Is It Weird Enough Yet? - Warmist left-winger Tom Friedman - NYTimes.com

Every time I listen to Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota talk about how climate change is some fraud perpetrated by scientists trying to gin up money for research, I’m always reminded of one of my favorite movie lines that Jack Nicholson delivers to his needy neighbor who knocks on his door in the film “As Good As It Gets.” “Where do they teach you to talk like this?” asks Nicholson. “Sell crazy someplace else. We’re all stocked up here.”

Thanks Mr. Perry and Mrs. Bachmann, but we really are all stocked up on crazy right now. I mean, here is the Texas governor rejecting the science of climate change while his own state is on fire - after the worst droughts on record have propelled wildfires to devour an area the size of Connecticut. As a statement by the Texas Forest Service said last week: “No one on the face of this earth has ever fought fires in these extreme conditions.”

Remember the first rule of global warming. The way it unfolds is really “global weirding.” The weather gets weird: the hots get hotter; the wets wetter; and the dries get drier. This is not a hoax.  This is high school physics…

COMMENTS

Art Horn said…
Thomas Freedman thinks he’s so smart but he is out of his league on this subject. From his educational background it appears he has no science training at all. He has no sense of weather history so he can’t place current events in any historical or “reality” context. Apparently he has never heard of La Nina or the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and their historical significance in re-creating the kinds of weather events we have seen around the world and will continue to see as the La Nina returns for 2012. He is just another big government liberal who thinks Washington and his own ideas are the answer.

He does not believe in free enterprise. Only the gifted and the wise (LIKE HIM) in Washington can run the economy and our lives. He is a socialist from stem to stern. He says “There is only one effective, sustainable way to produce “green jobs,” and that is with a fixed, durable, long-term price signal (READ TAX) that raises the price of dirty fuels and thereby creates sustained consumer demand (DESPITE WHAT PEOPLE ACTUALLY WANT, FREEDOM) for, and sustained private sector investment in (SOLYNDRA?), renewables (WHICH CAN’T WORK WITHOUT FOSSIL FUEL BACKUP). Without a carbon tax or gasoline tax or cap-and-trade system (OR A DICTATOR) that makes renewable energies competitive (COMPETATIVE? WHEN YOU RIG THE GAME?) with dirty fuels, while they achieve scale (WITH OUR MONEY) and move down the cost curve, green jobs will remain a hobby.” As they should.

This is why the New York Times is dying. They continue to employ old school democrat party line hammer an sickle advocates like Thomas Freedman. He should stick to areas he has experience in.

Se also a list of global weirding from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s here.

According to RSS AMSU, the first 8 months were the 2nd coldest January-August period in this century so far (second among 11 candidate years). The top 15 ranking of the years 1979-2011 according to the average temperature during the first eight months is as follows:

1.1998: 0.642
2.2010: 0.546
3.2002: 0.364
4.2005: 0.344
5.2007: 0.310
6.2003: 0.293
7.2004: 0.230
8.2001: 0.225
9.2004: 0.211
10.2006: 0.209
11.1991: 0.163
12.2011: 0.157
13.1995: 0.152
14.1983: 0.116
15.1988: 0.111

You can see that the first eight months of 2011 were colder than the same period of 1991 which was 20 years earlier; and of course, 1998 remains the leader of the league: its first 8 months were almost 0.5C warmer than the same months of 2011. At the 12th position, 2011 is out of top ten. Only Jan-Aug 2008 with -0.013C managed to be colder than the same period of 2011 among the years of the 21st century. So 2011 is helping to make the preliminary 21st century temperature trend even more negative than before; this is no bulshit, angry Al.

Some warming may have been taking place in recent months - because of the delayed effect of the disappearing La Nina a few months ago. But it may be replaced by another cooling in the coming months.

The ENSO oscillations have returned to the negative, La Nina territory after a few months in the neutral interval. For example, the latest weekly ENSO report says that the ONI 3.4 anomaly is at –0.6 C (and the 1+2 region is at –0.7 C) - it went down from -0.4C a month ago and has slipped below –0.5C, the boundary of the La Nina conditions, again.

Some of their models still show that there are equal odds that we will see neutral conditions in the Fall - but the next update is likely to predict another La Nina episode for the winter 2011/2012, in agreement with very recent NOAA press releases. In fact, the picture from Thursday shows a nice blue spot near the South American Western beaches:

I think that the blue spot sits at an important place - and is already big enough - and could help to decide that La Nina conditions will return on a more permanent basis. Just to be sure, that would be the second consecutive La Nina episode.

Whatever will happen to ENSO in the Fall, I think that it will only substantially influence the global temperatures in 2012. In the rest of 2011, we will see comparable temperature anomalies as in the first half of 2011 which may be smaller than the anomalies from July and August. That will mean that 2011 may slightly jump from the 12th warmest place (preliminary ranking), perhaps to a spot in the top ten, or drop slightly - but it will surely not get to the medal places for the warmest years.

It;s more likely than not at during 2012 or at the beginning of 2013, we will actually see an RSS climate record that will display a cooling trend during the most recent 15 years - partly because of the expected 2011/2012 La Nina, partly because the warm 1998 year will emerge at the beginning of the 15-year interval. Recent years increasingly paint the story that the “global warming” stopped more than a decade ago.

The first 11 years of this century surely display a cooling trend. One may believe that during the century (e.g. in 2040), the sign of the slope will be reverted but it doesn’t have to be. There doesn’t exist any convincing scientific evidence that it has to.

Bonus: Gore vs Obama

The video above is about Al Gore’s assault against his fellow undeserved peace Nobel prize winner Barack Obama. Imagine how much Gore likes peace if he can’t live in peace even with his fellow left-winger.

See Manbearpig’s blog for a few authentic words on his new hatred against Obama.

Are cosmic rays driving a significant part of climate change on Earth? Bullshit, Manbearpig says. Henrik Svensmark would surely never dare to suggest such a thing! Gore attacks Anne Jolis of WSJ without even linking to her article. Imagine that this disgraceful, dishonest, and would-be authoritative jerk would have the power to decide about the fate of the media: the Chinese communists would become the golden standards of freedom of press in comparison.

Gore’s carbon indulgence company, Generation Investment Management, has just announced that another company called the Alrehaif Group is doing exactly the same thing and stealing tons of the money from people in exactly the same way, even using a similar website design, as Al Gore’s company. Al Gore’s company thinks that the Alrehaif Group is a fraud who should be arrested. Will someone buy a mirror for Al Gore?

The real story is carried in the words of the sceptical scientist, Dr Roy Spencer on the excellent Watts Up With That? blog. The media hatchet job is most prevalent in the Guardian and on its broadcast arm, the BBC. Dr Spencer goes on to explain the findings in layman’s terms on his own website. In response to the resignation of Wolfgang Wagner, Dr Roger Pielke Sr puts the politicisation of science into context. And the ludicrous position on observations having to fit in with computer models as advanced by Dr Pete Gleick, and Dr Phil Jones’ comment about keeping sceptical papers out of the public domain, are both covered by Indur Goklany on WUWT.

What we are seeing is anti-science. We are experiencing pseudo science that aims not to question or challenge, but to reinforce the validity of a body of opinion that is yet to make the jump from theory to fact. It is being done to fit a political agenda. It is a corruption of science and the latest example of why people should be sceptical of the claims made about climate change and its causes and effects

In closing, one comment left on Watts Up With That? sums up the situation superbly and deserves to be repeated widely to help others understand what really is going on:

This is all part of the same pattern that has characterized the warmists’ approach to climate “science” since the last century. They come up with models and use these to produce predictions which are then baptized as sovereign truth. In real science, they would have been required to demonstrate the predictive validity of their models before their predictions would be granted any confidence - and when observations contradicted predictions, they would have been expected to revise their models instead of beating the data until it fit the model outputs. Instead, thanks to Algore, Hansen, left-wing politicians looking for regulatory and legislative mechanisms to control the polity and extract more tax dollars, and a compliant left-leaning media hungry for “imminent disaster” headlines, the burden of proof has been shifted to those who challenge the modellers instead of being left where it belongs: with the modellers who still have not demonstrated the validity of their models. I simply cannot believe we are still discussing a theory that, 20 years after it went mainstream, has yet to produce a single scrap of confirmatory empirical evidence.

The extent to which the AGW true believers have warped the scientific method to serve their pecuniary and political ends is simply breathtaking. Climate science represents the greatest perversion of the scientific method since the Enlightenment. It is phlogiston, phrenology and Lysenkoism all rolled up into one big, fat, corrupt boil desperately in need of lancing.

More HERE H/T Hans Schreuder

See also how ‘The Scientist’ journal twists the weasel words of the resigning editor Wagner into far more than it is here. 

Penn State had no issue with research by Michael Mann and, with qualifications about his ‘statistical analysis techniques’, the National Science Foundation cleared him as well, so why hasn’t this ClimateGate thing gone away?

The University of Virginia is providing ammunition for skeptics by citing ‘proprietary nature’ of some material requested under a Freedom of Information Act request, forcing a court order to get it.

Mann does himself - much less the University of Virginia or his lawyers - no good by delving into law interpretation with the rigor of his statistical analysis techniques, telling Science magazine

“U.Va has not turned over emails related to discussions of research, unpublished manuscripts, private discussions between scientists about science, etc.,--i.e., any of the materials that are exempt from release by state law...U.Va has simply turned over the non-exempt emails, and many of these were turned over to ATI months ago.”

He seems to be bragging that UVA has stonewalled skeptics the way the University of East Anglia did, and which got them into trouble.  What law says ‘private discussions between scientists about science’ are exempt from a Freedom of Information Act request?  None.

Mann will be cleared of literal wrongdoing again, just like the NSF did, and he should be - but he needs to shut up and stick to research.  He does more harm than good for climate science by being clever with Frankenstein graphs and now playing shade tree lawyer.

If he wants to have his emails exempt, he simply has to stop taking public money.  Progressives in science who cheered Greenpeace efforts to condemn and harass skeptics using FOIA requests but cheer stonewalling now are hypocrites of the highest order.

Look for resolution, or at least some progress in the fight, next month.  If there is nothing to hide, UVA might be better off just handing over the emails.  If they are making a conservative stand about intrusion of big government into their affairs, that is darn ironic.

Hiding the Decline of Academic and Scientific Transparency - By Paul Chesser, American Spectator

When they see what a mess we’ve made of our planet, extraterrestrials may be forced to take drastic action. Photograph: PR

It may not rank as the most compelling reason to curb greenhouse gases, but reducing our emissions might just save humanity
from a pre-emptive alien attack, scientists claim.

Watching from afar, extraterrestrial beings might view changes in Earth’s atmosphere as symptomatic of a civilisation growing out of control – and take drastic action to keep us from becoming a more serious threat, the researchers explain.

This highly speculative scenario is one of several described by a Nasa-affiliated scientist and colleagues at Pennsylvania State University that, while considered unlikely, they say could play out were humans and alien life to make contact at some point in the future.

Shawn Domagal-Goldman of Nasa’s Planetary Science Division and his colleagues compiled a list of plausible outcomes that could unfold in the aftermath of a close encounter, to help humanity “prepare for actual contact”.

In their report, Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis, the researchers divide alien contacts into three broad categories: beneficial, neutral or harmful.

Beneficial encounters ranged from the mere detection of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI), for example through the interception of alien broadcasts, to contact with cooperative organisms that help us advance our knowledge and solve global problems such as hunger, poverty and disease.

Another beneficial outcome the authors entertain sees humanity triumph over a more powerful alien aggressor, or even being saved by a second group of ETs. “In these scenarios, humanity benefits not only from the major moral victory of having defeated a daunting rival, but also from the opportunity to reverse-engineer ETI technology,” the authors write.

Other kinds of close encounter may be less rewarding and leave much of human society feeling indifferent towards alien life. The extraterrestrials may be too different from us to communicate with usefully. They might invite humanity to join the “Galactic Club” only for the entry requirements to be too bureaucratic and tedious for humans to bother with. They could even become a nuisance, like the stranded, prawn-like creatures that are kept in a refugee camp in the 2009 South African movie, District 9, the report explains.

The most unappealing outcomes would arise if extraterrestrials caused harm to humanity, even if by accident. While aliens may arrive to eat, enslave or attack us, the report adds that people might also suffer from being physically crushed or by contracting diseases carried by the visitors. In especially unfortunate incidents, humanity could be wiped out when a more advanced civilisation accidentally unleashes an unfriendly artificial intelligence, or performs a catastrophic physics experiment that renders a portion of the galaxy uninhabitable.

To bolster humanity’s chances of survival, the researchers call for caution in sending signals into space, and in particular warn against broadcasting information about our biological make-up, which could be used to manufacture weapons that target humans. Instead, any contact with ETs should be limited to mathematical discourse “until we have a better idea of the type of ETI we are dealing with.”

The authors warn that extraterrestrials may be wary of civilisations that expand very rapidly, as these may be prone to destroy other life as they grow, just as humans have pushed species to extinction on Earth. In the most extreme scenario, aliens might choose to destroy humanity to protect other civilisations.

“A preemptive strike would be particularly likely in the early phases of our expansion because a civilisation may become increasingly difficult to destroy as it continues to expand. Humanity may just now be entering the period in which its rapid civilisational expansion could be detected by an ETI because our expansion is changing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere, via greenhouse gas emissions,” the report states.

“Green” aliens might object to the environmental damage humans have caused on Earth and wipe us out to save the planet. “These scenarios give us reason to limit our growth and reduce our impact on global ecosystems. It would be particularly important for us to limit our emissions of greenhouse gases, since atmospheric composition can be observed from other planets,” the authors write.

Even if we never make contact with extraterrestrials, the report argues that considering the potential scenarios may help to plot the future path of human civilisation, avoid collapse and achieve long-term survival.

Last year, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn announced the city had won a coveted $20 million federal grant to invest in weatherization. The unglamorous work of insulating crawl spaces and attics had emerged as a silver bullet in a bleak economy - able to create jobs and shrink carbon footprint - and the announcement came with great fanfare.

McGinn had joined Vice President Joe Biden in the White House to make it. It came on the eve of Earth Day. It had heady goals: creating 2,000 living-wage jobs in Seattle and retrofitting 2,000 homes in poorer neighborhoods.

But more than a year later, Seattle’s numbers are lackluster. As of last week, only three homes had been retrofitted and just 14 new jobs have emerged from the program. Many of the jobs are administrative, and not the entry-level pathways once dreamed of for low-income workers. Some people wonder if the original goals are now achievable.

“The jobs haven’t surfaced yet,” said Michael Woo, director of Got Green, a Seattle community organizing group focused on the environment and social justice.

“It’s been a very slow and tedious process. It’s almost painful, the number of meetings people have gone to. Those are the people who got jobs. There’s been no real investment for the broader public.”

‘Who’s got the money’

The buildings that have gotten financing so far include the Washington Athletic Club and a handful of hospitals, a trend that concerns community advocates who worry the program isn’t helping lower-income homeowners.

“Who’s benefitting from this program right now - it doesn’t square with what the aspiration was,” said Howard Greenwich, the policy director of Puget Sound Sage, an economic-justice group. He urged the city to revisit its social-equity goals.

“I think what it boils down to is who’s got the money.”

Organizers and policy experts blame the economy, bureaucracy and bad timing for the program’s mediocre results. Called Community Power Works, the program funds low-interest loans and incentives for buildings to do energy-efficient upgrades. They include hospitals, municipal buildings, big commercial structures and homes.

Half the funds are reserved for financing and engaging homeowners in Central and Southeast Seattle, a historically underserved area. Most of the jobs are expected to come from this sector.

But the timing of the award has led to hurdles in enticing homeowners to bite on retrofits. The city had applied for the grant at a time of eco-giddiness, when former Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels was out-greening all other politicians except for Al Gore. Retrofits glowed with promise to boost the economy, reduce consumer bills and lower greenhouse gas emissions.

“A triple win,” is how Biden characterized it.

By the time Seattle won the award, homeowners were battered by unemployment and foreclosures. The long-term benefits of energy upgrades lacked the tangible punch of a new countertop. And the high number of unemployed construction workers edged out new weatherization installers for the paltry number of jobs.

“Really, we couldn’t have rolled out this program at a worse time,” said Greenwich, who had helped write the city’s grant proposal.

“The outcomes are very disappointing. I think the city has worked really hard, but no one anticipated just how bad this recession was going to be, and the effect it was going to have on this program.”

City feels ‘cautiously optimistic’

As of last week, 337 homeowners had applied for the program. Fourteen had gotten a loan, or were in the process of getting one.

“Yes, we’re not seeing as many completed retrofits as we wanted to,” said Joshua Curtis, the city’s manager for Community Power Works. “While everyone would like to see more upgrades, I think we’re feeling cautiously optimistic.”

He said the residential portion of program didn’t launch until April. He said there was a normal summertime lull in work and that he expected things to pick up in the fall. He was confident that the city’s marketing campaign and loan partner held promise.

Curtis said there were factors outside the city’s control, such as the economy. And he attributed frustration among job-seekers to a “mismatch” in the timing of two federal grants.

Before the city got the $20 million, some local agencies, including Got Green, had received funds in a government push to train workers in weatherization. But the anticipation of landing career-path jobs evaporated as months went by with no work.

“People are frustrated and rightly so,” Curtis said. “There’[s been sort of a lag time when people graduated from those programs.”

They include Long Duong, 32, who got a certificate in sealing air leaks and insulating walls after he was laid off from a job handling bags at the airport. But he soon found that other men had more qualifications than him, and he took part-time gigs – installing light bulbs and canvassing doors - while waiting for work.

A year later, he’s still looking.

“I haven’t given up yet,” said Duong, of South Seattle. “Weatherization is another opportunity for me.”

Curtis said the money that financed the Washington Athletic Club and hospitals doesn’t draw from funds reserved for single-family homeowners. He said the program’s standards will ensure that people targeted by the program - low-income workers - will get good jobs. And he said the WAC project will create some new work in September.

“We’re not where we want to be, but we have a path forward,” he said.

City needs to ‘step up its game’

But will the city hit its goals? Curtis was hopeful Seattle would make it by 2013, when the funding ends. Greenwich, of Puget Sound Sage, said the city needs to retrofit 100 to 200 homes a month to create 2,000 jobs. Woo, of Got Green, thinks the city needs to throw more money on incentives.

Greenwich said the energy retrofit market has turned out to be extremely complicated, with required hammering out of job standards, hiring practices, wages and how best to measure energy benefits.

“The city is really going to have to step up its game to get the 2,000 retrofits,” Greenwich said.

“But if this would have been easy, it would have been done already.”

Visit seattlepi.com’s home page for more Seattle news. Contact Vanessa Ho at 206-448-8003 or vanessaho@seattlepi.com, and follow her on Twitter as @vanessaho. 

There is a new paper which is critical of the ERA-40 Reanalysis. This is an important issue as this data set has been used in long-term climate studies; e.g. see which has over 2000 citations in the peer-reviewed literature according to google scholar. The new paper is

Screen, James A., Ian Simmonds, 2011: Erroneous Arctic Temperature Trends in the ERA-40 Reanalysis: A Closer Look. J. Climate, 24, 2620–2627. doi: 10.1175/2010JCLI4054.1.

The abstract reads [highlight added]

“Atmospheric reanalyses can be useful tools for examining climate variability and change; however, they must be used cautiously because of time-varying biases that can induce artificial trends. This study explicitly documents a discontinuity in the 40-yr European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Re-Analysis (ERA-40) that leads to significantly exaggerated warming in the Arctic mid- to lower troposphere, and demonstrates that the continuing use of ERA-40 to study Arctic temperature trends is problematic. The discontinuity occurs in 1997 in response to refined processing of satellite radiances prior to their assimilation into the reanalysis model. It is clearly apparent in comparisons of ERA-40 output against satellite-derived air temperatures, in situ observations, and alternative reanalyses. Decadal or multidecadal Arctic temperature trends calculated over periods that include 1997 are highly inaccurate, particularly below 600 hPa. It is shown that ERA-40 is poorly suited to studying Arctic temperature trends and their vertical profile, and conclusions based upon them must be viewed with extreme caution. Consequently, its future use for this purpose is discouraged. In the context of the wider scientific debate on the suitability of reanalyses for trend analyses, the results show that a series of alternative reanalyses are in broad-scale agreement with observations. Thus, the authors encourage their discerning use instead of ERA-40 for examining Arctic climate change while also reaffirming the importance of verifying reanalyses with observations whenever possible.”

Text in the paper includes

“ERA-40 has been recently used to assess Arctic temperature trends and their vertical structure. Most notably, ERA-40 formed the basis of a now-controversial examination of central Arctic temperature trends by Graversen et al. (2008). The results of that study have been strongly contested, mainly because of concerns about the accuracy of trends calculated from ERA-40 temperatures (Bitz and Fu 2008; Grant et al. 2008; Thorne 2008; Screen and Simmonds 2010b). Yet, ERA-40 continues to be used for Arctic temperature trend analysis (e.g., Yang et al. 2010). In light of this, we show here - explicitly and more thoroughly than previous studies - that inhomogeneities in ERA-40 lead to a poor representation of Arctic temperature trends, particularly in the mid- to lower troposphere, and we demonstrate that its continued use for this purpose is problematic.”

Such an error not only affects the Arctic troposphere, but necessarily must effect the entire northern hemisphere jet stream.  It is the poleward to equatorward layer average temperature gradient which causes this wind, as we discuss, for example, in

Pielke, R.A. Sr., T.N. Chase, T.G.F. Kittel, J. Knaff, and J. Eastman, 2001: Analysis of 200 mbar zonal wind for the period 1958-1997. J. Geophys. Res., 106, D21, 27287-27290 [we used the NCEP Reanalysis in our study]

and

Christy, J.R., B. Herman, R. Pielke, Sr., P. Klotzbach, R.T. McNider, J.J. Hnilo, R.W. Spencer, T. Chase and D. Douglass, 2010: What do observational datasets say about modeled tropospheric temperature trends since 1979?  Remote Sensing, 2(9), 2148-2169.

The authors of the Journal of Climate paper [Screen and Simmonds] are commended for alerting everyone to this serious error.

Guess what? The man responsible for looking after the fat pensions of the boys and girls at the BBC is a climate change fanatic, and he is part of an international group of investment managers who bust a gut to invest in ‘climate change’ schemes. He’s called Peter Dunscombe, and he runs the £8.2bn corporation pension fund, advising trustees on a day-to-day basis about their investments. Mr Dunscombe, who addresses conferences about ‘ethical investments’, is also chairman of the Institutional Investment Group on Climate Change(IIGCC), which has 47 members and manages four trillion euros’ worth of investments; yes, four trillion. Their goal is to find as many ‘climate change’ investment opportunities as possible:

The IIGCC Investor Statement on Climate change was launched in October 2006. Asset owners and asset managers who signed the Statement committed to increasing their focus on climate change in their own processes and in their engagement with companies and governments.

So now we really know why BBC staffers are so fanatical about ‘climate change’. It’s naked self-interest. In 2008, there were 18,736 contributors to the BBC pension fund; every man jack of them benefits from climate alarmism.

(h/t anonymous eagle-eyed B-BBC contributor)

Update: I’ve been going through the latest BBC Pensions Trust report, and it reveals that Helen Boaden, who is the overall boss of the BBC’s news and current affairs operation, was appointed to the trust in 2008. So the woman who tells environment reporters such as Roger Harrabin and Richard Black that the science is settled also works to maximise the returns of the pension fund with Peter Dunscombe. I thought that needed spelling out fully, just in case any subtleties might be missed.