Climate Change Study Of Scientific Consensus

BBBrownie · February 8, 2010

That has nothing to do with you personally. In researching this topic there has been a lot of reading. When debating or simply discussing this with the average personal that feels extremely strong about this topic and it's implications on people...time and time again they don't understand the topic but rather go solely on what the media is telling them. That is the scary truth which I was commenting on in general. You may be reading what is out there. I doubt you have read everything I have posted and if I am wrong that is great. For anyone to still believe after reading and thinking about the concerns posted by others shows that they still have some techical opinions that they hold dear as gospel. One of my recent posts was strongly in favor of the pro side. I actually quite liked it and if I heard more like it and the science was done well I can still be convinced.

It is not about right or wrong but to me still about doing great science and not taking a hypotheses and picking data to make it work.

Anyways...when you come on this thread and state that we need to clean up the Earth...you are actually starting a new topic if your reference was also not pertaining to CO2.

Otherwise...if you are on the fence...you and I are the same.

If you want actual clean air and water, parks to play in, fish to catch, birds and bees to watch etc. etc. We are again both in agreement.

Just to be clear...your commentary on early posts is identical to trend arguments and strategies imposed by the IPCC. Take Climate change and blame anything you can to capture all demographics. Since that was not your intent and rather a general observation about wanting to live cleaner...could not agree more!

Cheers

Sun

Agreed.

February 9, 2010

The political fires are getting hot and the smoke thick at the IPCC.

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http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/02...?section=justin

Push to change embattled climate panel

Posted Mon Feb 8, 2010 9:09pm AEDT

Updated Mon Feb 8, 2010 9:28pm AEDT

Climate change sceptics have seized on the mistakes in the IPCC report. (AAP Image: Dean Lewins)

Audio: Calls for IPCC reform after fresh mistakes found (The World Today) Related Story: UN defends IPPC chief Related Story: Climate body 'embarrassed' over forest claim Related Story: UN admits Himalaya glacier data dodgy A prominent scientist has joined sceptics in calling for the UN authority on climate change to be reformed, as yet more flaws are exposed in the International Panel on Climate Change's reports.

The Telegraph newspaper in Britain reports that several of the claims made by the IPCC are based on information from masters students or from environmental or business lobby groups.

While climate scientists say these flaws do not undermine the core argument about global warming, some, including Australian scientist Dr Bob Carter, are now calling for changes in the international climate change body.

The newspaper reports that the potential of wave power to produce electricity was wrongly attributed to a British wave energy company, Wavegen.

The company says it was not the source of the information.

There are also reports that masters students' papers on the effect of climate change in the Nile Delta and other African coastal areas were included in the report.

Dr Carter, a marine geologist from James Cook University, says the IPCC has been involved in a string of scandals.

"They are all of the same sort, but the science they are doing is not high class or they are trying to manipulate the refereeing procedure," Dr Carter said.

"In some cases, they alter reports after the scientists have signed off on them.

"The perplexing thing about this, from the point of view of an independent scientist like me, is why the press has suddenly picked this up as a big story because it is a very old story."

Dr Carter says global warming is a natural occurrence.

"The question is not are carbon dioxide emissions causing warming," he said. "The question is how much warming are they causing or, more specifically, how much warming are the human emissions causing?

"The IPCC and their scientists have now had 20 years. They have spent somewhere around $100 billion, thousands of scientists worldwide working on trying to pin down that human signal.

"They haven't found it after 20 years.

"What it tells you is the human signal is so tiny that it is lost of the variation of natural climate."

The last IPCC report involved more than 1,000 authors, 2,000 reviewers and took three years to write.

Professor Neville Nicholls from Monash University, a lead IPCC author, says it inevitable that glitches will slip in.

"Some of that literature isn't published in peer review journals and we include things like masters theses and PHD theses and reports put together by government organisations," he said.

"We are supposed to asses it all and the evidence of warming just continues.

"The January we have just finished was the hottest January globally we've seen - the hottest January on record.

"That is using satellite data of lower atmospheric temperatures. November 2009 was the hottest November we have ever seen in that data. So I think evidence just continues to build."

Call for reform

Barry Brooke, a climate change professor at Adelaide University, says the report's flaws are not in the IPCC's argument about greenhouse gas emissions, but in the predictions made about the future impact of climate change.

"We are not talking about any attacks on the fundamental science, about whether carbon dioxide is rising or whether temperatures are going up or whether there is a link between those two," he said.

"That is fundamental evidence as documented in the working group one section of this report.

"All these attacks are coming in on working group two and working group three. They are concerned with trying to predict the future impact or trying to predict future energy supply.

"Any time you go to try and predict something that is going to happen in the future, obviously there is a big burden of uncertainty and there is going to be a lot of unknowns."

Yet Professor Brooke says the IPCC is too big, too unwieldy and does not keep up with new emerging science.

He is backing calls for the process to be reformed.

"I wouldn't be disturbed at all if there wasn't another IPCC report," he said.

"Indeed, I think it would probably be more efficient if you had reports on a more regular basis that were slimmer, easier for policy makers to deal with and kept up the pace with the latest findings.

"That might avoid the impression that the public gets - it is the monolithic body that is all-knowing, and it is obviously not - but also that is really slow-moving in terms of what it recommends."

But the IPCC's Professor Nichols disagrees

"The IPCC reports are long. They are unwieldy. They are boring," he said.

"They take a lot of time for people like me to prepare because of the transparent review process, but what else do you do?

"Do you just say let everyone in the opinion pages of the newspaper, without the benefit of spending the time looking at the literature, do you take their opinion as the best opinion?

"I can't see another way around it and I would dearly love to find a simpler and streamlined process than all the time I have to put into IPCC, but I think we'd invent another IPCC if the IPCC didn't exist."

Editor's note (February 9): This story originally referred to Dr Bob Carter as a marine biologist. It has been corrected to refer to him as a marine geologist.

February 9, 2010

The one thing in this whole debate is that we never, ever, ever hear about any studies that show positive benefits to an increase in temperature by a couple degrees. You have to ask yourself..."why is that?"

Intuitively speaking there are always some positives to be discussed even if under a certain scenario the major are negative consequences.

That to me underlies my concern with current so called open, peered reviewed science.

Here is an interesting story on what may be considered a positive study...

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/...000/8503823.stm

Climate change will make world more 'fragrant'

By Matt Walker

Editor, Earth News

Fresh but fragrant air

Climate change will make the world more fragrant.

As CO2 levels increase and the world warms, land use, precipitation and the availability of water will also change.

In response to all these disruptions, plants will emit greater levels of fragrant chemicals called biogenic volatile organic compounds.

That will then alter how plants interact with one another and defend themselves against pests, according to a major scientific review.

According to the scientists leading the review, the world may already be becoming more fragrant, as plants have already begun emitting more smelly chemicals.

"The increase is exponential," says Professor Josep Penuelas, of the Global Ecology Unit at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain.

"It may have increased already by 10% in the past 30 years and may increase 30 to 40% with the two to three degrees (Celsius) warming projected for the next decades."

Biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) are routinely emitted by plants into the atmosphere.

Such chemicals differ in size, properties and origin, and can range from isoprene, monoterpenes, sesquiterpenes, and so-called green leaf and herbivore-induced volatiles to oxygenated volatile organic compounds such as carbonyls, acids and alcohols.

All play vital roles in helping plants grow and metabolise, communicate with one another and reproduce, and protect or defend themselves from herbivores such as browsing mammals or insect pests.

But plants emit different levels of such compounds depending on environmental conditions.

While significant research has been done to assess the impact of global warming on further CO2 exchange in the atmosphere, little focus has been given to how changing temperatures will alter emissions of important compounds such as BVOCs.

So Prof Penuelas and Dr Michael Staudt of the Centre for Functional Ecology and Evolution in Montpellier, France conducted a major review of how climate change will alter the expression of these compounds.

"Based upon the work reviewed, we can be reasonably sure that climate and global change in general will have an impact on BVOC emissions," they write in the journal Trends in Plant Sciences.

"The most likely overall impact is an increase in BVOC emissions mostly driven by current warming, and that the altered emissions will affect their physiological and ecological functions and their environmental role."

In particular, they say higher temperatures will cause plants to produce more BVOCs, and also lengthen the growing season of many species, further adding to the BVOCs produced.

By enhancing the activity of BVOC synthesising enzymes, and making it easier for such compounds to diffuse into the air, rising temperatures will cause a sharp, exponential increase in BVOCs.

Global emissions may already have increased by 10% in the past 30 years and could increase by an additional 30 to 45%, they say.

For example, studies have shown that artificially increasing the air temperature by three to four degrees Celsius makes heath growing on a sub-Arctic island emit between 56 and 83% more isoprene.

Higher temperatures will also enable more high-emitting plants to colonise higher latitudes.

Temperature will not be the only factor making plants emit more fragrant chemicals.

Changes in land use could mean that rainforests are being replaced by plantation trees, such as palms and rubber, that emit many more volatile organic compounds.

The scientists also suspect that higher concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere, greater levels of UV radiation reaching the poles, and increased amounts of ozone pollution, will all affect how plants produce BVOCs, though it is much less clear how.

Overall though, they feel the impact on plants around the world could be significant and underappreciated.

Complex consequences

Communication between plants could be affected.

For example, some BVOCs such as terpenes, methyl jasmonate or methyl salicylate act as airborne signals between plants, warning them of an attack by herbivores.

Plants forced to produce more of such chemicals could therefore be in a constant state of high alert.

Or it could be that a more fragrant atmosphere confuses pollinators such as bees, altering plant reproduction, or insect pests.

"Temperature is a very powerful driver of emissions," says Prof Penuelas.

"The increased emissions will likely affect physiology and ecology, ie the functioning of life."

He and Dr Staudt say a number of more detailed long term studies need to be performed to better understand the impact of elevated BVOC emissions in different habitats.

For while they can be reasonably sure that BVOC levels will increase, and the world will become more fragrant as a result, the problem is too complex to yet gauge many of the consequences.

February 10, 2010

Cool study.

Peer reviewed and suggests that up to 90% of the melting in the Himalayas is due to soot versus global warming.

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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/...00203161436.htm

Science News Share Blog Cite Print Email BookmarkBlack Carbon a Significant Factor in Melting of Himalayan Glaciers

ScienceDaily (Feb. 4, 2010) — The fact that glaciers in the Himalayan mountains are thinning is not disputed. However, few researchers have attempted to rigorously examine and quantify the causes. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientist Surabi Menon set out to isolate the impacts of the most commonly blamed culprit -- greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide -- from other particles in the air that may be causing the melting. Menon and her collaborators found that airborne black carbon aerosols, or soot, from India is a major contributor to the decline in snow and ice cover on the glaciers.

"Our simulations showed greenhouse gases alone are not nearly enough to be responsible for the snow melt," says Menon, a physicist and staff scientist in Berkeley Lab's Environmental Energy Technologies Division. "Most of the change in snow and ice cover -- about 90 percent -- is from aerosols. Black carbon alone contributes at least 30 percent of this sum."

Menon and her collaborators used two sets of aerosol inventories by Indian researchers to run their simulations; their results were published online in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

The actual contribution of black carbon, emitted largely as a result of burning fossil fuels and biomass, may be even higher than 30 percent because the inventories report less black carbon than what has been measured by observations at several stations in India. (However, these observations are too incomplete to be used in climate models.) "We may be underestimating the amount of black carbon by as much as a factor of four," she says.

The findings are significant because they point to a simple way to make a swift impact on the snow melt. "Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for 100 years, but black carbon doesn't stay in the atmosphere for more than a few weeks, so the effects of controlling black carbon are much faster," Menon says. "If you control black carbon now, you're going to see an immediate effect."

The Himalayan glaciers are often referred to as the third polar ice cap because of the large amount of ice mass they hold. The glacial melt feeds rivers in China and throughout the Indian subcontinent and provide fresh water to more than one billion people.

Atmospheric aerosols are tiny particles containing nitrates, sulfates, carbon and other matter, and can influence the climate. Unlike other aerosols, black carbon absorbs sunlight, similar to greenhouse gases. But unlike greenhouse gases, black carbon does not heat up the surface; it warms only the atmosphere.

This warming is one of two ways in which black carbon melts snow and ice. The second effect results from the deposition of the black carbon on a white surface, which produces an albedo effect that accelerates melting. Put another way, dirty snow absorbs far more sunlight -- and gets warmer faster -- than pure white snow.

Previous studies have shown that black carbon can have a powerful effect on local atmospheric temperature. "Black carbon can be very strong," Menon says. "A small amount of black carbon tends to be more potent than the same mass of sulfate or other aerosols."

Black carbon, which is caused by incomplete combustion, is especially prevalent in India and China; satellite images clearly show that its levels there have climbed dramatically in the last few decades. The main reason for the increase is the accelerated economic activity in India and China over the last 20 years; top sources of black carbon include shipping, vehicle emissions, coal burning and inefficient stoves. According to Menon's data, black carbon emitted in India increased by 46 percent from 1990 to 2000 and by another 51 percent from 2000 to 2010.

However, black carbon's effect on snow is not linear. Menon's simulations show that snow and ice cover over the Himalayas declined an average of about one percent from 1990 to 2000 due to aerosols that originated from India. Her study did not include particles that may have originated from China, also known to be a large source of black carbon. (See "Black soot and the survival of the Tibetan glaciers," by James Hansen, et al., published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.) Also the is an average for the entire region, which saw increases and decreases in snow cover. As seen in the , while a large swath of the Himalayas saw snow cover decrease by at least 16 percent over this period, as reported by the National Snow and Ice Data Center, a few smaller patches saw increases.

Menon's study also found that black carbon affects precipitation and is a major factor in triggering extreme weather in eastern India and Bangladesh, where cyclones, hurricanes and flooding are common. It also contributes to the decrease in rainfall over central India. Because black carbon heats the atmosphere, it changes the local heating profile, which increases convection, one of the primary causes of precipitation. While this results in more intense rainfall in some regions, it leads to less in other regions. The pattern is very similar to a study Menon led in 2002, which found that black carbon led to droughts in northern China and extreme floods in southern China.

"The black carbon from India is contributing to the melting of the glaciers, it's contributing to extreme precipitation, and if black carbon can be controlled more easily than greenhouse gases like CO2, then it makes sense for India to regulate black carbon emissions," says Menon.

February 11, 2010

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8510498.stm

Climategate e-mails inquiry under way

By Mark Kinver

Science and environment reporter, BBC News

A panel of independent experts has officially begun its inquiry into the "Climategate" affair.

The experts, headed by Sir Muir Russell, will investigate how e-mails from the UK's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) appeared on the web.

They will also consider if the e-mail exchanges between researchers show an attempt to manipulate or suppress data "at odds" with scientific practice.

The panel hopes to present "preliminary conclusions by spring 2010".

Speaking at the launch of the inquiry, Sir Muir, who is chairman of the Judicial Appointments Board for Scotland, said: "We are free to pursue and follow any line of inquiry that we wish."

E-mail allegations

In November, more than 1,000 messages between scientists at the CRU, based at the University of East Anglia (UEA), and their peers around the world were posted on the web, along with other documents.

CRU maintains one of the world's most important datasets on how global temperatures have changed.

Sir Muir says the review will follow any line of inquiry

Professor Phil Jones, the director of the unit, has stepped down pending the review, and has said he stands by his data.

UEA appointed Sir Muir in December to head an inquiry in to a series of allegations that arose from the stolen e-mails.

As well as more than 1,000 e-mails, the hack took 3,000 documents. The overall size of data amounted to 160MB.

The panel are also tasked with considering whether the unit failed to observe Freedom of Information requests properly.

Critics said that the e-mail exchanges reveal an attempt by the researchers involved to manipulate data.

Panel announced

Climate sceptics suggest that the affair shows that either human activities are not affecting the planet's climate system, or that the impacts are not as bad as many climate scientists suggest.

The panel's investigation will:

• "Examine the hacked e-mail exchanges, other relevant e-mail exchanges and any other information held at CRU to determine whether there is any evidence of the manipulation or suppression of data which is at odds with acceptable scientific practice."

• "Review CRU's policies and practices for acquiring, assembling, subjecting to peer review and disseminating data and research findings."

• "Review CRU's compliance or otherwise with the university's policies and practices regarding requests under the Freedom of Information Act."

• "Review and make recommendations as to the appropriate management, governance and security structures for CRU and the security, integrity and release of the data it holds."

However, the panel will not review the past scientific work of the CRU, as this will be re-appraised by a UEA-commissioned study, which will involve the Royal Society.

The other members of the inquiry, which is being funded by UEA, are Geoffrey Boulton, general secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburgh; Dr Philip Campbell, editor-in-chief for Nature journal; Professor Peter Clarke of the University of Edinburgh; David Eyton, head of research and technology at BP; and Professor Jim Norton, vice president for the Chartered Institute for IT.

February 13, 2010

From what I have read so far only the fanatics on one side or the other believe that major weather events proves one side or the another.

The anti GWT (global warming theory) guy says snow means cooling. The pro GWT guy says snow means warming. In the end rationally speaking all this storm tells us is...a storm happened.

The one guy says without a doubt we are in a warming trend...but the last 11 years has been cooling. Paleogeographically speaking...we have been warming for some time. If global historical patterns are the more consistent guide to predicting long term temperatures...maybe we are now in a falling temperature cycle heading towards a mini ice age.

At the same time if we had 10 years in a row of heavy snow winters...that can tell us something...but maybe only that ocean currents are changing.

Sun

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http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/02/12/...global-warming/

Updated February 13, 2010

Global Warming Debate Heats Up in Wake of Record Snowstorms

By Blake Snow

Scientists and politicians on both sides of the climate change debate have been pointing to the record-breaking snowstorms in the Mid-Atlantic states to promote their theories on the earth's changing temperatures -- and the debate is getting downright nasty.

As snow-weary Pennsylvanians dug out, utilities struggled to restore power to thousands and crews worked to reopen closed roads after a record-breaking blizzard that dumped more than a foot of snow across the state.

Scientists and politicians on both sides of the climate change debate have been pointing to the record-breaking snowstorms in the Mid-Atlantic states to promote their theories on the earth's changing temperatures -- and the debate is getting downright nasty.

Joseph Romm, a climate change expert and former Energy Department official; Jeff Masters, a meteorologist who writes on the Weather Underground blog; and others argue that this winter's snowstorms are, counterintuitively, evidence of global warming and not cooling.

"It's absurd for the 'anti-science side' to say we're in a cooling trend when we're in an overall warming trend," says Romm of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. "Heavy snow is not evidence that climate science is false," he added, noting that "the snow we've seen is entirely consistent with global warming theory."

But Patrick J. Michaels, senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and state climatologist for Virginia for 27 years, disagrees. "Global warming simply hasn't done a darned thing to Washington's snow," he wrote on National Review, adding that "if you plot out year-to-year snow around here, you'll see no trend whatsoever through the entire history."

Politicians are jumping on the bandwagon, too. "It's going to keep snowing in DC until Al Gore cries 'uncle,'" tweeted Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C.

Global warming advocates feel under attack as skeptics use the record-setting snowstorms -- and the recent discoveries of errors in the U.N.'s climate science study, a growing scandal called climate-gate -- to question the theory that climate change is a manmade problem.

Romm explains that cold weather doesn't cause snow. What brings the flakes down is a combination of cold and precipitation. And since warmer air holds more moisture, global warming and heavy snowfall can coexist, so long as temperatures keeping dipping below 32 degrees.

Bill Nye, the Science Guy, agrees, going so far as to tell MSNBC's Rachel Maddow that scientists who doubt climate change's manmade origins are unpatriotic. "If you want to get serious about it, these guys claiming that the snow in Washington disproves climate change are almost unpatriotic -- it's as if they're denying science," Nye said.

And though the science debate heats up, unlike the weather, the snowstorms have set off even more questions: Why is the East Coast getting hit, while Vancouver needs to truck in snow for the Winter Olympics? Can we accurately link extreme weather with global warming?

Not really, says meteorologist Jeff Masters of Weather Underground, an independent forecaster. "You can't take regional events and link them to overall climate change," he said. "There's a huge amount of natural variance."

But some skeptics say the science isn't that innocent, even though they acknowledge global warming as a measurable anomaly. "As climate change critics, we're not denying an increase in temperature," says Dan Miller, publisher of the Heartland Institute, a group that favors free-market solutions to public policy problems. "We're skeptical of the crisis level and the cause."

Miller says climate-change scientists have a conflict of interest, as many stand to receive "a huge amount of money" from the government to support continued research. "There is no upper limit of money at stake," he warns.

Conversely, Miller says his firm is impartial, having no financial investment in climate change; it would lose a mere 4 percent of its funding if it ends up on the wrong side of the debate. "There's no money at stake for critics," he points out.

Masters says in a perfect world he'd need "200-300 years worth of records" to accurately predict further climate change. But since that's not available, "We're forced to make decisions on a limited data set." Nevertheless, Masters feels the possible dangers of global warming outweigh the risks of remaining idle. "We need to take action even in the face of inadequate data," he says.

Miller disagrees, arguing that we should collectively return to the drawing board -- in light of all the controversy, confusion, and potential conflicts of interest -- before we draw any conclusions.

"The science isn't settled," he says. "Yes, the climate has warmed -- that's not a hoax. But can't we go back and reconsider the science? Let's just step back and reconsider."

February 13, 2010

Great...a scientist who feel threatened by those that don't agree with him. What scientists out there have everyone believing them? Very, very few obviously.

Now he says he is just not well organized. Can't find the raw data...lost the raw data... Holy cow is that scary that we would even consider relying on a guy like this for critical policy decisions!

Jones also admits the "that the debate had not been settled over whether the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than the current period." I feel that this is a crucial point that clearly needs discussion before we can say today's temperature is anything to worry about.

If scientists are provide data, recommendations and policy decision information then they should be held to an incredibly high standard to make sure bias and poorly done science is excluded. Currently that is not being done by anyone but the IPCC which...as we can tell from the Climategate scandal leaks, Glaciergate and Africagate and Stormgate...that they have sorely failed to date.

Now that an investigation is underway...guys like this are desperately trying to lay the ground work for denial of any wrong doing. That being said...he may just be totally stupid and inept in how he does studies and may mean well...but then people and the IPCC should know that and be super critical of his work and demand full disclosure and review by ANYONE wanting to test his theories.

In the end he should be FORCED to redo his work with ONLY that raw data he currently poses or can find legitimately and the re-run his work. He can't use data he can't show where it comes from. He also has to be available for defending his work if he is using a biased data set. We have to know where the temperature recording sites are. That makes a huge difference to eliminating bias. He complains that he is just a scientist measuring temperature but in fact he spends a lot of time linking CO2 to temperature which is making a big inference step without the research. Anyways...controversy is just the life of a scientist and he has to get over the ego trip he used to ride! Science is not science until someone can replicate the work and the work is defend-able in public. IMHO.

Sun

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511701.stm

Climategate' expert Jones says data not well organised

By Roger Harrabin

Environment analyst, BBC News

Professor Phil Jones

Phil Jones, the professor behind the "Climategate" affair, has admitted some of his decades-old weather data was not well enough organised.

He said this contributed to his refusal to share raw data with critics - a decision he says he regretted.

But Professor Jones said he had not cheated over the data, or unfairly influenced the scientific process.

He said he stood by the view that recent climate warming was most likely predominantly man-made.

But he agreed that two periods in recent times had experienced similar warming. And he agreed that the debate had not been settled over whether the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than the current period.

These statements are likely to be welcomed by people sceptical of man-made climate change who have felt insulted to be labelled by government ministers as flat-earthers and deniers.

'Bunker mentality'

Professor Jones agreed that scientists on both sides of the debate could suffer sometimes from a "bunker mentality".

He said "sceptics" who doubted his climate record should compile their own dataset from material publicly available in the US.

"The major datasets mostly agree," he said. "If some of our critics spent less time criticising us and prepared a dataset of their own, that would be much more constructive."

His colleagues said that keeping a paper trail was not one of Professor Jones' strong points. Professor Jones told BBC News: "There is some truth in that.

"We do have a trail of where the (weather) stations have come from but it's probably not as good as it should be," he admitted.

"That's similar with the American datasets. There were technical reasons for this, with changing data from different countries. There's a continual updating of the dataset. Keeping track of everything is difficult. Some countries will do lots of checking on their data then issue improved data so it can be very difficult. We have improved but we have to improve more."

Professor Jones clarified later that when he had told me that his paper trail was insufficient he meant data trail. He insisted that he had not lost any original data, but that the sources of some of the data may have been insufficiently clear.

His account is the most revealing so far about his decision to block repeated requests from people demanding to see raw data behind records showing an unprecedented warming in the late 20th Century.

Professor Jones said climate scientists needed to do more to communicate the reasons behind their conclusion that humans were driving recent climate change.

They also needed to be more transparent with data - although he said this process had already begun.

He strongly defended references in his emails to using a "trick" to "hide the decline" in temperatures.

These phrases had been deliberately taken out of context and "spun" by sceptics keen to derail the Copenhagen climate conference, he said.

And he denied any attempt to influence climate data: "I have no agenda," he said.

"I'm a scientist trying to measure temperature. If I registered that the climate has been cooling I'd say so. But it hasn't until recently - and then barely at all. The trend is a warming trend."

He said many people had been made sceptical about climate change by the snow in the northern hemisphere - but they didn't realise that the satellite record from the University of Alabama in Huntsville showed it had been the warmest January since records began in 1979.

February 14, 2010

With my training in scientific thought and research this has always been my largest area of skepticism. It has been well documented that most weather stations were set in and around airports. As airports grew...so did the impact of human induced "microclimates". To explain a microclimate one only needs to look at the temperature patterns in a big city. The downtown core is always 2 degrees or warmer than the suburbs which in turn is a least a degree warmer than the surrounding country side farms. When you look at additional bias in having a heating generating source like an air conditioner fan it makes you kind of angry that that is not taken into account.

Actually some studies do take it into account. Unfortunately...after they do their modeling efforts some studies actually show the opposite effects in their report by tweaking the data to show more natural warming than man made appliance effects.

These biases is what I need to be removed in order to start "trusting" what these guys are saying. When the head temperature guy puts in bias...then the next guy uses his work and puts in bias..and the next one and the next one... Well...you know you end up with biased results in the extreme.

IMHO

Sun

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/envi...icle7026317.ece

The Sunday Times

February 14, 2010

World may not be warming, say scientists

Jonathan Leake

The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.

In its last assessment the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the evidence that the world was warming was “unequivocal”.

It warned that greenhouse gases had already heated the world by 0.7C and that there could be 5C-6C more warming by 2100, with devastating impacts on humanity and wildlife. However, new research, including work by British scientists, is casting doubt on such claims. Some even suggest the world may not be warming much at all.

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.

These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.

“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”

The IPCC faces similar criticisms from Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited by the panel to review its last report.

The experience turned him into a strong critic and he has since published a research paper questioning its methods.

“We concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC’s climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialisation and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias,” he said.

Such warnings are supported by a study of US weather stations co-written by Anthony Watts, an American meteorologist and climate change sceptic.

His study, which has not been peer reviewed, is illustrated with photographs of weather stations in locations where their readings are distorted by heat-generating equipment.

Some are next to air- conditioning units or are on waste treatment plants. One of the most infamous shows a weather station next to a waste incinerator.

Watts has also found examples overseas, such as the weather station at Rome airport, which catches the hot exhaust fumes emitted by taxiing jets.

In Britain, a weather station at Manchester airport was built when the surrounding land was mainly fields but is now surrounded by heat-generating buildings.

Terry Mills, professor of applied statistics and econometrics at Loughborough University, looked at the same data as the IPCC. He found that the warming trend it reported over the past 30 years or so was just as likely to be due to random fluctuations as to the impacts of greenhouse gases. Mills’s findings are to be published in Climatic Change, an environmental journal.

“The earth has gone through warming spells like these at least twice before in the last 1,000 years,” he said.

Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of the chapter of the IPCC report that deals with the observed temperature changes, said he accepted there were problems with the global thermometer record but these had been accounted for in the final report.

“It’s not just temperature rises that tell us the world is warming,” he said. “We also have physical changes like the fact that sea levels have risen around five inches since 1972, the Arctic icecap has declined by 40% and snow cover in the northern hemisphere has declined.”

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts has recently issued a new set of global temperature readings covering the past 30 years, with thermometer readings augmented by satellite data.

Dr Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office, said: “This new set of data confirms the trend towards rising global temperatures and suggest that, if anything, the world is warming even more quickly than we had thought.”

Surface temperature records: policy driven deception? - a report by Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts

*************************************

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/s...urface_temp.pdf Who is the SPPI? I found this on the web. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_P...olicy_Institute

February 14, 2010

If the man influence global warming catastrophe scenario is correct we will definitely need biased removed. We saw on the survey of scientific opinions that many scientists believe in global warming...greatly influenced by the thought that all their peers believe even though they themselves do not see scientific evidence in their own research. Some core studies and scientists are driving the bulk of the belief system and as such they must be held accountable to an extremely high level of scrutiny. IF they can't stand the heat and defend their research and share the raw data and discuss irregularities in micro-climate impacts etc...then quite frankly they are NOT scientists but either business men protecting their job security, politicians trying to promote an agenda or ideologists trying to force everyone to change to a lower standard of living with those making the most money supporting those countries or groups or individuals making the least money.

IMHO.

Sun

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/envi...icle7003622.ece

From The Times

January 27, 2010

Science chief John Beddington calls for honesty on climate change

The IPCC's 2007 report that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 has exposed a wider problem with the way that some evidence was presented

Ben Webster, Environment Editor

The impact of global warming has been exaggerated by some scientists and there is an urgent need for more honest disclosure of the uncertainty of predictions about the rate of climate change, according to the Government’s chief scientific adviser.

John Beddington was speaking to The Times in the wake of an admission by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that it grossly overstated the rate at which Himalayan glaciers were receding.

Professor Beddington said that climate scientists should be less hostile to sceptics who questioned man-made global warming. He condemned scientists who refused to publish the data underpinning their reports.

He said that public confidence in climate science would be improved if there were more openness about its uncertainties, even if that meant admitting that sceptics had been right on some hotly-disputed issues.

He said: “I don’t think it’s healthy to dismiss proper scepticism. Science grows and improves in the light of criticism. There is a fundamental uncertainty about climate change prediction that can’t be changed.”

He said that the false claim in the IPCC’s 2007 report that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 had exposed a wider problem with the way that some evidence was presented.

“Certain unqualified statements have been unfortunate. We have a problem in communicating uncertainty. There’s definitely an issue there. If there wasn’t, there wouldn’t be the level of scepticism. All of these predictions have to be caveated by saying, ‘There’s a level of uncertainty about that’.”

Professor Beddington said that particular caution was needed when communicating predictions about climate change made with the help of computer models.

“It’s unchallengeable that CO2 traps heat and warms the Earth and that burning fossil fuels shoves billions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. But where you can get challenges is on the speed of change.

“When you get into large-scale climate modelling there are quite substantial uncertainties. On the rate of change and the local effects, there are uncertainties both in terms of empirical evidence and the climate models themselves.”

He said that it was wrong for scientists to refuse to disclose their data to their critics: “I think, wherever possible, we should try to ensure there is openness and that source material is available for the whole scientific community.”

He added: “There is a danger that people can manipulate the data, but the benefits from being open far outweigh that danger.”

Phil Jones, the director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and a contributor to the IPCC’s reports, has been forced to stand down while an investigation takes place into leaked e-mails allegedly showing that he attempted to conceal data.

In response to one request for data Professor Jones wrote: “We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”

Professor Beddington said that uncertainty about some aspects of climate science should not be used as an excuse for inaction: “Some people ask why we should act when scientists say they are only 90 per cent certain about the problem. But would you get on a plane that had a 10 per cent chance of landing?”

Mike Hulme, Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia, said: “Climate scientists get kudos from working on an issue in the public eye but with that kudos comes responsibility. Being open with data is part of that responsibility.”

He criticised Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, for his dismissive response last November to research suggesting that the UN body had overstated the threat to the glaciers. Mr Pachauri described it as “voodoo science”.

Professor Hulme said: “Pachauri’s choice of words has not been good. The question of whether he is the right person to lead the IPCC is for the 193 countries who make up its governing body. It’s a political decision.”

Blowing hot and cold

Glaciers

The IPCC says its statement on melting glaciers was based on a report it misquoted by WWF, a lobby group, which took its information from a report in New Scientist based on an interview with a glaciologist who claims he was misquoted. Most glaciologists say that the Himalayan glaciers are so thick that they would take hundreds of years to melt

Sea levels

The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research says sea levels could rise by 6ft by 2100, a prediction based on the 7in rise in sea levels from 1881-2001, which it attributed to a 0.7C rise in temperatures. It assumed a rise of 6.4C by 2100 would melt the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets.

UK Climate Projections, published last year by the Government, predicted a rise of one to two feet by 2095

Arctic sea ice

Cambridge University’s Polar Ocean Physics Group has claimed that sea ice will have disappeared from the North Pole in summer by 2020. However, in the past two summers the total area of sea ice in the Arctic has grown substantially

Global temperatures

The Met Office predicts that this year is “more likely than not” to be the world’s warmest year on record. It claims the El Niño effect will join forces with the warming effect of manmade greenhouse gases.

Some scientists say that there is a warming bias in Met Office long-range forecasts which has resulted in it regularly overstating the warming trend

February 15, 2010

Apparently I missed Amazongate :-)

The pro side claims engineers and mathematicians and statisticians that understand how the common sense aspects of the often very wide ranging claims of doom are not "experts".

Again we have the IPCC using non peer reviewed and non scientists making claims without study that is widely accepted by policy makers and paranoid people as true.

Well...the cat is out of the bag once again.

Sigh...how can I believe with this crazy stuff happening?

Sun

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/envi...icle7009705.ece

From The Sunday Times

January 31, 2010

The UN climate panel and the rainforest claim

Jonathan Leake

Dr. Rajendra Pachauri

IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri is fighting to keep his job after a barrage of criticism

A STARTLING report by the United Nations climate watchdog that global warming might wipe out 40% of the Amazon rainforest was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in its 2007 benchmark report that even a slight change in rainfall could see swathes of the rainforest rapidly replaced by savanna grassland.

The source for its claim was a report from WWF, an environmental pressure group, which was authored by two green activists. They had based their “research” on a study published in Nature, the science journal, which did not assess rainfall but in fact looked at the impact on the forest of human activity such as logging and burning. This weekend WWF said it was launching an internal inquiry into the study.

This is the third time in as many weeks that serious doubts have been raised over the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change. Two weeks ago, after reports in The Sunday Times, it was forced to retract a warning that climate change was likely to melt the Himalayan glaciers by 2035. That warning was also based on claims in a WWF report.

Related Links

* Real threat to rainforest

* Bad science needs good scrutiny

* Panel ignored warnings on glacier error

The IPCC has been put on the defensive as well over its claims that climate change may be increasing the severity and frequency of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.

This weekend Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, was fighting to keep his job after a barrage of criticism.

Scientists fear the controversies will be used by climate change sceptics to sway public opinion to ignore global warming — even though the fundamental science, that greenhouse gases can heat the world, remains strong.

The latest controversy originates in a report called A Global Review of Forest Fires, which WWF published in 2000. It was commissioned from Andrew Rowell, a freelance journalist and green campaigner who has worked for Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and anti-smoking organisations. The second author was Peter Moore, a campaigner and policy analyst with WWF.

In their report they suggested that “up to 40% of Brazilian rainforest was extremely sensitive to small reductions in the amount of rainfall” but made clear that this was because drier forests were more likely to catch fire.

The IPCC report picked up this reference but expanded it to cover the whole Amazon. It also suggested that a slight reduction in rainfall would kill many trees directly, not just by contributing to more fires.

It said: “Up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state. It is more probable that forests will be replaced by ecosystems that have more resistance to multiple stresses caused by temperature increase, droughts and fires, such as tropical savannas.”

Simon Lewis, a Royal Society research fellow at Leeds University who specialises in tropical forest ecology, described the section of Rowell and Moore’s report predicting the potential destruction of large swathes of rainforest as “a mess”.

“The Nature paper is about the interactions of logging damage, fire and periodic droughts, all extremely important in understanding the vulnerability of Amazon forest to drought, but is not related to the vulnerability of these forests to reductions in rainfall,” he said.

“In my opinion the Rowell and Moore report should not have been cited; it contains no primary research data.”

WWF said it prided itself on the accuracy of its reports and was investigating the latest concerns. “We have a team of people looking at this internationally,” said Keith Allott, its climate change campaigner.

Scientists such as Lewis are demanding that the IPCC ban the use of reports from pressure groups. They fear that environmental campaign groups are bound to cherry-pick the scientific literature that confirms their beliefs and ignore the rest.

It was exactly this process that lay behind the bogus claim that the Himalayan glaciers were likely to melt by 2035 — a suggestion that got into another WWF report and was then used by the IPCC.

Georg Kaser, a glaciologist who was a lead author on the last IPCC report, said: “Groups like WWF are not scientists and they are not professionally trained to manage data. They may have good intentions but it opens the way to mistakes.”

Research by Richard North

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Du Jour-gate flavor: Amazon

25 01 2010

The IPCC “Flavor of the day”-gate is now the Amazon Rain Forest. What will tomorrow’s flavor be?

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3640/330052..._6b9a79eb4a.jpg

James Delingpole of the Telegraph says this better than I ever could, so I’ll provide his summary here. Note that there are plenty more cases of unsubstantiated non peer reviewed references in the IPCC report, a list of which you can see here. For those wondering what “Load of porkies” means, see this.

Delingpole relays North’s analysis:

Here’s the latest development, courtesy of Dr Richard North – and it’s a cracker. It seems that, not content with having lied to us about shrinking glaciers, increasing hurricanes, and rising sea levels, the IPCC’s latest assessment report also told us a complete load of porkies about the danger posed by climate change to the Amazon rainforest.

This is to be found in Chapter 13 of the Working Group II report, the same part of the IPCC fourth assessment report in which the “Glaciergate” claims are made. There, is the startling claim that:

At first sight, the reference looks kosher enough but, following it through, one sees:

This, then appears to be another WWF report, carried out in conjunction with the IUCN – The International Union for Conservation of Nature.

The link given is no longer active, but the report is on the IUCN website here. Furthermore, the IUCN along with WWF is another advocacy group and the report is not peer-reviewed. According to IPCC rules, it should not have been used as a primary source.

It gets even better. The two expert authors of the WWF report so casually cited by the IPCC as part of its, ahem, “robust” “peer-reviewed” process weren’t even Amazon specialists. One, Dr PF Moore, is a policy analyst:

My background and experience around the world has required and developed high-level policy and analytical skills. I have a strong understanding of government administration, legislative review, analysis and inquiries generated through involvement in or management of the Australian Regional Forest Agreement process, Parliamentary and Government inquiries, Coronial inquiries and public submissions on water pricing, access and use rights and native vegetation legislation in Australia and fire and natural resources laws, regulations and policies in Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, South Africa and Malaysia.

And the lead author Andy Rowell is a freelance journalist (for the Guardian, natch) and green activist:

Andy Rowell is a freelance writer and Investigative journalist with over 12 years’ experience on environmental, food, health and globalization issues. Rowell has undertaken cutting-edge investigations for, amongst others, Action on Smoking and Health, The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, IFAW, the Pan American Health Organization, Project Underground, the World Health Organization, World in Action and WWF.

But the IPCC’s shamelessness did not end there. Dr North has searched the WWF’s reports high and low but can find no evidence of a statement to support the IPCC’s claim that “40 per cent” of the Amazon is threatened by climate change. (Logging and farm expansion are a much more plausible threat).

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/25/d-jo...-flavor-amazon/

http://news.mongabay.com/2010/0204-amazongate.html

February 15, 2010

Call upon the UN to improve it's credibility and scientific integrity!

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/envi...icle7026932.ece

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From The Times

February 15, 2010

UN must investigate warming ‘bias’, says former climate chief

‘Every error exaggerated the impact of change’

Bob Watson of Defra

Robert Watson has held talks with Al Gore over creating a research group

Ben Webster, Environment Editor, and Robin Pagnamenta, Energy Editor

The UN body that advises world leaders on climate change must investigate an apparent bias in its report that resulted in several exaggerations of the impact of global warming, according to its former chairman.

In an interview with The Times Robert Watson said that all the errors exposed so far in the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) resulted in overstatements of the severity of the problem.

Professor Watson, currently chief scientific adviser to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said that if the errors had just been innocent mistakes, as has been claimed by the current chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, some would probably have understated the impact of climate change.

The errors have emerged in the past month after simple checking of the sources cited by the 2,500 scientists who produced the report.

The report falsely claimed that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 when evidence suggests that they will survive for another 300 years. It also claimed that global warming could cut rain-fed North African crop production by up to 50 per cent by 2020. A senior IPCC contributor has since admitted that there is no evidence to support this claim.

The Dutch Government has asked the IPCC to correct its claim that more than half the Netherlands is below sea level. The environment ministry said that only 26 per cent of the country was below sea level.

Professor Watson, who served as chairman of the IPCC from 1997-2002, said: “The mistakes all appear to have gone in the direction of making it seem like climate change is more serious by overstating the impact. That is worrying. The IPCC needs to look at this trend in the errors and ask why it happened.”

He said that the IPCC should employ graduate science students to check the sources of each claim made in its next report, due in 2013. “Graduate students would love to be involved and they could really dig into the references and see if they really do support what is being said.”

He said that the next report should acknowledge that some scientists believed the planet was warming at a much slower rate than has been claimed by the majority of scientists.

“We should always be challenged by sceptics,” he said. “The IPCC’s job is to weigh up the evidence. If it can’t be dismissed, it should be included in the report. Point out it’s in the minority and, if you can’t say why it’s wrong, just say it’s a different view.”

Dr Pachauri has not responded to questions put to him by The Times, despite sending a text message saying that he would do so.

Professor Watson has held discussions with Al Gore, the former US Vice-President, about creating a new climate research group to supplement the work of the IPCC and to help restore the credibility of climate science.

He said that the scheme to create what he called a “Wikipedia for climate change” was at an early stage but the intention was to establish an online network of climate science research available to anyone with access to the internet and subject to permanent peer review by other scientists.

He said that the project would allow scientists to “synthesise all of the observational record in real-time, not every 5-7 years like the IPCC”.

He rejected concerns that the project would undermine the IPCC’s authority. “It would have to be done so it was complimentary and not a challenge to the IPCC,” he said.

A spokesman for Mr Gore’s office in Nashville, Tennessee, declined to comment on the project.

Meanwhile, a member of the inquiry team investigating allegations of misconduct by climate scientists has admitted that he holds strong views on climate change and that this contradicts a founding principle of the inquiry. Geoffrey Boulton, who was appointed last week by the inquiry chairman, Sir Muir Russell, said he believed that human activities were causing global warming.

Sir Muir issued a statement last week claiming that the inquiry members, who are investigating leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia, did not have a “predetermined view on climate change and climate science”.

Professor Boulton told The Times: “I may be rapped over the knuckles by Sir Muir for saying this, but I think that statement needs to be clarified. I think the committee needs someone like me who is close to the field of climate change and it would be quite amazing if that person didn’t have a view on one side or the other.”

February 16, 2010

From The Times

February 16, 2010

How I made the Met Office admit its climate-change data was wrong

John Graham-Cumming

The history of science is filled with stories of amateur scientists who made significant contributions. In 1937 the American amateur astronomer Grote Reber built a pioneering dish-shaped radio telescope in his back garden and produced the first radio map of the sky. And in the 19th century the existence of dominant and recessive genes was described by a priest, Gregor Mendel, after years of experimentation with pea plants.

But with the advent of powerful home computers, even the humble amateur like myself can make a contribution.

Using my laptop and my knowledge of computer programming I accidentally uncovered errors in temperature data released by the Met Office that form part of the vital records used to show that the climate is changing. Although the errors don’t change the basic message of global warming, they do illustrate how open access to data means that many hands make light work of replicating and checking the work of professional scientists.

After e-mails and documents were taken from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia late last year, the Met Office decided to release global thermometer readings stretching back to 1850 that they use to show the rise in land temperatures. These records hadn’t been freely available to the public before, although graphs drawn using them had.

Apart from seeing Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth I’d paid little attention to the science of global warming until the e-mail leaks from UEA last year.

I trusted the news stories about the work of the IPCC, but I thought it would be a fun hobby project to write a program to read the Met Office records on global temperature readings and draw the sort of graphs that show how it’s hotter now than ever before.

Since my training is in mathematics and computing I thought it best to write self-checking code: I’m unfamiliar with the science of climate change and so having my program perform internal checks for consistency was vital to making sure I didn’t make a mistake.

To my surprise the program complained about average temperatures in Australia and New Zealand. At first I assumed I’d made a mistake in the code and used a pocket calculator to double check the calculations.

The result was unequivocal: something was wrong with the average temperature data in Oceania. And I also stumbled upon other small errors in calculations.

About a week after I’d told the Met Office about these problems I received a response confirming that I was correct: a problem in the process of updating Met Office records had caused the wrong average temperatures to be reported. Last month the Met Office updated their public temperature records to include my corrections.

John Graham-Cumming is a programmer and author of The Geek Atlas

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article7028418.ece

February 16, 2010

Jeepers Creepers.

Another blunder by the IPCC

Some fanatics are trying to blame the Australian drought on Climate Change. The IPCC picks Australia as a place to be concerned about. Things get said and assumptions are made that it was based upon science.

Apparently there does not seem to be any data to support this. The IPCC is having to make another change. Apparently there have been regular droughts and wildfires in Australia for eons and in fact some animals and plants evolved to cope with the seasonal grass fires.

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http://www.warwickhu...com/blog/?p=201

South East Australian heatwave in January 2009 is not detectable in “global warming” data

March 4th, 2009 by Warwick Hughes

Increasingly, we are hearing in the media that the January-February south east Australian heatwave and disastrous bushfires in Victoria that have killed over 200 people are the result of climate change or global warming.

This map shows the 10 degree grid cell that the temperature data graphs below is collected from.

SE Australia grid cells

Here is what the local region component of global temperature data speaks to us about January 2009 vs long term trends for South East Australia. These graphics of monthly temperature anomalies from land stations demonstrate that FROM 1880 THERE IS NO WARMING IN SOUTH EAST AUSTRALIA. February data is not yet in but can be added later.

The first graphic is from the UK Met Office – Hadley Centre, their latest CRUTEM3 global land data which has evolved from the datsets of P.D. Jones et al of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of Norwich. These data show a very slight and statistically insignificant warming of 0.03 degrees from 1880 to Jan 2009.

Note the pre 1880 data is riddled with gaps.

CRUTEM3 trend 1880-2009 SE Australia

The second graphic is generated by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) lead by the well known greenhouse warming proponent, Dr. James Hansen.

GISS monthly anomalies shows that SE Australia between 140-150E and 30-40S has a miniscule cooling trend over the 1549 months from Jan 1880 to Jan 2009 which would not be statistically significant from zero.

GISS temperature trend SE Australia 1880-2009

Both sets of data are made available through the The Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute who have a web site KNMI Climate Explorer, where it is possible to download a huge range of global climate data.

First let us be clear that “global warming” is measured by monthly mean temperature anomalies, so if a signature can not be seen in that context, then the case for a link between heatwaves – bushfires – global warming, is just arm-waving speculation.

Mean temperature = the average of night and day.

Blaming the 2009 Victorian bushfires on climate change or global warming is likely to become one of those “self evident truths” that our Governments and green media love so much.

It is interesting to remember what the “official” data show and that is that although there have been periods of both warming and cooling over south east Australia for 129 years, these cancel out and there is no overall trend.

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Posted in BoM Australia, IPCC, Jones et al, News and Views, Surface Record | 1 Comment »

February 17, 2010

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/...00131145840.htm

Stratospheric Water Vapor Is a Global Warming Wild Card

ScienceDaily (Feb. 1, 2010) — A 10 percent drop in water vapor ten miles above Earth's surface has had a big impact on global warming, say researchers in a study published online January 28 in the journal Science. The findings might help explain why global surface temperatures have not risen as fast in the last ten years as they did in the 1980s and 1990s.

Observations from satellites and balloons show that stratospheric water vapor has had its ups and downs lately, increasing in the 1980s and 1990s, and then dropping after 2000. The authors show that these changes occurred precisely in a narrow altitude region of the stratosphere where they would have the biggest effects on climate.

Water vapor is a highly variable gas and has long been recognized as an important player in the cocktail of greenhouse gases -- carbon dioxide, methane, halocarbons, nitrous oxide, and others -- that affect climate.

"Current climate models do a remarkable job on water vapor near the surface. But this is different -- it's a thin wedge of the upper atmosphere that packs a wallop from one decade to the next in a way we didn't expect," says Susan Solomon, NOAA senior scientist and first author of the study.

Since 2000, water vapor in the stratosphere decreased by about 10 percent. The reason for the recent decline in water vapor is unknown. The new study used calculations and models to show that the cooling from this change caused surface temperatures to increase about 25 percent more slowly than they would have otherwise, due only to the increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

An increase in stratospheric water vapor in the 1990s likely had the opposite effect of increasing the rate of warming observed during that time by about 30 percent, the authors found.

The stratosphere is a region of the atmosphere from about eight to 30 miles above the Earth's surface. Water vapor enters the stratosphere mainly as air rises in the tropics. Previous studies suggested that stratospheric water vapor might contribute significantly to climate change. The new study is the first to relate water vapor in the stratosphere to the specific variations in warming of the past few decades.

Authors of the study are Susan Solomon, Karen Rosenlof, Robert Portmann, and John Daniel, all of the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) in Boulder, Colo.; Sean Davis and Todd Sanford, NOAA/ESRL and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado; and Gian-Kasper Plattner, University of Bern, Switzerland.

February 19, 2010

Taking sides in the wicked climate change debate

Last Updated: Sunday, January 24, 2010 | 2:14 PM ET Comments60Recommend16By Stephen Strauss, CBC News

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon admitted the UN climate summit in Copenhagen fell short of its goals but called it an important step toward a global agreement needed to combat climate change. (Heribert Proepper/Associated Press)"When it comes to climate change, the press seems to be obsessed with providing 'balanced' reporting," Geert de Cock, Sierra Club of Canada.

"Many media outlets overlooked the actual science that has informed this massive international meeting, choosing instead to focus on the 'he said, she said' musings of political pundits," Fraser Los, contributing editor of thegreenpages.

As the quotes above highlight, one of the reactions that came out of the Copenhagen meeting on climate change in December was a sense by many that the media was ignoring the "science" of global warming because it went against a classic diktat of journalism, which is to get the other side of the story.

I have a somewhat different take on the "other side" controversy. Part of the reason the media went looking for an opposite view on climate change was because two-sidedness was easy to convey.

On one side are most of the world's atmospheric scientists, who say that human-initiated emissions of greenhouse gases have started to seriously change the world's climate. On the other is a much smaller number of scientists who are saying that there is no evidence yet that humans are responsible for any of the slight warming we seem to have seen, and that future effects might not be so dire.

Participants in the debate can bring forward different amounts and examples of evidence, but there are definitely two sides to the issue.

Wicked problems

If you want to know what is profoundly confusing to a journalist writing about climate change, try to understand the difficulties of explaining issues of how to remedy a problem when they turn into what is called a "wicked problem."

A wicked problem is one in which the solution is not true or false but just better or worse. A wicked problem has no immediate or ultimate test for a solution and can be considered a symptom of another problem. (You can read a discussion of a wicked problem on Wikipedia).

If you want to know how wickedness works when looking at climate change, consider scientists' efforts to deal with the environmentally damaging belch of a cow. In 2006, the UN's Food and Drug Administration estimated that the planet's roughly 1.5 billion cattle and buffalo produced 37 per cent of all the methane that human-related activity releases. That is a big concern, because methane is 20 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. One molecule of methane traps as much heat as 20 molecules of carbon dioxide.

The methane is the fermented fruit of a cow's digestive inefficiency. The less efficient a cow is at breaking down the food it eats, the more methane comes out, usually as belches. Studies suggest that a cow belches somewhere between 100 and 500 litres of methane a day.

So what to do to cut down on this?

Welcome world: Copenhagen's interactive globe, one symbol of the climate change summit. (Cristian Charisius/Reuters) Last year, British Lord Nicholas Stern, who wrote an influential account of the costs of climate change in 2006, expressed a simple truth: "Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world's resources. A vegetarian diet is better."

A simple truth maybe, but assuming that six billion humans want to continue to eat and drink from the cow, it's not a widely acceptable one. So, for the last 15 or 20 years, agricultural scientists have been looking at how to make cattle more "fuel efficient" and in so doing, cut their methane emissions. About five years ago, Agriculture Canada scientists produced a much-quoted review of all that was known about what they called methane "mitigation strategies" in cattle. They list 19 possible remediation avenues, and I will just discuss a few.

One simple solution is to increase the amount of milk a cow produces. Yes, you have to feed them more, but studies suggest that making cows more efficient at turning feed into milk can lower their average methane emissions by anywhere from 17 to 26 per cent. A simple and tested way to boost milk production is to inject cattle with the bovine somatotropin hormone. In the U.S., this has increased milk production by an estimated 10 or 20 per cent and as consequence, lowered methane release by an estimated nine per cent.

From an environmental perspective, injecting hormones into cattle is good for the environment. Yet, you can almost hear organic food lovers shiver at what they would see as milk production wickedness.

Low-methane genes

Another way of reducing methane emissions is by altering what cattle eat. Letting cows graze on whatever grows naturally on the open range or in farmers' fields is, methane-reduction-wise, usually a bad idea. Cattle's digestive systems become most efficient when they eat — I quote the 2004 paper — "diets rich in starch … such as the ones commonly used in U.S. feedlots." So, people have experimented with reducing methane emissions by feeding cattle corn, or barley, or flax, or canola or cod liver oil or ground up bits of coconut.

Of course, this is wickedly contradictory because, I again quote the article, "the decision to reduce CH4 (methane) production should also take into account the importance of ruminants in converting fibrous feeds, unsuitable for human consumption, to high quality protein sources (i.e. milk and meat)."

That is, one of the reasons we have cultivated cows is that they can turn grasses that people can't eat into something that we can.

In their search for cow-stomach-efficiency, scientists have also looked at "manipulation of rumen fermentation." One such manipulation involves giving cattle substances such as antibiotics to kill the bacteria in their stomachs that work to turn feed into methane. So, what you might do is decrease methane emissions but increase worries about generalized antibiotic resistance in the animals and in humans who eat their meat and drink their milk.

There is an active research effort, most notably in this country at Stephen Moore's lab at the University of Alberta, to find the gene or genes that make some cattle produce less methane. The hope is to create strains of cattle that genetically are programmed to release less methane. But again, one worries about wickedness here, because previous studies on the increase of milk production in cattle have highlighted what we already know about genes — they effect not just one thing but many. The same traits that increase milk yield also decrease cow fertility, for example.

And I haven't even spoken about the efforts to take cattle excrement, break down the methane in it and produce biofuel. To be efficient, this fundamentally requires cattle not to roam free but be penned in some place where their excrement can be gathered.

What does this all say about the complaints of too much journalistic scientific "other-sidedness" that followed from Copenhagen?

To my mind, those who are concerned about dealing with human-induced climate change should instead of complaining be counting their blessings. Two-sidedness gives the impression one can choose sides and, with enough will and effort, bring about change. If one casts remedying the problem of climate change as not just a wicked problem but as what is being called a "super wicked problem," what people are likely to do is throw up their hands and their hearts.

What they are likely to say is: This is too complex to fix, and so, there is nothing we can do but await the grim dawning of a wicked future we can't change.

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/01...ate-change.html

February 19, 2010

Another Voice

Global doubting: Why the cloudy outlook?

Chicago Tribune

Feb. 18, 2010, 8:35PM

Three years ago, the United Nations issued what many considered the bible of climate change. The 3,000-page report famously said the evidence for long-term global warming was “unequivocal.” That's science-speak for: The argument's over. (Oh, and thanks in advance for the Nobel Peace Prize.)

But these days that thunderous 2007 verdict is sounding, well, a lot like tomorrow's weather forecast: It's very likely to be right. But there's some doubt.

Why the cloudy outlook? For starters, last month the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was forced to apologize for a gaudy — and false — claim that the Himalaya glaciers could disappear by 2035. Turns out that warning may be off by about 300 years.

Then came the reports that the head of the U.N. panel, Rajendra Pachauri, was battling accusations of financial conflicts of interest linked to his consulting business. He has denied doing anything improper, and so far no one has proved otherwise.

And then there's the scandal known as Climategate. That's the furor over purloined e-mails showing a few top climate scientists in England and the U.S. fuzzing over some contradictory evidence and conspiring to muzzle skeptics and bury research that didn't agree with their own findings.

So now the U.N. panel's credibility is heavily damaged — and so is the science of global warming. Doubts about the science are creeping in. Many people can't help but wonder: Are some of these climate scientists trying to find the facts or hide them?

You could see that uncertainty in the recent global warming summit in Copenhagen, where the world's powers agreed to absolutely nothing of consequence.

You can see it in the U.S. Senate, where an expensive and complicated cap-and-trade carbon bill is dead.

You can sense that public opinion is turning against the idea of massively expensive solutions.

Let's take a deep breath here. The climate skeptics have poked some holes in the science and exposed the apparently unethical behavior of a few top scientists. They've found some disturbing mistakes in the panel's report.

None of this disproves the essential conclusion that the planet is warming, and there's still strong evidence that it is driven by human activity. Even if you throw out the tainted research, the trends — rising sea levels, temperature changes and retreating polar ice — are convincing and have been documented over many decades by different groups of scientists around the world.

Yet the U.N.'s credibility on climate change is in tatters, and that's going to affect the debate. In a recent article in the journal Nature, five climate scientists called for a drastic overhaul of the panel. They want to make it smaller, more independent and nimble. They want to make sure that the scientists chosen to work on the reports aren't selected because they already agree with the global warming orthodoxy. That kind of change is essential to restore the panel's credibility.

Meanwhile, the critical question of what can and should be done to slow global warming remains open to debate, as it should.

One climate expert, John Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville, wrote in Nature: “The truth, and this is frustrating for policymakers, is that scientists' ignorance of the climate system is enormous. There is still much messy, contentious, snail-paced and now, hopefully, transparent work to do.”

Hmm. Humility. How refreshing. And scientific.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editor...ok/6874348.html

hydropsyche · February 19, 2010

They want to make sure that the scientists chosen to work on the reports aren't selected because they already agree with the global warming orthodoxy. That kind of change is essential to restore the panel's credibility.

I vote for Tim Ball. He's qualified and he's strongly against. If they are so certain, they have nothing to fear.

February 21, 2010

I vote for Tim Ball. He's qualified and he's strongly against. If they are so certain, they have nothing to fear.

I think this explains well the basic tenant that everyone wants to see.

Trust in the scientists that individual bias, ideology and personal agendas are not misrepresenting scientific theory as a whole.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8525879.stm

***********************************************

Science damaged by climate row says NAS chief Cicerone

By Victoria Gill

Science reporter, BBC News, San Diego

Ralph Cicerone

NAS chief Ralph Cicerone says crisis is a 'wake-up call' for researchers

Leading scientists say that the recent controversies surrounding climate research have damaged the image of science as a whole.

President of the US National Academy of Sciences, Ralph Cicerone, said scandals including the "climategate" e-mail row had eroded public trust in scientists.

His comment came at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in San Diego.

Dr Cicerone joined other renowned scientists on a panel at the event.

'Distrust has spread'

He said that the controversial e-mail exchanges about climate change data had caused people to suspect that scientists "oppressed free speech".

His fellow panel members, including Lord Martin Rees, president of the UK's Royal Society, agreed that scientists needed to be more open about their findings.

"There is some evidence that the distrust has spread," Dr Cicerone told BBC News. "There is a feeling that scientists are suppressing dissent, stifling their competitors through conspiracies."

Recent polls, including one carried out by the BBC, have suggested that climate scepticism is on the rise.

Dr Cicerone linked this shift in public feeling to the hacked e-mails and to recently publicised mistakes made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in one of its key reports.

'More transparency'

He said he was convinced that these events had had a wider knock-on effect.

"Public opinion polls are showing that the answers to questions like: 'how much do you respect scientists?' or 'are they behaving in disinterested ways?', have deteriorated in the last few months."

He said that this crisis of public confidence should be a wake-up call for researchers, and that the world had now "entered an era in which people expected more transparency".

"People expect us to do things more in the public light and we just have to get used to that," he said. "Just as science itself improves and self-corrects, I think our processes have to improve and self-correct."

February 21, 2010

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...0021903046.html

********************

Global warming advocates ignore the boulders

By George F. Will

Sunday, February 21, 2010

Science, many scientists say, has been restored to her rightful throne because progressives have regained power. Progressives, say progressives, emulate the cool detachment of scientific discourse. So hear the calm, collected voice of a scientist lavishly honored by progressives, Rajendra Pachauri.

He is chairman of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the 2007 version of the increasingly weird Nobel Peace Prize. Denouncing persons skeptical about the shrill certitudes of those who say global warming poses an imminent threat to the planet, he says:

"They are the same people who deny the link between smoking and cancer. They are people who say that asbestos is as good as talcum powder -- and I hope they put it on their faces every day."

Do not judge him as harshly as he speaks of others. Nothing prepared him for the unnerving horror of encountering disagreement. Global warming alarmists, long cosseted by echoing media, manifest an interesting incongruity -- hysteria and name-calling accompanying serene assertions about the "settled science" of climate change. Were it settled, we would be spared the hyperbole that amounts to Ring Lardner's "Shut up, he explained."

The global warming industry, like Alexander in the famous children's story, is having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Actually, a bad three months, which began Nov. 19 with the publication of e-mails indicating attempts by scientists to massage data and suppress dissent in order to strengthen "evidence" of global warming.

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But there already supposedly was a broad, deep and unassailable consensus. Strange.

Next came the failure of The World's Last -- We Really, Really Mean It -- Chance, a.k.a. the Copenhagen climate change summit. It was a nullity, and since then things have been getting worse for those trying to stampede the world into a spasm of prophylactic statism.

In 2007, before the economic downturn began enforcing seriousness and discouraging grandstanding, seven western U.S. states (and four Canadian provinces) decided to fix the planet on their own. California's Arnold Schwarzenegger intoned, "We cannot wait for the United States government to get its act together on the environment." The 11 jurisdictions formed what is now called the Western Climate Initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions starting in 2012.

Or not. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer recently suspended her state's participation in what has not yet begun, and some Utah legislators are reportedly considering a similar action. Brewer worries, sensibly, that it would impose costs on businesses and consumers. She also ordered reconsideration of Arizona's strict vehicle emission rules, modeled on incorrigible California's, lest they raise the cost of new cars.

Last week, BP America, ConocoPhillips and Caterpillar, three early members of the 31-member U.S. Climate Action Partnership, said: Oh, never mind. They withdrew from USCAP. It is a coalition of corporations and global warming alarm groups that was formed in 2007 when carbon rationing legislation seemed inevitable and collaboration with the rationers seemed prudent. A spokesman for Conoco said: "We need to spend time addressing the issues that impact our shareholders and consumers." What a concept.

Global warming skeptics, too, have erred. They have said there has been no statistically significant warming for 10 years. Phil Jones, former director of Britain's Climatic Research Unit, source of the leaked documents, admits it has been 15 years. Small wonder that support for radical remedial action, sacrificing wealth and freedom to combat warming, is melting faster than the Himalayan glaciers that an IPCC report asserted, without serious scientific support, could disappear by 2035.

Jones also says that if during what is called the Medieval Warm Period (circa 800-1300) global temperatures may have been warmer than today's, that would change the debate. Indeed it would. It would complicate the task of indicting contemporary civilization for today's supposedly unprecedented temperatures.

Last week, Todd Stern, America's special envoy for climate change -- yes, there is one; and people wonder where to begin cutting government -- warned that those interested in "undermining action on climate change" will seize on "whatever tidbit they can find." Tidbits like specious science, and the absence of warming?

It is tempting to say, only half in jest, that Stern's portfolio violates the First Amendment, which forbids government from undertaking the establishment of religion. A religion is what the faith in catastrophic man-made global warming has become. It is now a tissue of assertions impervious to evidence, assertions that everything, including a historic blizzard, supposedly confirms and nothing, not even the absence of warming, can falsify.

February 21, 2010

This is what the pro side is thinking...

****************************************

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-b...article1472224/

Eric Reguly

Published on Thursday, Feb. 18, 2010 12:00AM EST Last updated on Saturday, Feb. 20, 2010 3:14AM EST

The science of climate change is inexact. It is about uncertainty and probabilities. Based on the evidence, a criminal lawyer would not be able to prove that humans are responsible for potentially catastrophic climate change. But the evidence would certainly nail down a civil conviction.

If the vast bulk of evidence says climate change is real and that humans are almost certainly to blame, why is the science being dismissed as exaggerated, unreliable or even fraudulent by the climate change doubters?

Opinion polls show that public skepticism about man-made climate change has climbed in recent months as the stories questioning the legitimacy of the science migrate from the Internet's fringes to the mainstream media.

The University of East Anglia affair certainly did a lot of damage. The university's Climatic Research Unit failed to keep proper records about Chinese weather stations and probably deleted potentially embarrassing correspondence to get around the Freedom of Information Act, among other sins. As far as scandals go, it's genuine.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change "scandal" is less convincing, though the skeptics' blogs would have you believe it's a con job that makes Bernie Madoff look like a saint. Marc Morano's Climate Depot calls the IPCC a "train wreck." The site hosts blogs with provocative headlines such as "Is Anything in the IPCC Report Accurate?"

The IPCC's 2007 report on climate change concluded that "warming of the climate system is unequivocal" and that most of the recent warming was "very likely due" to human activity. Left unchecked, the greenhouse gas emissions have the potential to raise average global temperatures by between 1.1 to 6.4 degrees by the end of the century, the report said.

Produced by 800 contributing authors and reviewed by some 2,500 scientists, the report tipped the balance in favour of the argument that humans are the main contributors to climate change.

It built momentum for December's Copenhagen climate change summit, which tried (and failed) to launch a global successor to the relatively narrow Kyoto Protocol. (The IPCC shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.)

What got the skeptics all hot was the IPCC claim that the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035, even though the figure did not appear in any of the "Technical Summaries" or "Summaries for Policy Makers," only on one page of the 3,000-page report. In truth, there is almost no evidence to suggest the glaciers will melt that quickly.

Another claim said global warming could reduce rain-fed North African crop production by 50 per cent by 2020. This scenario, too, is dubious. The Dutch government has asked the IPCC to correct the claim that more than half of the Netherlands is below sea level; the official Dutch figure is 26 per cent.

Mistakes in a 3,000-page report were inevitable, especially given that the IPCC does not conduct its own research; it collects and reviews research done by climate scientists everywhere. More mistakes will surface, if only because the climate change skeptics, backed by well-financed armies of lobbyists employed by companies that cringe at the thought of tight emission reduction targets, are straining every word through their truth filters.

They have been doing so for three years and the biggest mistake they could find is the Himalayan claim. None of the IPCC's central conclusions have been demolished. We know that greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere, that global average temperatures are increasing, and that natural phenomena can explain only part of the warming. Glaciers are indeed melting, including those in the Himalayas.

In regions where little climate data have been collected, the climate change evidence may not be compelling. Change can only be measured against a base. If the base isn't known, any climate change claims are open to challenge. But in areas where a lot of data have been collected, there is no argument that climate change is real. The thoroughly studied ice packs in the Arctic and Greenland are disappearing faster than most scientists had expected.

The IPCC has struggled to defend itself. That's in good part because it has no resources. It is not an institution or a company or a movement. It is a small secretariat with an annual budget of about $5-million (U.S.), insignificant compared with the financial firepower of the climate change skeptics. IPCC chairman Rajenda Pachauri's delayed apology for the Himalayan mistake made a bad situation worse.

Sadly, the British government is one of the few to have come out in defence of the IPCC's report, even though scientists from many dozens of countries contributed to the study.

"It's right that there's rigour applied to all the reports about climate change," British Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Ed Miliband told the Observer newspaper last month. "But I think it would be wrong that, when a mistake is made, it's somehow used to undermine the overwhelming picture that's there."

Hear, hear Mr. Miliband. Governments ignore the IPCC at their peril. The preponderance of evidence, to use a civil lawyer's term, suggests climate change is real and dangerous.

February 21, 2010

very good read

http://www.probeinternational.org/files/UK...enkTennekes.pdf

February 21, 2010

AAAS say "trust us"

Does this make you feel better?

One guy works closely with the IPCC.

*************************************

Top Scientists Affirm Consensus on Global Warming

SAN DIEGO, California, February 20, 2010 (ENS) - A panel of eminent U.S. and European scientists has confirmed the widespread scientific consensus that the Earth's climate is warming due to human activities, but said they and their colleagues should have responded more quickly and effectively to news of an error in a major climate report and hacked researcher e-mails.

In a symposium Friday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement Science, AAAS, the scientific leaders acknowledged errors in a 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and possibly impolitic email exchanges by East Anglian University climate researchers.

But they expressed shock at the political effects of the disclosures and said the impact was far out of proportion to the overwhelming evidence that human activity is changing the Earth's climate.

Jerry North (Photos by Edward Lempenin courtesy AAAS)

"There has been no change in the scientific community, no change whatsoever," in the consensus that global average temperatures have been steadily climbing since the mid-20th century," said Jerry North, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University.

The panel also included: Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academies of Science and chair of the National Research Council; Lord Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society in the U.K.; James J. McCarthy, chairman of the AAAS Board; Alexander Agassiz, professor of Biological Oceanography at Harvard University; and Philip Sharp; a Nobel laureate and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Some climate science critics and media reports have suggested that the e-mails, stolen from an East Anglican University server and released last November, show evidence of tinkering with climate change data. But many scientists say comments from the emails were taken out of context and used in misleading ways.

An independent investigation is ongoing. The Royal Society will provide advice to the University of East Anglia in identifying assessors to conduct an independent external reappraisal of the Climatic Research Unit's key publications.

Lord Martin Rees

Rees said on February 12, "It is important that people have the utmost confidence in the science of climate change. Where legitimate doubts are raised about any piece of science they must be fully investigated - that is how science works. The names being put forward by the society will be acting as individuals, not representatives of the Society and the Society will have no oversight of this independent review."

In January, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations organization that has involved thousands of scientists from around the world in producing four major reports since the 1990s, acknowledged that it had included unsubstantiated data on Himalayan glacier melting in a 2007 report.

Cicerone said "the appearance, if not the reality," of a rift within the research community has "corroded" the climate debate in a way that "may spread over to other kinds of science."

James J. McCarthy

Scientists need to redouble their efforts to share the implications of climate change with the public, he said, by breaking down the numbers and showing how the often-cited global average temperature rise of three degrees Centigrade could actually send temperatures over the land soaring nearly to nearly nine degrees in the next few decades.

"A lot of what we need to do," said Cicerone, "is translate basic information into terms the public can understand.

Several of the scientists acknowledged that some of the details of climate change remain uncertain. But "we think despite all the uncertainties ... action is justified and indeed imperative" to avoid the worst effects of climate change, said Rees.

The IPCC conclusions are subject to rigorous peer review. Indeed, said Rees, some IPCC researchers did catch the erroneous statement that accelerated melting could lead to the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers by 2035. Still, the error slipped through.

McCarthy, who formerly served as co-chair of an IPCC working group, predicted that the organization would certainly redouble its efforts to catch mistakes in the future.

Sunset in Germany, July 29, 2009 (Photo by Juergen Kuprat)

He said the IPCC's prestigious reputation as a Nobel Peace Prize winning organization was a factor in many news reports. "The greater the stature of the institution," he said, "the harder the fall."

Some scientists were also not prepared to discuss the data in ways that were useful to the press and public, said North. While the diversity of data - from pollen samples to satellite data to computer modeling - is a key strength of climate change conclusions, the "culture" of each discipline is equally varied, he said.

"Some of these [groups] are not really well organized to handle relations with the press," North said.

Climate change is "diffuse and international and remote in time," two special hurdles that make it "very hard to get the public exercised on the matter," said Rees.

Wider access and transparency for research data is a step toward better communication, Cicerone said. The National Academies released a report last year on building specific standards for sharing research more broadly with scientific colleagues and the public.

The controversy will probably play only a small role whether the U.S. Congress will pass a climate change law this year, said McCarthy and Cicerone, who said Americans remain more concerned about a sluggish economy than about climate change.

So far, McCarthy said, scientists have not done "a sufficiently good job" of persuading the American people and their congressional representatives of the potential economic and health benefits of a comprehensive climate change law.

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/feb2010/2010-02-20-01.html

February 22, 2010

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405...BelowLEFTSecond

Climate Change and Open Science

In the Internet age, transparency is the foundation of trust.

By L. GORDON CROVITZ

'Unequivocal." That's quite a claim in this skeptical era, so it's been enlightening to watch the unraveling of the absolute certainty of global warming caused by man. Now even authors of the 2007 United Nations report that "warming of the climate system is unequivocal" have backed off its key assumptions and dire warnings.

Science is having its Walter Cronkite moment. Back when news was delivered by just three television networks, Walter Cronkite could end his evening broadcast by declaring, "And that's the way it is." The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report likewise purported to proclaim the final word, in 3,000 pages that now turn out to be less scientific truth than political cover for sweeping economic regulations.

Equivocation has replaced "unequivocal" even among some of the scientists whose "Climategate" emails discussed how to suppress dissenting views via peer review and avoid complying with freedom-of-information requests for data.

Phil Jones, the University of East Anglia scientist at the center of the emails, last week acknowledged to the BBC that there hasn't been statistically significant warming since 1995. He said there was more warming in the medieval period, before today's allegedly man-made effects. He also said "the vast majority of climate scientists" do not believe the debate over climate change is settled. Mr. Jones continues to believe in global warming but acknowledges there's no consensus.

Some journalistic digging into the 2007 U.N. climate change report revealed that its most quoted predictions were based on dubious sources. The IPCC now admits that its prediction that the Himalayan glaciers might disappear by 2035 was a mistake, based on an inaccurate citation to the World Wildlife Foundation. This advocacy group was also the basis for a claim the IPCC has backed away from—that up to 40% of the Amazon is endangered.

The IPCC report mistakenly doubled the percentage of the Netherlands currently below sea level. John Christy, a former lead author of the IPCC report, now says the "temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change." As the case collapsed, the top U.N. climate-change bureaucrat, Yvo de Boer, announced his resignation last week.

The climate topic is important in itself, but it is also a leading indicator of how our expectation of full access to information makes us deeply skeptical when we're instead given faulty or partial information. In just three years since the report was issued, we have gone from purported unanimity among scientists to a breakdown in any consensus. Opinion polls reflect this U-turn, with growing public skepticism.

Skeptics don't doubt science—they doubt unscientific claims cloaked in the authority of science. The scientific method is a foundation of our information age, with its approach of a clearly stated hypothesis tested through a transparent process with open data, subject to review.

The IPCC report was instead crafted by scientists hand-picked by governments when leading politicians were committed to global warming. Unsurprisingly, the report claimed enough certainty to justify massive new spending and regulations.

Some in the scientific community are now trying to restore integrity to climate science. "The truth, and this is frustrating for policymakers, is that scientists' ignorance of the climate system is enormous," Mr. Christy wrote in the current issue of Nature. "There is still much messy, contentious, snail-paced and now, hopefully, transparent, work to do."

Mr. Christy also makes the good point that groupthink—technically known as "informational cascades"—is a particular risk for scientists. He proposes a Wikipedia-like approach in which scientists could openly contribute and debate theories and data in real time.

The unraveling of the case for global warming has left laymen uncertain about what to believe and whom to trust. Experts usually know more than amateurs, but increasingly they get the benefit of the doubt only if they operate openly, without political or other biases.

We need scientists who apply scientific objectivity, or the closest approximation of it, and then present their information with enough transparency that people can weigh the evidence. Instead of a group of scientists anointed by the U.N. telling us what to think, the spirit of the age is that scientists need to provide open access to information on which others can make policy decisions.

The lesson of the chill of the global-warming consensus is this: Those who want to persuade others of the truth as they see it need to make their case as transparently as possible. Technology enables access to information and leads us to expect open debates, conducted honestly and in full view. This is inconvenient for those who want to claim unequivocal truth without having the evidence. But that's the way it is.

February 24, 2010

The empire has begun to strike back

by Lorne Gunter, Canwest

It was only a matter of time before the climate alarmists got their feet back under them. There is too much at stake politically, too many careers and reputations on the line, too much grant money for researchers and donations for environmental groups, too much green-tax revenue for governments, too much prestige in academic circles at risk for those who have asserted for more than a decade that man is causing damaging climate change to slink away in defeat.

So it is of little surprise that in the past couple of weeks many alarmists have begun asserting that despite all the revelations of the past three months about how key climate scientists and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have corrupted the scientific process in an obsessive drive to prove that climate change is real, nothing has undermined the "fact" that the Earth is warming dangerously.

Since late November, the True Believers have watched in stunned silence as the foundation of the climate-change theory has suffered one body blow after another.

First it was the revelation that scientists at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) in England -- perhaps the most influential of the three sources the United Nations relies on for most of its climate data -- were fudging their data to show more warming in recent decades than had actually occurred.

At the same time, these scientists were doing their best to upend the peer-review process at major scientific journals so scientists who disagreed with them would be unable to get published. And they were withholding their raw data and computer codes from other scientists and government investigators so no one else could validate or debunk their research by attempting to replicate it.

The alarmists have recently begun to rally around Phil Jones, the discredited head of the CRU. Nearly two week ago, Jones gave an interview to the BBC in which he admitted there had been no "statistically significant" global warming in the past 15 years.

Some news sources and global-warming skeptics overplayed Jones's exact words. Last Sunday's Daily Mail in Britain, for instance, claimed Jones had performed a "U-turn" in his claims for warming.

Jones, in fact, continues to insist the Earth is warming. But what he now admits is that it is not warming that rapidly (just 0.12 C per decade) and not "at the 95-per-cent significance level," the level needed to assert statistical certainty.

He also now allows that there may have been other periods in the past 1,000 years that were as warm as or warmer than today.

While this is not a complete about-face, it is hardly business-as-usual, as the alarmist would have us believe. Even if Jones is still insisting that global warming is happening, there is now a measure of doubt in his claims that never existed before. What makes Jones's words significant is not that they reveal some 180-degree change in his thinking, but that for the first time he admits significant uncertainty in the so-called settled science of climate change.

If leading climate scientists had spent the past 15 years saying the warming they were seeing wasn't all that significant or that there remained many uncertainties about predictions of future climate or that some pre-industrial periods had been warmer, would there have been a Kyoto accord or a Copenhagen Earth summit? Would Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth have made $100 million? Would environmentalists have been asked to write government policy? Would there be any support at all for green taxes and carbon capture and other measures aimed at curbing carbon dioxide emissions?

Likely not.

Even though alarmists are correct that Jones has not recanted his earlier belief in the warming theory, he has undergone a significant change.

Or take the assertion, recently very common among alarmists, that NASA's climate scientists are still finding global warming occurring, so it must still be happening.

Frankly, NASA's climate scientists have hardly more credibility than the CRUs or IPCCs.

NASA is another of the three repositories of climate data relied upon by the UN, but three years ago a significant error was found in its records. In the 1990s, NASA had begun keeping temperature records differently, but it had failed to adjust all its pre-1990s records (about 120 years' worth) to match the new method. When it reconciled its old records to its new method, recent warm years ceased to be as remarkable. For instance, 1934 replaced 1998 as the warmest year. And 1921 became the third-warmest.

In 2008, NASA substituted September's global temperatures for October's (they claimed accidentally), thereby distorting upward the worldwide averages for the fall of that year -- an otherwise rather cool year.

And most recently, NASA has been shown to be cherry-picking the Earth stations it uses to calculate global average. It has been eliminating stations in colder locations (polar, rural, mountainous) and over-relying on warmer ones (mid-latitudes, urban).

Alarmists may want to believe this changes nothing, but that simply makes them the new deniers.

http://www.montrealgazette.com/opinion/let...3494/story.html

February 24, 2010

http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

Arctic ice monitoring. It is interesting that they say the ice is not growing as fast as expected with the cold temperatures. That seems to indicate an ocean current influence.

Fact is studies have proven beyond a doubt that ice has come and gone in the Arctic many times over and over again in the past. Is that happening now? We can't be sure. They can track ice trends but to pin point why...hard to say. The IPCC and even Jones now freely admits that we have been in a slightly cooling phase on Earth for 11 years and no statistical warming in 15 years.

I just wish we had a crystal ball to see where this is going.

Cheers

Sun

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