud to be exposed and laid out how Jones was attempting to back away from the reconstructions. I believe that the first step was his 2008 paper on the UHI effect in China. By casting doubt on his own 1990 paper, which was the justification for ignoring the effects of urbanization and overestimating surface warming, he could claim to have simply made an error when he trusted Wang’s falsified China data. It actually may have worked had the e-mails not exposed his methods and if he had not responded immediately by giving interviews that established that the e-mails were legitimate.
And unlike most of you, I actually read Wegman’s conclusions, including his social network matrix. Anyone who read the conclusions is not surprised by the denro data and code scandal and fully knows that a proper reconstruction using the full data sets does not show the hockey stick that your side has been hyping up since 1998. We now know that Mann and Briffa used statistical tricks and that they can’t reproduce their results if they have to use the full data sets. We also know that their own proxies show a major divergence from the CRU data, proving that either the CRU data is not very good, that dendro proxies are unsuitable for the task they were tortured to perform, or a combination of both.
I have nothing to prove because I never used altered data and algorithms to produce temperature profiles that could not be reproduced. That was done by your side and it has a lot of explaining to do about how it can release the original data when it claimed that it has destroyed it just a few short days ago.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece
For the record, I do not believe that much of the data was destroyed because the CRU has made some recent modifications to the temperature data in which past periods have changed. That could not have happened if the data was actually missing.
You also have to keep in mind that this fiasco opens the door to a few very important issues. Now that the fraud has been established by e-mails and public statements admitting an attempt to violate the FOI Act and other national bodies have admitted that their temperature reconstructions are the result of adding an artificial warming signal that is not seen in the raw data there are several issues that the IPCC has to open up for debate. These include but are not limited to:
1. Re-examination of the CO2 concentration data in published literature. Why was the low number chosen for the 1800s when there were hundreds of papers that came up with concentrations that were significantly higher?
2. Re-examination about the validity of the ice core evaluation methods. While the methods support the sceptics by pointing out that the temperature increases came first and that CO2 concentrations followed, as would be expected by anyone who understood the solubility curves, the assumptions made to justify the analysis seem to be very thin.
3. Re-examination of the assumption about residency time of emitted CO2. The literature tends to come up with an average period of around a decade. The IPCC models assume ten times that number but do not have a credible explanation about why that figure is valid.
4. Re-examination of the feedback data. It is clear that all of the scary scenarios are driven by feedback assumptions because human emissions of CO2 have such a minor effect on temperature. If the feedback assumptions are invalid the whole case for reducing CO2 emissions falls apart. Dr. Lindzen has published a paper that has shown that at best there is no feedback but that it is most likely that the feedback is negative and that a doubling would only cause an increase of 0.3C to 0.6C.
5. A re-evaluation of the palaeoclimatology methods and data. Why do palaeoclimatologists include stripbark proxies even though the NRC and NSA have made it clear that they are inappropriate? Why are entire proxy sets like the Polar Urals and Yamal cores ignored after it is shown that they do not produce the ‘expected’ warming? Why are data sets cut off when they show temperatures going down? Why do palaeoclimatologists use proxies upside down to support a conclusion that the proxies obviously reject?
6. Why does the IPCC ignore legitimate papers that oppose the AGW theory? Why should incompetents like Michael Mann and Keith Briffa get to decide which papers should be excluded by pulling strings in the background?
7. Why is the amplitude of the UHI effect ignored when the bulk of the literature clearly establishes a bias on surface readings that exceed the claimed warming since the end of the LIA? Given the fact that the Jones 1990 paper has been discredited, why is the IPCC still using it as its foundation? And if Jones now admits that the UHI effect is twenty times stated in his original paper, why isn’t the global data set adjusted to account for it?
It is clear that the case for AGW has been exposed as the fraud that it obviously was to any rational person who had the time to look at the data. Now that the warmers can’t hide behind a false consensus they need to open up the issue for debate using real numbers and real science. Having been caught lying, it is up to them to regain trust by proving that their conclusions remain the same when the data and methods are opened up to scrutiny. From what I see, this fiasco vindicates Steve McIntyre, who had the story right all along even though he still remained a believer in warming for longer than a rational person would have. He caught Mann’s lies early on and withstood the personal attacks from the green lobby and the rent seekers. He kept working to expose errors in the GISS database, papers on Antarctic warming, papers that used the upside down sediment data, the Yandal scandal, etc. I think that the Norwegian Parliament should strip the Peace Prize from the IPCC and give it to him instead.
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Hi,
Copenhagen Disgrace
It’s outrageous that the document “Copenhagen Diagnosis” being distributed to all delegates by the organisers of the Copenhagen summit on climate change was co-authored by the great data fiddler and very dishonest Michael Mann!
Michael Mann has been ostracised by his peers. Why? Because he fudged widely accepted data on global temperatures to produce his dishonest “hockey stick” used by the gross exaggerator, Al Gore.
For many years, temperature data for the last 1,000 years has been analysed by experts who have agreed on the variations shown which include the Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age. Mann’s massaging of the data intentionally did away with these to produce his rigged “hockey stick” chart.
In 1996, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) “Second Assessment Summary for Policy Makers” chart on global temperatures included the Medieval Warming, the Little Ice Age and late Twentieth Century warming. However, in 2001, the IPPC uncritically adopted Michael Mann’s fraudulent data and in their 2001 Climate Change Report included a totally different chart using Michael Mann’s rigged figures and showing his ridiculous “hockey stick”.
Following widespread condemnation of Michel Mann’s dishonesty(a), subsequent IPCC reports have included charts omitting the “hockey stick” without explanation. This is also disgraceful, as the 2001 IPPC chart based on rigged data together with al Gore’s hyperbole, were crucial in putting so much unjustified fear and emotion into the whole Global Warming debate. It is clear that the IPPC authors knew that the rigged “hockey stick” data was wrong and sent a very misleading case to the public.
At the Copenhagen Summit, Saudi Arabia has called for an independent investigation into “Climategate”, the scandal over hacked e-mails that threatened to undermine the global-warming negotiations. The emails came from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), headed by Phil Jones (since stood down) and widely used by the IPCC. In one email Phil Jones says: “I’ve just completed Mike’s [Mann] Nature [Magazine] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s [Briffa] to hide the decline [in temperatures].”
(a) See: http://wattsupwiththat.com/
http://www.climateaudit.org/
http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/2009/12/cherry-picking-trees-for-global-warming.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/3332616/that-famous-consensus.thtml
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/06/american-thinker-understanding-climategates-
hidden-decline/
http://groups.google.com/group/talk.politics.misc/msg/c23bd35c43ead628
More info’ here: http://www.biz-at-home.biz/climate/
Cheers,
Denis Maclaine
Brisbane, Australia
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Shorter Denis Maclaine: “Blah, di blah blah blah”
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Denis, I doubt this will make any difference, as climate contrarians are usually impervious to logic, but just in case:
“Watts Up With That” and “Climate Audit” are just about the least reliable sources of climate information you could possibly find. They have a long and strong track record of ludicrously poorly supported claims, blatant cherry picks of the evidence, and near-total ignorance of the actual science.
In reality, the CRU stolen emails have not produced *any* evidence of scientific malpractice, tampering with data, etc. That the “hide the decline” phrase has been trumpeted as some kind of evidence of wrongdoing demonstrates just how ignorant the Watts/Audit crowd are… in fact, the process he’s describing is entirely sound and justified, and in fact if Jones had *not* removed the tree ring data after 1960, it would have been criticised and corrected in peer review. Look up the “divergence problem” in dendroclimatology.
The same applies to the “hockey stick”… in the denialosphere, it’s the greatest scandal in scientific history, but in the real world, Mann is anything but disgraced, the “hockey stick” is very sound, widely accepted and is supported by many independent lines of evidence.
Try reading a bit more broadly. For instance, this site, or Skeptical Science, or Real Climate, will give you a much sounder overview of the science.
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The greatest scientific hoax of the century Climate Change and you the bed wetter’s are perpetrating a fraud and if we are able to stop you guys the people won’t rest till you and your fellow con artist are in jail.
love your icon’s you give to truthers.
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mmm. Smells like a flame war! Somebody bring the pork ribs?
I have been collecting “rational” discussions about climate for my blog at http://www.vivanewmexico.com/blog and Brave New Climate is often linked to. I will probably not refer anyone directly to this one.
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Still think Dr. Plimer’s assertions of trimming, cooking and forgery are wrong? There is no science in the “evidence” of Gorebal Warming. Any hypothesis that has been advanced has been disproven immediately; thus no science.
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Denis Maclaine, on December 13th, 2009 at 18.53 Said:
“It’s outrageous that the document “Copenhagen Diagnosis” being distributed to all delegates by the organisers of the Copenhagen summit on climate change was co-authored by the great data fiddler and very dishonest Michael Mann!”
Double Fallacy of 1)unsupported assertions and 2) ad hominem.
“Michael Mann has been ostracised by his peers. Why? Because he fudged widely accepted data on global temperatures to produce his dishonest “hockey stick” used by the gross exaggerator, Al Gore.”
Unsupported assertions
“Mann’s massaging of the data intentionally did away with [the Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age] to produce his rigged “hockey stick” chart.”
Unsupported assertions
“In 1996, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) “Second Assessment Summary for Policy Makers” chart on global temperatures included the Medieval Warming, the Little Ice Age and late Twentieth Century warming. However, in 2001, the IPPC uncritically adopted Michael Mann’s fraudulent data and in their 2001 Climate Change Report included a totally different chart using Michael Mann’s rigged figures and showing his ridiculous “hockey stick”.”
Misrepresentation, see here http://cce.890m.com/temperature-reconstructions/
“Following widespread condemnation of Michel Mann’s dishonesty(a), subsequent IPCC reports have included charts omitting the “hockey stick” without explanation. This is also disgraceful, as the 2001 IPPC chart based on rigged data together with al Gore’s hyperbole, were crucial in putting so much unjustified fear and emotion into the whole Global Warming debate. It is clear that the IPPC authors knew that the rigged “hockey stick” data was wrong and sent a very misleading case to the public.”
OK after about strike ten its time to call bollocks, “bollocks”. See link provide above.
“At the Copenhagen Summit, Saudi Arabia has called for an independent investigation into “Climategate”, the scandal over hacked e-mails that threatened to undermine the global-warming negotiations. ”
Well if the Saudi’s are calling for an investigation then there must be something hide! Because the Saudi’s feudal rules are famous corruption busters have no self-interest in delaying a price on carbon.
“The emails came from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), headed by Phil Jones (since stood down) and widely used by the IPCC. In one email Phil Jones says: “I’ve just completed Mike’s [Mann] Nature [Magazine] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s [Briffa] to hide the decline [in temperatures].”
Jones, has suffered incredible harassment, being bombarded with a coordinated campaign of 55 FOI request in 5 days, which lead to the uncooperative actions he requested. Then having private emails trawled through, and used out of context to promote misrepresentation and distortion (such as Maclaine has tried to do here). See here http://greenfyre.wordpress.com/2009/11/21/mikes-nature-trick-to-hide-the-decline/
What is striking is that having stolen the email correspondents of dozens of climate science, the benificiaires of the the crime can produce no corroborating evidence of the dodgy figures or incorrect science they claimed exist. Maclaine and those he takes his information from are reduced to innuendo and speculation.
Notice that Maclaine keeps having to repeat phrases like:
“Michel Mann’s dishonesty”
“the great data fiddler and very dishonest Michael Mann”
“Michael Mann has been ostracised by his peers. Why? Because he fudged widely accepted data on global temperatures to produce his dishonest “hockey stick” used by the gross exaggerator, Al Gore.”
” Mann’s massaging of the data intentionally did away with [the Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age] to produce his rigged “hockey stick” chart.”
the IPPC uncritically adopted Michael Mann’s fraudulent data and in their 2001 Climate Change Report included a totally different chart using Michael Mann’s rigged figures and showing his ridiculous “hockey stick”.”
Would Maclaine need to make this type of assertion repeatedly if he had supported it with evidence? Maclaine is promoting pure propaganda.
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Preston Scott,
If your speculation and musing were evience, then, you’d have at least some evidence for your position.
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“Watts Up With That” and “Climate Audit” are just about the least reliable sources of climate information you could possibly find. They have a long and strong track record of ludicrously poorly supported claims, blatant cherry picks of the evidence, and near-total ignorance of the actual science.”
The Wegman committee found Steve McIntyre, who puts out Climate Audit to be very reliable and took his side over that of Mann and the people at RealClimate. Anthony Watts was able to use a group of volunteers to uncover the USHCN measurement bias that NOAA/GISS had ignored for decades and forced many of the analysts to respond to his findings. Steve McIntyre forced GISS to correct their claimed ‘Y2K error’ and correct the data to properly show that 1934 was warmer than 1998. He also found the ‘Harry’ data error in Steig’s laughable Antarctica paper. Gavin Schimidt tried to deny him credit by calling it in. He later claimed that some other independent individual had found the same error only to be exposed as the person who made the call just to deny credit to McIntyre.
The e-mails expose many other cases of such pettiness, unethical behaviour and outright academic fraud on the part of the people that you seem to hold in such high esteem. I suggest that you look at the data, e-mails and code and start seeing reality as it is rather than what you imagine it to be.
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Vagel,
Re Wegman report, see this link from previops post http://cce.890m.com/temperature-reconstructions/
Re Anthony Watts’s claims, you should be more skeptical than that.
Re your assertions of fraud: I keep asking for coroborating evidence to support such wild claims, You’ve got all the “clues” now, so where is the fraud. I’ve only ever received bluster and inuendo in reply.
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Check out how Bryan Appleyard, of the “Sunday Times”,a former pseudo sceptic, saw the light and now passionately defends the AGW science.
“Global Warming is real”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6931598.ece
Now I’m waiting for Andrew Bolt to figure it out!
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Almost looks like Charles Babbage had Climategate in mind when he wrote his three criteria for detecting non-science: trimming, cooking and forgery.
Almost prophecy
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Preston, Vangel, Sam: gawd, give it a break you pack of delusionist fools. Can’t you appreciate how ridiculous you sound? Go look in a mirror. You’ll see the words “Hypocrite” smeared on your forehead in crude lipstick writing.
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Blue Ajah, Why the personal attack?
Ian Pilmer is a noted geologist why is he to be so vigorously and personally attacked for stating his opinion?
Why are you so protective of your “settled science” ?
I will answer this question. The “science” of AGW is a sham. The Climategate emails have shown the scientific method has been ignored and “non-science” and criminal behaviour substituted, an ethical scientist would see that but where are they?
Just this week AGW was blamed for killing Koala’s, increasing shark attacks, What next? Clubbing baby seals?
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Just watched the lateline interview with “professor” pilmer. I think it is a shame that the press even present this as a “debate” because it gives credibility to pilmers absurd and clearly fraudulent claims.
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At least George Monbiot and Tony Jones destroyed him. Frauds are always exposed.
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I think it was very important that “the press” showed this “debate”. Plimer lost it, big time .
Monbiot all but said Plimer was misanthropic and a deluded liar, on national television.
I’m not a lawyer, but they are real fighting words but I don’t think Plimer will be taking Monbiot, Tony Jones, or the ABC to court.
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Everyone was making slanderous claims.
Plimer said the worlds premier climate scientists at CRU East Anglia had perpetration the greatest scientific fraud in history.
That trumps George Monbiot’s liar liar pants on fire claim.
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Whatever
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Barry
I am not an academic but I presume Adelaide University has some rules on academic behaviour? Ian Plimer is entitled ot his own views on any public policy matter. But surely when he comments on a topic within his field he is held to some standard of accuracy? He is a geologist and appears to have made statements on CO2 and volcanoes that have been proven false (more CO2 than anthropogenic causes), and then a false explanation (submarine causes were excluded from data; they weren’t). Can he do that as an academic geologist? As an outsider, he appears to be harming the reputation of the University at this point.
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I include below a sample letter which those so moved may wish to forward to the appropriate officers of the University of Adelaide in support of action to hold an inquiry into the professional conduct of Ian Plimer. I think that however each of us regards Mr Plimer, or what we may think should happen in response, it is important to get proceedings started by fitting our claims into a form which the University will find hard to ignore. I intend to send this letter also to Julia Gillard, in her capacity as Minister for Education.
————————————-
As many of you will be aware, Professor Ian Plimer has recently been the subject of some controversy. This derives not merely from his outspoken views on the political context within which proposals to stabilise and lower atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases takes place, to which, Professor Plimer, is surely entitled.
It concerns claims of fact made in his most recent publication, Heaven & Earth. You will be aware, I feel sure, of the reviews by reputable scientists such as Ian Enting of this non-peer-reviewed book and the
rather serious misrepresentation they have found. They found for example that in a number of cases, claims made were not sourced to actual data, and in one case where it was, the citation was radically
at odds with the claim for which the source was adduced.
You may be aware that last night, on the now internationally televised Lateline, some of these and other matters were in part canvassed again in the course of an exchange between George Monbiot and Professor Plimer moderated by Tony Jones. Most disappointingly, Professor Plimer offered neither a defence of his right to make such claims, nor a
correction, but rather, sought to obfuscate by introducing other issues aimed at covering up his alleged fraud.
You will recall, doubtless, the investigation some years ago into a work by Bjorn Lomborg by the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty in which the case was made out that the book titled The Skeptical Environmentalist was characterised by the DCSD as follows:
The DCSD went on to list the areas that were problematic for an ostensibly scientific work in that book:
There is a perception amongst those qualified to know that Plimer’s work fails in each of these respects and the association of Professor Plimer and these ostensibly spurious and specious claims has the
potential to damage seriously the academic reputation of the University of Adelaide, particularly as the nature of the controversy to which Professor Plimer is a party, will, perforce, provoke detailed scrutiny of the ostensibly scientific claims he makes.
Your institution asserts inter alia that its policy restrains a researcher or reviewer with intent to deceive, or in reckless disregard for the truth:
I believe it is incumbent upon your institution to commence proceedings to clarify the issues of scientific integrity attaching to Professor Plimer and his work, so as to better position the University
of Adelaide to protect the academic interests of other staff and students there:
Here’s a list of email addresses to work with:
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“Just watched the lateline interview with “professor” pilmer. I think it is a shame that the press even present this as a “debate” because it gives credibility to pilmers absurd and clearly fraudulent claims.”
Actually, Plimer has been right and the AGW proponents have been wrong. I suggest that you take a look at the issues revealed by the CRU e-mails.
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“I am not an academic but I presume Adelaide University has some rules on academic behaviour? Ian Plimer is entitled ot his own views on any public policy matter. But surely when he comments on a topic within his field he is held to some standard of accuracy? He is a geologist and appears to have made statements on CO2 and volcanoes that have been proven false (more CO2 than anthropogenic causes), and then a false explanation (submarine causes were excluded from data; they weren’t). Can he do that as an academic geologist? As an outsider, he appears to be harming the reputation of the University at this point.”
Plimer is right that AGW is a fraud. And if you are interested in bad academic behaviour, I suggest that you look to the University of East Anglia and the fraud committed by Phil Jones. You could also look to Penn State and Michael Mann’s fake hockey stick.
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What fraud are you talking about Vangel? To what fake aspect of the hockey stick are you referring? Could you be more specific?
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“What fraud are you talking about Vangel? To what fake aspect of the hockey stick are you referring? Could you be more specific?”
The fraud outlined in the code and e-mails would be a good start for your examination. And the fraud committed by Jones when he hid the extent of the UHI effect. The fraud committed by Mann when he created the algorithm that turned random noise into hockey sticks. The fraud committed by Briffa and Jones when they hid the post 1961 divergence. The fraud that took a flat trend shown in the raw data and added the warming signature that we have seen after 1950 while it lowered the temperatures measured in the 1930s and 1940s. Etc., etc., etc., etc.
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Vangel you are still not being specific. What lines of code were fraudulent? How was the UHI effect hidden? What was it that they were they hiding in the post 1961 divergence? How did they add a warming signature to the data? Perhaps start with just one of my above questions, and explain it a little more. Pick any of them and have a go. Let’s more from wild hand waving and mouth frothing to specifics.
I don’t want links to extensive PDFs. I want you to tell us what you think is fraudulent. If it’s clear and obvious, it should be easy for your to explain.
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“What fraud are you talking about Vangel? To what fake aspect of the hockey stick are you referring? Could you be more specific?”
I hit the send button before I could add this. Take a look at the Wegman report for a perfect example of what Mann did.
Click to access 07142006_wegman_report.pdf
And the Wegman reply to the Stupak enquiry.
Click to access StupakResponse.pdf
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They were hiding a conundrum. A situation in which they could not explain the factors that caused divergence in their results. A divergence that might undermine faith in the paleoestimates. At least that would seem to be what they were hiding according to Mike Mann in this email:-
http://www.tuxwerx.com/Climategate/mail/0938018124.txt
Whatever the motive the leaked correspondance does make clear that in their work for the IPCC they were producing a marketing document and hiding data that was off message.
They also had ample time to reflect on what they were hiding. During the review process Steve McIntyre offered a review comment saying that the post 1961 data in the Briffa reconstruction shouldn’t be left out of the final IPCC report. The comment was ignored. The books were cooked.
There should be no IPCC. It’s existance is guaranteed to distort the process of scientific enquiry.
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But TerjeP, if they were trying to hide it from other people, why has this post-1960 divergence been widely discussed in the open, peer-reviewed literature? e.g.
D’Arrigo et al 2008. On the ‘Divergence Problem’ in Northern Forests: A review of the tree-ring evidence and possible causes. Global and Planetary Change, 60: 289-305
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloplacha.2007.03.004
That’s like hiding from the cops after a burglary by sneakily jumping in the back of their parked paddywagon.
This issue was NOT left out of the IPCC AR4 2007. What makes you think it was? Didn’t you read the chapter on palaeoclimate yourself to check?
So what data were they hiding here? What data did they hide, full stop?
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[…] Brave New Climate […]
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I do not pretend to know the full details of the data suppressed by East Anglia but that is beside the point I raised. There seems to be a lot of bad faith argument techniques in use in this thread. I raised a point about Plimer (the topic of this thread), and then opponents try to shift the debate to East Anglia and Mike Mann, which are both different issues. Plimer used the same evasive tactic on Tuesday night. It is neither clever nor honest.
As for East Anglia, Monbiot rightly criticised any deception involved. But again, so what? It doesn’t change all the work done by NASA, CSIRO, Potsdam institute and many other bodies that have produced evidence, all showing global warming is happening.
I would agree with Terja about the undesirability of an IPCC but for other reasons. It includes nations such as Saudi Arabia that havea vested interest in not taking action. From what I have read since, the greater danger of such bodies is that, in trying to reach compromise, they understate, not overstate CC risks. Recalling IPCC3, virtually all the worst case forecasts have been exceeded since. Why then does anyone think that climate change isn’t happening?
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This is all the same old bull. The trees in Germany are being killed by acid rain, the world will end in 2000 if we dont fix the Yr2000 bug, several islands in the pacific will be underwater by the year 2010.
You are all deluded fools but if you are stupid enough to believe this latest religious outburst then link a tax to the temperature of the world taken from satellites and weather balloons monitored and reviewed by independent scientists – but then we have learnt how hard it is to find any of those in the world of modern science. You are a disgrace to the great scientists that proceeded you.
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Vangel, your response asserting fraud demonstate the point I was making in my Dec 14th post:
…I keep asking for coroborating evidence to support such wild claims, You’ve got all the “clues” now, so where is the fraud. I’ve only ever received bluster and inuendo in reply.
Barry has ask you several times for the specific detials of the fraud, yet your replys are only broad speculative assertions and allusions. Why can’t you cite the precise characteristics of the fruad you claim exists?
If you have the evidence present it rather than assuring us that the Wegman report for a perfect example of what Mann did.
Monbiot can cite the specific example of fraud in Plimers work, and he can show exactly what Plimer got wrong with the evidence from the primary sources.
Like Plimers claim of USGS not counting undersea volcanoes, like his continued claim that volcanos are producing more CO2 than human’s combustion (in the face of correction) . Like Plimer copying a discredited frauduent chart (Plimer’s figure 3) from Durkin’s GGWS then telling radio listeners if was from a German publication Klimafakten.
Look at Ian Enting list for dozens more specifics.
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I do not pretend to know the full details of the data suppressed by East Anglia but that is beside the point I raised.
It isn’t behind the point. The entire claim that we have seen significant warming since the 1950s is based on the reconstruction coming out of the East Anglia people The evidence is clear that the only way to get the warming was by adding an artificial warming signature that created the claimed heating. The bottom line was that without the fraud committed by the CRU and Penn State people there would be no support for the IPCC’s agenda. While Plimer is crude at times and a bit quick to make statements that require more thought, the science is with him and against the AGW proponents. And being right on the issue is what really matters.
Just today I read a statement in which the Russians are claiming that CRU cherry-picked stations to make temperatures seem much warmer than they actually were.
(http://en.rian.ru/papers/20091216/157260660.html)
I also looked at the recent paper by Balling and Idso, in which it is shown that most of the claimed warming in the US came from the adjustments to the raw data.
(http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2002/2002GL014825.shtml)
This paper is only one of many that have made exactly the same point. May researchers have concluded that the temperature reconstructions can only show warming if the data is adjusted by the gatekeepers. While adjustments could be justified, the people at CRU/NOAA and other locations have not been able to explain them properly. Their algorithms are hidden from public view and their metadata does not reveal why a number of stations were omitted from the set. That makes the entire reconstruction useless as scientific evidence and makes Plimer’s charge a correct one.
From where I stand it looks as if the AGW proponents have lost ground quickly and are now in a position where they have to prove that their claims are valid. Given the fact that they cannot point to a single paper that provides empirical evidence that supports the view that CO2 is a material driver of temperature the AGW proponents and their political masters are desperate to have something done before the voting public grows too suspicious and weary of the issue.
Until the scientists who created the temperature profiles can present the data and algorithms and reproduce their previous results there is no scientific basis for the AGW claim and Plimer will remain on the right side of the argument.
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Actually, virtually everything you wrote above is false, Vangel.
Read this latest post at Real Climate. It’s useful because it shows you how you, too, can generate a global temperature graph to your satisfaction:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/12/are-the-cru-data-suspect-an-objective-assessment/
Go ahead. I dare you.
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Vangal,
You appear to be saying you don’t understand what is happening with temperature data but that you think its fraud.
I think you better tone down your claims until you get the evidence.
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Vangal,
Also as you seem to put so much weight in the supposed independence of the Wegman report, you should acquaint your self with these problems. Including a forth undisclosed author.
http://deepclimate.org/2009/12/17/wegman-report-ghostwriter-revealed/#more-1273
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Why are there reports like this one on the Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107104574572091993737848.html
and almost nothing in our local media (apart from Andrew Bolt).
I think this shows that this is a religion and like religion you dont care where the supporting information comes from as long as it supports the religion. Then it becomes about suppressing anyone who holds a differing opinion.
What happened to Science when you are all singing off the one set of data and there are no questions asked just more and more research 10,000+ of you. What the hell were you doing all that time?
This is not going to be quietly denied and closed down long enough for the religious zealots to cover their tracks.
To quote the above report from Daniel Henninger –
“I don’t think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn’t only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. Most people could not name three other subjects they would associate with the work of serious scientists. This was it.”
Guys you have plucked the golden goose.
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Bob Thomas, that WSJ article is a typical rant from someone who is obviously not engaged in the scientific process, and has no understanding of how it operates. It says nothing of substance — it is a spleen vent into the aether. Really, the multiple images of Galileo says it all. Absolutely, mind-numbingly, pathetic.
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vangel (or whoever you really are a sock puppet for)
I said I didn’t know the full details of East Anglia, but that doesn’t mean I am ignorant. I have read Real Climate as well as IPCC4, Stern, Garnaut, and several NASA, NSIDC and CSIRO reports; I just wasn’t claiming to be expert on East Anglia. As Barry said above, what you say is false. There is a huge amount of data, from multiple sources, that shows it has gotten warmer since 1950. Your statement to the contrary is false.
Why do you make provably false statements? Do you think it impresses anyone? It only lowers your own credibility. Does someone pay you to write this nonsense? if so, they aren’t getting their money’s worth. The people who read this blog are reasonably well informed. Give up on the disinformation tactic.
And once again, like an Ian Plimer clone, you avoid discussing the point I raised about Plimer in the first place.
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Exactly. An opinion piece which cites no evidence to back its contentions doesn’t amount to much.
Conversely, there’s a great deal of good information out there to illustrate the the CRU hack has entirely failed, assuming that its purpose was to show that climate science is a giant conspiracy to deceive the public. The total evidence that’s come to light in the stolen emails of scientific malpractice is zero. The stunt has succeeded, though, in adding yet more fuel to the fire of contrarian ignorance.
For some decent analysis of the contrarian claims made about assorted cherry-picked phrases in the emails, you could start with The emerging scientific consensus on the SwiftHack emails: get real, denialists.
As for “all singing off the one set of data”…. please. Try to learn even a little bit about what you’re trying to condemn.
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Barry Brooks – I will tell you what is mind numbingly pathetic. A group of leading scientists holding a powerful gun to all the peoples of the worlds heads without allowing alternate views and building a fear campaign based on suspect data and pathetic inaccurate graphs.
If we have been studying this for 100 years, as I read on one of your links Matt, then why is it not axiomatic. Why do we need to build computer models to define what is going on.? Computer models are notoriously poor predictors of the future, ask any financial people and just about anyone in the IT business who has worked on them professionally rather than playing with fortran and a wish list of data. The code from the East Anglia leak is, according to several programmers I saw discussing it on a blog (will provide link later) ‘pathetic’ and ‘poor to useless’.
And this is part of your great 100 years of work. Guys I know you can argue the minutia of your world as I have noted above, but the broad brush of evidence is what is bringing you down.
If you dont address the big questions regarding data collection and authentication, code issues, suppression of debate and peer review, building hockey stick graphs to threaten the ignorant etc.
As you are now appear to be bogging the argument down in detail only makes the rest of us suspect that you are trying to buy time to fix your story, your story appears to be turning into a fairytale. Lucky really as it could easily have been a nightmare.
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Bob Thomas: “Blah di blah blah blah”.
Go away, you conspiratorial crank. This blog is for serious discussion.
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Matt – If this is just an opinion piece then you must accept that Monbiot’s stuff is exactly the same.
Couldnt find the exact blog I was on but a search on ‘programmers review of the climategate code’ or something similar in Google will bring up a host of sites where you could read about it.
Here is the first example I looked at:
http://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2009/11/does-the-climategate-code-produce-reliable-output/
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Frankly, Bob, that’s a load of utterly ignorant rubbish. You’ve been hoodwinked.
In reality, the “broad brush of evidence” overwhelmingly supports the two basic conclusions the planet is warming and that human activity is primarily responsible. Those two conclusions are essentially axiomatic now among climate scientists, and will remain so until the balance of convincing evidence indicates otherwise. The main areas of uncertainty and debate are around the future impacts: their timing, scale and nature.
If you think those conclusions are under serious scientific threat at all, you probably need to read a bit more about it.
You can hand-wave with stuff like “suspect data and pathetic inaccurate graphs” all you like, but all it demonstates is that you don’t know the material at all, frankly. You’ve swallowed the Watts stance hook, line and sinker without reviewing what the science itself. Where’s the “skepticism”?
As for “needing computer models to define what’s going on”
– you’ve been misinformed again, I’m afraid. Those two basic conclusions stand on a mountain of observational evidence. The computer models are used to project what is likely to happen in the future.
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Bob Thomas writes:
As you are now appear to be bogging the argument down in detail only makes the rest of us suspect that you are trying to buy time to fix your story…
Bob, those details you want to avoid are what are called ‘facts’. You know, ‘evidence’. Its what science is about.
You are engaging in sweeping assertions, and speculation. We are asking you to simply support your claims with facts. How supportable are these many assertions you make? Which are not supportable with the weight of evidence?
I’ve got another question for you Bob, when can you tell if a conspiracy theory is a dud? Draw a line somewhere, is it when you need it to be so big, drawing in so many people than it becomes unmanageable? Is in when you keep making circular arguments to avoid facing or present facts?
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That article (about the code quality) again contains no evidence whatsoever to support the suggestion that the code is producing significant errors or has been maliciously manipulated to produce a certain result.
You’ll note also that the writer has never actually used IDL, has not used Fortran for 15 years, and was careless enough to conclude that the “ARTIFICAL correction” thing was meaningful, when it actually refers to commented-out (non-functional) code that was probably used for internal code testing.
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Ok Matt I accept your sensible comments. I went and found the original site I was looking at.
This is a sample of what is a long analysis of this code:
http://neuralnetwriter.cylo42.com/node/2421
The bit that made me laugh was this bit. Anyone into programming will burst out laughing before the table of numbers Smiling
.
Quote:
17. Inserted debug statements into anomdtb.f90, discovered that
a sum-of-squared variable is becoming very, very negative! Key
output from the debug statements:
.
OpEn= 16.00, OpTotSq= 4142182.00, OpTot= 7126.00
DataA val = 93, OpTotSq= 8649.00
DataA val = 172, OpTotSq= 38233.00
DataA val = 950, OpTotSq= 940733.00
DataA val = 797, OpTotSq= 1575942.00
DataA val = 293, OpTotSq= 1661791.00
DataA val = 83, OpTotSq= 1668680.00
DataA val = 860, OpTotSq= 2408280.00
DataA val = 222, OpTotSq= 2457564.00
DataA val = 452, OpTotSq= 2661868.00
DataA val = 561, OpTotSq= 2976589.00
DataA val = 49920, OpTotSq=-1799984256.00
DataA val = 547, OpTotSq=-1799684992.00
DataA val = 672, OpTotSq=-1799233408.00
DataA val = 710, OpTotSq=-1798729344.00
DataA val = 211, OpTotSq=-1798684800.00
DataA val = 403, OpTotSq=-1798522368.00
OpEn= 16.00, OpTotSq=-1798522368.00, OpTot=56946.00
forrtl: error (75): floating point exception
IOT trap (core dumped)
.
..so the data value is unbfeasibly large, but why does the
sum-of-squares parameter OpTotSq go negative?!!
.
Probable answer: the high value is pushing beyond the single-
precision default for Fortran reals?
I feel for this guy. He’s obviously spent years trying to get data from undocumented and completely messy sources.
It brings into question the reliability of any results based on such sources.
One must ask who paid for the work, and why they allowed such dreadful work.
It reminds me of stuff I’d do when at the baby stage of my programming life. That stage lasted weeks. It appears others persisted longer!
Take this example comment on the Australian database:
Quote:
It takes time.. time I don’t have! Though I’m pleased to see that the second FSM is helpfully
chipping in to pair things up when possible.
.
getting seriously fed up with the state of the Australian data. so many new stations have been
introduced, so many false references.. so many changes that aren’t documented. Every time a
cloud forms I’m presented with a bewildering selection of similar-sounding sites, some with
references, some with WMO codes, and some with both. And if I look up the station metadata with
one of the local references, chances are the WMO code will be wrong (another station will have
it) and the lat/lon will be wrong too. I’ve been at it for well over an hour, and I’ve reached
the 294th station in the tmin database. Out of over 14,000. Now even accepting that it will get
easier (as clouds can only be formed of what’s ahead of you), it is still very daunting. I go
on leave for 10 days after tomorrow, and if I leave it running it isn’t likely to be there when
I return! As to whether my ‘action dump’ will work (to save repetition).. who knows?
.
Yay! Two-and-a-half hours into the exercise and I’m in Argentina!
.
Pfft.. and back to Australia almost immediately :-( .. and then Chile. Getting there.
.
Unfortunately, after around 160 minutes of uninterrupted decision making, my screen has started
to black out for half a second at a time. More video cable problems – but why now?!! The count is
up to 1007 though.
.
I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as
Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO
and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar coordinates. I
know it could be old and new stations, but why such large overlaps if that’s the case? Aarrggghhh!
There truly is no end in sight. Look at this:
If this diary of work fairly reflects on the quality of research in climatology, then I think there needs to be a thorough shake up.
This is a disgrace.
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Bob, what they didn’t tell you at that site (nor at Watts, Climate Audit, etc) is that HARRY_read_me.txt (the file being quoted here) is about Harry’s marathon of wrestling with an old legacy product and dataset that is not part of the headline GISS or HadCRUt results.
To quote RealClimate:
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“A leading Russian think-tank claims the British meteorological office has been misrepresenting Russian weather data to manipulate the results and suggest rising temperature trends. The Moscow Institute of Economic Analysis alleges the Hadley Center for Climate Change used only a quarter of the data provided by Russia. Analysts for the agency imply that climate experts selectively used incomplete reporting that emphasized a warming effect.”
Can anyone repute this assertion?
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“Analysts for the agency”? This is not a government agency, it’s a Russian anti-global warming PR group.
Tim Lambert refutes the claims. It’s embarrassing how ham-fisted these outfits seem to be around the world, I have to say.
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I like to put this alarmism into context.
Here are two posts that put this so called AGW catastrophe into context, each with one diagram that exposes the lie.
Climate Change Context Diagrams:
http://neuralnetwriter.cylo42.com/node/2421?page=17#comment-2623 – The ultimate?
The Claimed AGW in Context Using Ice Cores – The lie EXPOSED again
http://neuralnetwriter.cylo42.com/node/2421?page=18#comment-2677
Although I have been quoted looking at the Harry file, my thread contains over 550 posts covering this whole Climategate scandal.
Anyone who doesn’t see the AGW scam is either ignorant, duped, or lying, possibly lying with an agenda.
The great thing about truth is that it always comes out in the end.
And this is the end of the AGW scam. Some just need to come to terms with that fact.
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Matt Andrews,
I got as far as “by Tim Lambert
The latest story exciting the denialosphere is”
and realised that article is written by yet another person who loves antilocution.
IMO anyone who accuses others of “denial” in this way ONLY deserves the utmost disrespect.
Pathetic.
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Also as you seem to put so much weight in the supposed independence of the Wegman report, you should acquaint your self with these problems. Including a forth undisclosed author.
Let me see. A book that is written two years after the Wegman report plagiarizes a paragraph and you think that discredits Wegman? It seems that the deniers of natural variation seem to have trouble with cause and effect.
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I think this shows that this is a religion and like religion you dont care where the supporting information comes from as long as it supports the religion. Then it becomes about suppressing anyone who holds a differing opinion.
It is not just religion. It is a con in which the big players are going after the consumer and taxpayer.
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vangel (or whoever you really are a sock puppet for)
I speak for myself and have no personal connection to any group or organization on either side of the debate.
I said I didn’t know the full details of East Anglia, but that doesn’t mean I am ignorant. I have read Real Climate as well as IPCC4, Stern, Garnaut, and several NASA, NSIDC and CSIRO reports; I just wasn’t claiming to be expert on East Anglia.
What irony; the e-mails implicate the people at RealClimate and the lead authors at the IPCC. Given the fact that everyone relies on the temperature reconstruction provided by CRU everyone you mention has no ground to stand on because without the false temperature profile there is no significant warming since the 1930s. (The raw data shows no meaningful warming; to get it, you need to cherry pick stations and make adjustments to the continuous records of rural stations. The Russians just pointed out that many of their stations, including those that have a continuous record over a long period of time, have been ignored because they do not support the conclusions.)
As Barry said above, what you say is false. There is a huge amount of data, from multiple sources, that shows it has gotten warmer since 1950. Your statement to the contrary is false.
It is you and Barry who are wrong. CRU has claimed to have lost the original data so it cannot be used to support the AGW claims. The raw data clearly shows no warming and even NASA admitted that 1934 was the warmest year on record for the US. Try doing some research instead of getting all of your information from bloggers who are interpreting for you and telling you what to think.
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In reality, the “broad brush of evidence” overwhelmingly supports the two basic conclusions the planet is warming and that human activity is primarily responsible. Those two conclusions are essentially axiomatic now among climate scientists, and will remain so until the balance of convincing evidence indicates otherwise. The main areas of uncertainty and debate are around the future impacts: their timing, scale and nature.
Where is the evidence again? You have a temperature reconstruction that cannot be replicated and has been shown to be created by manipulating and cherry picking data. You have discredited denro claims that have also been shown to be created by data manipulation. You have historical records showing much warmer periods a thousand years ago when men were not driving SUVs and burning coal.
Show me a single paper that uses empirical data to establish that human emissions are responsible for meaningful warming and we have a real debate. Until then all you have is a narrative devoid of facts or reason.
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Bob, those details you want to avoid are what are called ‘facts’. You know, ‘evidence’. Its what science is about.
The problem for the AGW proponents is that that they can’t produce a single piece of empirical evidence to support their claim that human emissions are causing the warming seen on the temperature reconstruction. They have to face two inconvenient facts.
One, the raw data shows no warming trend. To get much warming after the 1930s you need to add a warming signal to the surface measurements.
Two, their entire argument is as follows: because we can’t explain the warming shown by the artificial adjustments to the raw data in any other way, it must be CO2 that is responsible.
Just where exactly is the ‘science’ that you keep mentioning? I have asked a number of times for any of you warmers to point to the paper that can show an empirical link between human CO2 emissions and meaningful temperature change. So far none of you have been able to answer the challenge.
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Hi Matt – yes I can see what you are saying that the data referenced is an old no longer used set. My concerns are how could they ‘clean’ the data when there are repetitions and overlaps. How would you clean this data and who would do that when it is really only poor administration of the readings in the first place. It appears as if the basis of it is so bad how can you make decisions about this data without possibly questioning the sources and collection mechanics?
I also find it strange that you dont comment on what anyone can see, and that is the quality of the work being done on the code and the now obsolete data. Are you suggesting that they fired this incompetent and hired new programmers?
I also found this interesting from your link re TIm Lambert:
refutes the claims.
QUOTE:
Well, if you say so sod; Briffa is a gentleman though don’t you think; and both studies are in the Northern hemisphere, pretty close to Russia where this study took place;
http://eprints.ucl.ac.uk/11144/
The thing is, Iceland was warmer than today in the 1930’s, so was Greenland; and the Arctic and the US; Canada is ambiguous; the Briffa/ Burger exchange deals with the rest of the Northern hemisphere; in the SH; Africa and South America are guessed at by GISS and IPCC; Australia is interesting; the nationalised temperature trend shows a typical AGW trend over the 20thC but 75% of the individual locations used for the nationalised trend don’t. Plimer was pretty bad on this point about the current decade not being the hottest the other night; he didn’t have to be; the facts were on his side.
END QUOTE
regards Bob
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This thread has degenerated to the point where comments here are no longer serving any useful purpose. It has become infested by trolls and delusionists who are more interested in pushing ideology than discussing matters of science or evidence. Comments closed.
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[…] – il geologo Ian “Il Sole è fatto di ferro” Plimer; […]
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Dr. Brook, once someone is proven to be fraud, isn’t it only prudent to question all of there work. If there is clear evidence unethical suppression of information and opposing viewpoints, and even data manipulation from the information source that all global warming believers use for there research, would that mean by default all reasearch based on that information would be flawed?
As far for the consensus factor, when there are more scientist that disagree, than signed the 2007 UN climate summry how is that consensus? Isn’t consensus in science contrary to all scientific processes ?
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Comments apparently not closed after all?
Usual tripe from Planet Denial. Any detailed “evidence of data manipulation”, or just the usual third hand disinformation from denial blogs? Any acknowledgement of the spectacular serial fraud of McIntyre and friends? As for trying to compare something as flimsy as an online poll (the Oregon Petition) with no identity verification whatsoever, against the list of *authors* of the IPCC AR4…. logic fail. Usual stuff.
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After a year long break I opened the thread again — curiosity killed the cat…
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The ‘tripe’ is coming from those that deny the fact that natural factors are much greater than the lead authors that the IPCC uses want to admit. But no matter how much they try to spin the story and divert attention from the real empirical evidence the game is nearly over and most of the AGW advocates are abandoning ship as quickly as they can because the evidence clearly shows that natural factors are far more important than the IPCC was admitting.
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This is a bit bizarre…
Vangel, I’m sure that to your dying day you will rail against the scientific facts of climate change. But no one is listening to you.
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Vangel, on 15 February 2011 at 11:40 AM — I hope this simpe climate model explains the matter to you:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/10/unforced-variations-3-2/comment-page-5/#comment-189329
But also you could learn some climatology by reading “The Discovery of Global Warming” by Spencer Weart:
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.html
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A simple model from RealClimate? These are the frauds that kept changing the data to fit their models rather than reject their hypothesis when the empirical evidence refuted it.
The facts on this issue are clear. The science shows that changes in CO2 concentrations do not drive temperature change. In fact, the opposite is true. (The data shows that the temperature change comes first and that CO2 concentrations follow.) The science also shows that changes in temperature can be attributed to a number of natural factors and that the current temperature level is unexceptional. Of course, everyone should know that the big threat to human beings is exposure to excess cold temperatures because such exposure is much harder to deal with. This is why we have so many more deaths in the winter than in the summer and why years that are exceptionally cold have many more deaths than those that are very hot. Everyone should know that longer growing seasons are favourable to agricultural production and to an increase in biomass. It is cold spells that kill crops and cause frozen lizards to fall off trees in Florida, turtles to drown in the Gulf, cows to die of cold in Vietnam, and fish to die off by the millions in Bolivia. The anti-capitalist greens thought that they could exploit a warm PDO for political purposes and spun a story that could not be supported by the scientific evidence. Now their credibility is shot and voters are turning in anger against many of the policies that the greens were pushing. Sadly, they sacrificed the legitimate environmental movement that was actually concerned about conservation on the altar of vulgar politics.
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Vangel, on 15 February 2011 at 1:01 PM — You didn’t even bother to check the link! It is my simple model; that was just a convenient place to stash it.
The rest of your rant indicates you have no interest in learning the facts; your mind is made up and you don’t want to have to change it to fit the evidence; an anti-scientist.
Therefore I’ll not respond further until such time as you have assimilated Weart’s most excellent history, if that ever happens.
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Quite right, DBB – Vangel has proved many times over that s/he doesn’t weigh the balance of the evidence, nor indeed does s/he bother to learn the basics of climate science. S/he simply regurgitates the ignorant ramblings of others on denial sites.
In other words, denial as opposed to skepticism. Pointless even attempting to engage these people in discussion – they are simply not rational.
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With the outbreak of ‘soft green’ activists occurring in the 1960’s whether or not man is actually causing global warming was never going to get in the way of the extremists agenda.
Therefore, logically and as it appears to the remote observer, the AGW argument was always going to be advanced, at some point, by the extreme green fringe. The fact that this has happened in the last 20 years is no surprise at all.
A problem exists when the AGW argument gains public support. For if the public decide to go anti-carbon this will have profound consequences not only for man but for nature.
Soft green technologies are hard on the land. They cause mankind’s land-footprint to increase dramatically. Man has been saving the wilderness with the hard technologies of oil and coal. For a simple reason: you drill a small hole and extract enormous amounts of energy. This is directly opposed to say a solar farm which requires a large surface area to capture the same amount of energy. Simple reasoning suggests the wilderness is threatened by soft green technologies.
Professor Barry Brook advances the notion that AGW is causing catastrophic climate change but why? Simple. He is a nuclear power advocate and as such by advancing the AGW argument he advances the cause of nuclear power.
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Nice theory, but the evolution of the BNC blog — laid out for all to see in this post and the history that preceded it — testifies that the opposite is actually the case.
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No surprises here, on 15 February 2011 at 2:12 PM — Your dates, associations and reasoning are ahistorical. [That’s the polite eay to say you just made it up.]
Start again by reading the Charney et al. 1979 NRC/NAS report:
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12181&page=R1
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Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists
http://www.marshall.org/article.php?id=174
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Barry, just make damn sure that, by your activism, you are saving the environment and not harming it. To do this you must cast aside your allegiences for they only serve to blind you from the truth.
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David, which dates, and how can reasoning be ahistorical??
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