By Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent, UK Guardian
An online news service sponsored by the world’s premier scientific association unwittingly promoted a study making the false claim that catastrophic global warming would occur within nine years, the Guardian has learned.
The study, by an NGO based in Argentina, claimed the planet would warm by 2.4C by 2020 and projected dire consequences for global food supply. A press release for the Food Gap study was carried by EurekAlert!, the news service operated by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) , and the story was picked up by a number of international news organisations on Tuesday.
“This is happening much faster than we expected,” Liliana Hisas, executive director of the Universal Ecological Fund (UEF) and author of the study, said of her findings.
But, in an episode recalling criticism of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), when the UN climate science body wrongly claimed the Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035, the UEF claims about rising temperatures over the next decade were unfounded.
Climate change is happening much faster than previously thought. But warming at such a rapid rate over the next decade is impossible, climate scientists aid.
In an email, Gavin Schmidt, a Nasa climatologist wrote: “2.4C by 2020 (which is 1.4C in the next 10 years - something like six to seven times the projected rate of warming) has no basis in fact.”
The AAAS, which runs the EurekAlert! News service, removed reference to the study from its website on Tuesday afternoon.
“We primarily rely on the submitting organisation to ensure the veracity of the scientific content of the news release,” Ginger Pinholster, director of the office of public programmes for AAAS said.
“In this case, we immediately contacted a climate-change expert after receiving your query. That expert has confirmed for us that the information indeed raises many questions in his mind, and therefore we have removed the news release from EurekAlert!”
But by then the study had been picked up by a number of international news organisations including the French news agency AFP, Spain’s EFE news agency, the Canadian CTV television network and the Vancouver Sun, and the Press Trust of India.
For some climate scientists, the false claims made by the UEF paper recalled the highly damaging episode in which the IPCC, the UN’s climate science body, included the false information about melting of the Himalayan glaciers in its 2007 report. The mistake was a public relations disaster for the IPCC and led to calls for the resignation of its chair, Rajendra Pachauri.
It was also exploited by climate sceptics to undermine the science of climate change, and is seen by some as having set back efforts in the US for action on climate change. In this instance, climate scientists said it appeared Hisas had overlooked the influence exerted by the oceans, which absorb heat, thus delaying the effects of increasing concentrations of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere.
Ray Weymann, a founder of a volunteer rapid-response force aimed at countering misconceptions about climate science, said: “The author has a fundamental misunderstanding.” Hisas, for her part, said her findings had been endorsed by an Argentine scientist, Osvaldo Canziani, who had worked on the IPCC’s fourth assessment report on the state of climate science, and was credited as an adviser to the UEF.
Hisas’s main finding, that climate change would disrupt the supply of basic staples such as wheat and rice, was largely in line with other recent reports. She said the UEF did not intend to withdraw the report. “We are just going to go ahead with it. I don’t have a choice now,” she said. “The scientist I have been working with checked everything and according to him it’s not wrong.”
Marshall Hoffman, owner of the PR agency which placed the notice on the AAAS website, argued the a number of recent studies had all shown warming at a much faster rate than predicted by the IPCC in its most recent report. “The thing is, we have already put it on the internet and we had already got a lot of calls on it,” he said. “This study is going to be bantered around for months. It doesn’t make any difference whether it is released now, or we try to pull it back.”
Canziani did not immediately respond to email. Hisas and sources in Buenos Aires said he was ill. Canziani was co-chair of the IPCC’s working group 2, which looked at the effects of climate change. The erroneous claim on Himalayan glaciers in the 2007 report was in the section overseen by working group 2.
Note that Scientific American is still running this story (here). This reminds me why I dropped my subscription to a magazine I once enjoyed.
By Leon Clifford, The Observatory
An angry discussion has erupted over recent research which appears to suggest that the build-up of heat in the oceans that is predicted to be associated with global warming is not happening.
The research based on an analysis of ocean buoy temperature measurements suggests that the oceans cooled between 2003 and 2008, that this cooling does not support the idea that the oceans are stockpiling heat and that it does not support the idea that the Earth is in positive radiative balance - that is, acting as a net absorber of heat and therefore warming.
Physicists Robert Knox and David Douglass of the University of Rochester, New York, bluntly state in their paper that their research “does not support the existence of either a large positive radiative imbalance or a “missing energy."”
Climate scientist Kevin Trenberth of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) , who made famous the phrase “missing energy”, has reportedly dismissed the paper as “rubbish”, according to the websites of climate scientists Roger Pielke Sr of the University of Colorado and Judy Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology. Pielke Sr described the research as “a solid scientific study” on his website.
The Knox and Douglass paper, “Recent energy balance of Earth”, was published in November by the International Journal of Geosciences.
The idea that the oceans are stockpiling heat is a key tenet of global warming as the oceans store between 80 and 90 per cent of the heat in the climate system. Furthermore, research co-authored by NCAR’s Trenberth and colleague John Fasullo in 2010 based on satellite data and computer models suggested that the Earth was absorbing more energy than it was radiating back into space - a necessary requirement for global warming - and that this energy has been accumulating in the oceans since 2005.
The trouble is that this energy was not showing up in any measurements which led to Trenberth’s well publicised “travesty” comment in an email published as a result of the “Climategate” leaks which stated: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t”.
Knox and Douglass analysed Argo float temperature data for the period from 2003 to 2008 to estimate changes in ocean heat content (OHC). They state that “Our four estimates of the recent OHC trend for 2003-2008 adequately consider interannual variability and we find that the trend is negative”. That is that the ocean heat content has been falling and not increasing.
It is clear from their paper that Knox and Douglass believe that there is no missing energy and that the problem of missing energy is an artifact caused by a “serious overestimate” by Trenberth and Fasullo of the radiation imbalance at the top of the Earth’s atmosphere. Essentially, they are saying that there is no positive radiation imbalance and therefore no need to assume that a store of energy is being built up in the oceans - with the clear implication, although not explicitly stated in their paper, that the Earth may not be not warming.
In May 2010 Nature published a paper that appeared to confirm that the upper layer of the world’s ocean has warmed since 1993, indicating a strong climate change signal. The paper “Robust Warming of the Global Upper Ocean” by Lyman et al analysed nine different estimates of heat content in the upper ocean from 1993 to 2008 ranging from the surface to a depth of around 700m. The measurements included data from Argo, an array of autonomous free-floating ocean floats, as well as from earlier devices called expendable bathythermographs or XBTs that were dropped from ships to obtain temperature data. This analysis yielded “a statistically significant linear warming trend for 1993-2008,” according to the Nature paper.
However, while the linear warming trend spanned the period from 1993 to 2008 it is an average and the authors of the Nature paper reported that the individual upper ocean heat content anomaly curves “all flatten out after around 2003”. The team reported that the causes of this flattening are “unclear” but referred to the fact that sea surface temperatures had been constant since 2000 and also suggested that increased sea levels since then may be due more to melting continental ice rather than thermal expansion.
Roger Pielke Sr’s website here.
Judy Curry’s website here.
“Recent energy balance of Earth”, by Robert Knox and David Douglass was published in November by the International Journal of Geosciences click here.
“Robust warming of the global upper ocean”, by John M. Lyman et al, published on 20 May 2010 in Nature click here .
“Tracking Earth’s energy”, by Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo, Science, Vol. 328, 2010, pp. 316–317 click here.
See post here.
By Brendan O’Neill
Who, if anyone, is to blame for the terrible flooding in Brisbane? Commentators are pointing their collective finger at the usual suspects. For the extreme green magazine Grist, the floods expose mankind’s arrogance in believing that he can build settlements anywhere he likes, even on floodplains. Nature is “taking a perverse pleasure in pointing out just where the shiny, might city is weakest”, gloats Grist. Others are blaming Aussie property developers, for thoughtlessly throwing up flood-prone buildings, and yet others think Queensland politicians should have done more to improve flood defences.
But might there be another, so far overlooked, contributing factor to the floods? Might the politics of environmentalism itself - the contemporary obsession with global warming as the greatest threat to mankind - have exacerbated the impact of the flooding in Brisbane? It seems possible that Aussie politicians’ and officials’ deeply held conviction that the main problem we face today is increased heat, droughts and a lack of rainfall caused them to take their eye off the ball in Brisbane, and to be unprepared for something as relatively normal as very heavy rainfall.
It is worth looking at a document called ClimateSmart 2050, which was published in 2007 by the Queensland government. It outlines Queensland’s priorities for the next four decades (up to 2050) and promises to reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions by 60 per cent during that timeframe. The most striking thing about the document is its assumption that the main problem facing this part of Australia, along with most of the rest of the world, is essentially dryness brought about by global warming. It argues that “the world is experiencing accelerating climate change as a result of human activities”, which is giving rise to “worse droughts, hotter temperatures and rising sea levels”. We are witnessing “a tendency for less rainfall with more droughts”, the document confidently asserted.
Not surprisingly, given their belief that the Earth would become increasingly parched, Queensland officials emphasised the potential crisis of future “water availability” and promised to prioritise “water conservation”. This is one reason why the Wivenhoe dam at Brisbane was allowed to fill up over the past couple of years: because climate change-obsessed Queensland bureaucrats were convinced that rainfall would decline and dry seasons would become more intense, and therefore as much water as possible had to be stored up for future crises. In March last year, as the Wivenhoe dam went from being just 16.7 per cent full to 80 per cent full, still local politicians told their communities to use water sparingly or else “risk a return to a ban on washing cars and other severe restrictions”.
The Queensland government’s belief that water conservation should be a key priority in this speedily warming world of ours appears to have led to the situation where local dams were allowed to get dangerously full. So in recent weeks, the Wivenhoe dam was running at 150 per cent to 180 per cent capacity, which means that the authorities had to start releasing water from the dam at the same time that the rain-caused flash floods were hitting Brisbane’s river system - effectively contributing to the deluge. It is surely worth asking, at least, whether Queensland officialdom’s embrace of the ideology of climate change, its fervent belief in future manmade drought and thus the need to store as much water as possible, made it unprepared for the current flooding of the Brisbane area.
This is not to say that “greens are to blame for Brisbane”. There’s no point joining the current clamour to find one evil person or one evil that can be held responsible for what is a very complex natural disaster. However, in a world in which the political elites increasingly spend their time fantasising over a future hot apocalypse, where it is fashionable to make Biblical predictions about mankind receiving a sweaty punishment for his wayward behaviour, it is worths raising the possibility at least that our priorities have become seriously skewed. Perhaps it is time for our leaders to come back down to Earth, and to address problems in the here and now, rather than endlessly moralising about man’s behaviour and its future impact on Mother Earth.
See more here.
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Story on Brisbane’s man made flood peak here. Pictures before and after here.
Flooding historically in Queensland has occurred in La Ninas in cold PDO years, conditions occuring this year. A similar major flood occurred in 1974, a strong La Nina winter in the 1947-1977 cold PDO phase.
A similar major flood occurred in 1974, a strong La Nina winter.
Precipitation anomalies in the 1974 flood year through February 11 enlarged here.
2010 precipitation anomalies through January 11 enlarged here.
In fact if you composite all La Nina years with cold PDO you get this Queensland wet signal (November to March).
Enlarged here.
Update: a study in Nature magazine from late 2010 that says global warming is driving the drought in Oz by reducing moisture in the air. And of course, following the floods, they’re all rushing to blame them on increased moisture in the air caused by global warming. See more here. H/T Haunting the Library
And from John Nicol “The failure of the huge computers in Melbourne’s CSIRO to predict the current floods is to their unremitting shame. Admission by the IPCC that their models can not handle La Nina, which are natural and NOT the result of global warming, nor clouds and precipitation, yet “believe” the warming from 1978 to 1995 was “very likely” due to carbon dioxide, rings hollow.
No one really believes BOM or CSIRO would be clever enough to predict the weather a week in advance, but to come out, after the event, blaming global warming for something less severe than similar events in the 1800s (1840s/50s, 1893, 1974) beggars belief. The cycle of climate marches on, independent of man, thumbing its nose at his lame efforts predict its whims.”
By Donna Laframboise, NOconsensus.org
Report cites research accepted for publication 29 months after deadline
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sensibly bases its report on research published prior to a deadline. This may seem like a trivial matter, but it is not. If IPCC authors are to accurately describe the scientific literature, an agreed-upon cutoff date is required. If expert reviewers are to comment on the IPCC’s use of that literature, they must be afforded adequate opportunity to examine it.
Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC’s embattled chairman, insists his organization scrupulously followed the rules when it produced the 2007 report on which governments now rely to make multi-billion-dollar decisions. A month ago, he assured us that this document:
...was based on scientific studies completed before January 2006, and did not include later studies…
If this is true how could a paper that wasn’t accepted for publication until 29 months later be cited multiple times?
The paper in question is titled “West Antarctic ice sheet collapse - the fall and rise of a paradigm.” It was authored by David G. Vaughan, a scientist with the British Antarctic Survey. As the abstract makes clear the study was submitted to the journal Climatic Change in November 2005.
The date on a PDF found here tells us a revised version was prepared in January 2006. Although it’s unclear what occurred during the next 29 months, the abstract says this paper wasn’t accepted for publication until May 2008. (The Working Group 1 installment of the IPCC report was itself finalized in February 2007, leaving a 15-month gap between the IPCC report’s published summary and the Vaughan paper’s acceptance. There is a 20-month gap between the apparent full publication of the Working Group 1 report in March 2007 and the paper’s appearance in print in November 2008.)
The paper is listed in the references for Chapter 10 of the IPCC’s Working Group 1 report here where it looks like this:
Vaughan, D.G., 2007: West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapse - the fall and rise of a paradigm. Clim. Change, in press.
It is cited (incorrectly, given its eventual 2008 publication date) as Vaughan, 2007 on this page to support a statement whose plausibility it actually rejects. The IPCC declares:
If the Amundsen Sea sector were eventually deglaciated, it would add about 1.5 m to sea level, while the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) would account for about 5 m (Vaughan, 2007). [bold added]
But concluding remarks on page 13 of the January 2006 version of Vaughan’s paper leave a different impession:
Since most of WAIS is not showing change, it now seems unlikely that complete collapse of WAIS, with the threat of a 5-m rise in sea level, is imminent in the coming few centuries. [bold added]
If the sole research paper the IPCC cites to establish the notion of a 5-meter sea level rise says such an event is “unlikely” shouldn’t the IPCC mention this fact? Yet when the Vaughan paper gets cited on this page, the IPCC once again fails to tell the whole story. Instead, alarming statements go unqualified:
A collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) has been discussed as a potential response to global warming for many years (Bindschadler, 1998; Oppenheimer, 1998; Vaughan, 2007). A complete collapse would cause a global sea level rise of about 5 m. [bold added]
But wait, there’s more. The Vaughan study is also cited on this page - bringing to three the number of times the IPCC’s Working Group 1 report relies on a paper whose publication status has yet to be determined. The IPCC’s Working Group 2 also gets in on the act. It cites the Vaughan paper once on this page of Chapter 15 and three times on this page of Chapter 19.
So why was this paper even under consideration by the IPCC? What does this paper say that’s so important, so unique, so dramatic or authoritative that the IPCC felt it couldn’t rely on already-published research to make the same case? Beats me.
It would be immensely helpful if Pachauri could enlighten us. At the same time perhaps he could assure us that the following facts have nothing at all to do with this matter. We wouldn’t want anyone to erroneously conclude that there are two citation standards: one for IPCC insiders and another for everyone else:
Working Group 1, Chapter 4 lists a D. Vaughan (UK) as a contributing author
WG1, Chapter 10 lists a D. Vaughan (UK) as a contributing author
WG2, Chapter 15 lists a David G. Vaughan (UK) as one of two coordinating lead authors
WG2’s Summary for Policymakers lists a David Vaughan as a drafting author
WG2’s Technical Summary lists a David Vaughan (UK) as a lead author
See post and more here.
By Barbara Hollingsworth, Washington Examiner
Carbon dioxide has been named as the chief culprit in rampant “ocean acidification” which, according to environmentalists on the Natural Resources Defense Council, will soon start killing off fish and dissolving coral reefs, putting a major dent in the seafood and eco-tourism industries.
According to a 2009 statement by Britain’s Royal Society, co-signed by Dr. James Hansen, of NASA’s Goddard Center, and Dr. Mark Spalding of The Nature Conservancy:
“Temperature‐induced mass coral bleaching causing widespread mortality on the Great Barrier Reef and many other reefs of the world started when atmospheric CO2 exceeded 320ppm.
“At today’s level of ~ 387ppm CO2, reefs are seriously declining and time‐lagged effects will result in their continued demise with parallel impacts on other marine and coastal ecosystems…
“Proposals to limit CO2 levels to 450ppm will not prevent the catastrophic loss of coral reefs from the combined effects of global warming and ocean acidification.To ensure the long‐term viability of coral reefs the atmospheric CO2 level must be reduced significantly below 350ppm.”
Except that there’s practically no evidence that the depth in which coral shells dissolve faster than they accumulate has gotten any shallower over the past 250 years, geoscientist David Middleton points out in “Chicken Little of the Sea Strikes Again”.
“There is solid evidence that elevated atmospheric CO2 levels have actually caused carbonate deposition to increase over the last 220 years,” Middleton writes.
In fact, CO2 may actually be good for coral reefs. “It appears that in addition to being plant food...CO2 is also reef food,” he points out:
“Over the last 400+ years the Earth’s climate has warmed ~0.6, mean sea level has risen by about 9 inches and the atmosphere has become about 100 ppmv more enriched with CO2; and the Great Barrier Reef has responded by steadily growing faster… Once again, we have an environmental catastrophe that is entirely supported by predictive computer models and totally unsupported by correlative and empirical scientific data,” he concludes.
“We can safely pitch ocean acidification into the dustbin of junk science.”
Read more at the Washington Examiner here.
By James Delingpole
This is a guest post from one of our regular commenters, Memory Vault. He’s understandably upset about the Australian floods, which may have claimed more than 70 lives. But what really upsets him is that this disaster could have been prevented. He blames green campaigners so wedded to their ideology they never stop to consider the human consequences. It is to them his bitter letter is addressed.
Andrew Bolt has similarly harsh words for Australia’s eco nuts. Were it not for the actions of Environment Minister Peter Garrett, for example, the Queensland town of Gympie would not now be underwater. Unfortunately, Garrett took it upon himself to block the proposed dam that would have prevented it.
Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett on Wednesday said he made the interim decision to reject the controversial $1.8 billion plan to dam the Mary River because evidence showed it could kill off endangered species. He made the interim decision to reject the controversial $1.8 billion plan to dam the Mary River because evidence showed it could kill off endangered species.
“The project would have serious and irreversible effects on national listed species such as the Australian lungfish, the Mary River turtle and the Mary River cod - both of those endangered.
Here is Memory Vault’s post. It is addressed to the climate trolls who haunt this blog, forever assuring us with their characteristic shrill certainty, that the “science” is now settled and that we sceptics are greedy, selfish fools.
I am sitting here in my home in South East Queensland, watching the news come in about the flooding everywhere. Entire suburbs around Brisbane and several smaller towns are either isolated by flood-waters or have been evacuated. Highways are cut everywhere.
People have been dying. So far about 20 people have died in the past week - nine just this morning when a deluge went through the Lockyer Valley. Most of them children. Another 70 are missing. One could put it all down to “just” weather.
Except EXACTLY the same floods occurred in EXACTLY the same places back in 1974, with much the same tragic loss of life and destruction of property.
Back then we weren’t nearly as clever and learned as you think yourselves to be today. Back then we had this silly notion that climate was cyclical, and if we didn’t prepare for it, we would have a repeat of the same tragedies to deal with in “about thirty years”. That was the thinking of the scientists back then - that climate went in roughly thirty year cycles.
Flood mitigation programs were planned. A series of levee banks and diversionary dams would be built. Brisbane and SE QLD would NEVER suffer such devastation again. After all, we had thirty years to plan and build and improve.
And that’s what we did - or at least started. Wivenhoe Dam got built as the first step, but by the time it was finished clever people like you lot who “knew” that such things were never going to happen again had taken over. CO2 AGW madness had already taken hold.
Instead we had “post modern” minds like Tim Flannery “advising” the government that because of Anthropogenic Global Warming, SE QLD would be perpetually in drought from then on. “Forget dams and flood mitigation programs”, intoned the wise Dr Tim - “build desalination plants instead”.
So that’s what our government did. And that is why thirty five years later, we are once again suffering exactly the SAME tragic loss of life and destruction of property, pretty-much exactly where, and when, and how, those stupid scientists who foolishly believed climate was cyclical had predicted.
Meanwhile our billion dollar desalination plant is quietly being mothballed, and emergency crews are frantically trying to work out how they might be able to save nineteen thousand homes from destruction in the next couple of days, as the Lockyer deluge hits Brisbane. Wise Dr Tim Flannery has been made ‘Australian of the Year’ for his contributions.
I google on the internet for climate extremes and climate-related disasters in the 1972 - 1979 period - the period of the last transition in the natural weather cycle, and I find that it wasn’t a good period in many places around the world. Record and near record high - and low temperatures, record and near-record precipitation, and so on. Floods and droughts pretty-much mimicking what is happening now, and in pretty-much the same places.
I also noted that the indicators of the “silly” theory of the cyclical nature , ocean and atmospheric, are pretty much exactly as they are now.
I have to admit it could all get a bit depressing. But then I remember that the world is in the capable hands of much cleverer people than those silly scientists back in the Seventies who believed climate was cyclical. Now the decisions are being made by clever people like Dr Tim Flannery - and you.
That is when I weep for my fellow Man.
By Dr. Tim Ball, Canada Free Press
It’s frightening how little climate science is known by both sides of the debate on human causation of global warming. I wrote this sentence before I saw a paper from Michigan State University that found, “Most college students in the United States do not grasp the scientific basis of the carbon cycle - an essential skill in understanding the causes and consequences of climate change.”
The professor says students need to know because they must deal with the buildup of CO2 causing climate change. This discloses his ignorance about the science of the carbon cycle and the role of CO2 in climate. It’s not surprising and caused by three major factors:
(1) A function of the emotional, irrational, religious approach to environmentalism.
(2) The political takeover of climate science
(3) Funding directed to prove the political rather than the scientific agenda.
(4) The dogmatism of politics and religion combined to suppress openness of ideas and the advance of knowledge critical to science.
We now have a generation (30 years) of people teaching, researching, or running government that has little knowledge because of lack of fundamental education. Because of them, the public is ill informed, don’t understand the problem, and don‘t know the questions to ask. Correcting the education process will take time because there are insufficient people with the knowledge or expertise. Correcting and widening the research functions will take longer because of removing or re-educating current personnel and a lack of qualified replacements. Even if achieved, success is unlikely. There is the massive problem of inadequate data.
Reduction in the number of weather stations, elimination of raw data by national governments, unexplained manipulations of existing data, lost data by people like Phil Jones, were all done to falsify the results and prevent scrutiny of their work. This couples with failure to fund research to recover and reconstruct historical data. In his autobiography Hubert Lamb said he founded the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) because “it was clear that the first and greatest need was to establish the facts of the past record of the natural climate in times before any side effects of human activities could well be important.” The situation is worse now, sadly due to people at the CRU and government weather agencies.
The blame begins with the political manipulations of Maurice Strong, but he only succeeded because of the so-called climate scientists. Among them, computer modelers caused the biggest problem. They needed to know the most, but knew the least. If they knew anything they would know there is inadequate data and understanding of the major components and mechanisms on which to build the models.
I responded to a newspaper article with a letter pointing out many errors. It elicited an invite from Andrew Weaver IPCC computer modeler. I entered his office with my backpack and he said, “I hope you don’t have a microphone in that thing do you?” I remarked, “Someone’s paranoia is showing.” In the next twenty minutes I realized, because of 25 years of teaching, researching and publishing, he knew very little about climate. He received a phone call and I left his office. A student working outside said he heard my comments about the severe limitations of the computer models and and said he agreed. He simply wanted to get his degree and research money was available. Weaver claimed to be a climatologist, but removed that from his web page when it was pointed out he was a computer modeler.
Over the years Weaver consistently refused a debate. When a students group arranged one at the University of Victoria he refused to participate with his standard line about only dealing with “working” climatologists. His students showed up at my presentation and were talking to students outside the door, apparently attempting to deter them from entering. When they all finally came in they tried to interrupt the proceedings by constantly asking questions. They even had laptops and challenged with Internet sites supposedly contradicting what I said. It was shameless and not surprisingly their interpretation of events appeared on a smear blog site. For example, I showed the Milankovitch Effect and said it was not in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) computer models. One student said he worked with the models and it is included. There’s no doubt it is in some climate models, but not those of the IPCC.
Weaver has announced he will not participate in the next IPCC. He, like so many who got on the bandwagon of politics and funding, is abandoning the sinking ship. Most of his early funding was from Environment Canada until alternate arrangements were made. He began withdrawal in January 2010, “Senior Canadian climate scientist says the United Nations’ panel on global warming has become tainted by political advocacy, that its chairman should resign, and that its approach to science should be overhauled.”
He also said, “the leadership of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has allowed it to advocate for action on global warming, rather than serve simply as a neutral science advisory body.” He knew this all along, partly because I told him. The question is what has he taught his students in the meantime? Judging by his responses to my questions and those asked by his students at my presentation, not much and very biased.
A former editor of an enlightened environmental journal said we need a committee of scientists from the many disciplines involved in climate science. Such a committee existed 25 years ago, and produced groundbreaking work. It was a joint project funded by The National Museum of Canada and Environment Canada under the title “Climatic Change in Canada During the Past 20,000 years.” Each year a specific topic was considered and scientists presented material that was published in Syllogeus. For example, Syllogeus 5 examined Critical Periods in the Quaternary of Climatic History of Northern North America. All the problems that plague climate science such as tree rings, ice cores, circulation patterns and proxy data, among many others, were identified and researched. In the last meeting, I was elected Chair, and in my acceptance speech said, we need to consider carefully and scientifically the claims of global warming. Environment Canada cut the funding because it challenged the political position that agency had already taken; the project died. Canada should reconstitute it because it was producing useful and non-political science - supposedly Weaver would now approve, but I don’t think he’s qualified to participate.
People who totally accepted the corrupted, limited and narrowly focused science of the IPCC have taught climate science for the last 30 years. They should all read Lamb’s monumental two-volume set;
Lamb, H.H., 1972,"Climate: Present, Past and Future. Vol. 1: Fundamentals and Climate Now.” Methuen, London and 1977, “Climate: Present, Past and Future. Vol. 2: Climatic History and the Future”.
They’d learn that all issues now put forward as ‘new’ are not new at all. They only appear new because of the black hole that politicians, aided by a few climatically uneducated political scientists, have dragged climate science into over the last 30 years. Post is here.
By Heidi Blake, The Telegraph
Britain’s largest exam board has been accused of “brainwashing” pupils by forcing them to use an inaccurate temperature graph that exaggerates the scale of global warming.
Climate experts have accused AQA of “scientific illiteracy” and “propaganda” after a graph in its most recent Geography GCSE exam paper contained a series of inaccuracies which magnified the rise in global temperatures.
The graph wrongly presented the current warm period as the hottest on record and pinpointed the world’s current average temperature at 59.5 degrees Fahrenheit (15.3C), when it has in fact never risen above 58.1F (14.52C).
The exam board also overlooked the last ice age, which peaked around 20,000 years ago, instead marking the “previous glacial period” at around 180,000 BC.
AQA ignored the universally-accepted temperature records taken from Antarctic ice core samples over the last 15 years and instead opted to use a graph taken from a children’s textbook first published in 1990.
The ice core data has been used to reconstruct global temperatures going back 800,000 years, showing that the previous four interglacial warm periods were hotter than today.
Kato Harris, head of Geography at South Hampstead High School in north London, has written to the exam board to highlight the errors. He said: “It is demoralising and frustrating when we are trying to be accurate, rigorous teachers, imparting to our pupils the latest scientific knowledge, only for the exam board apparently to show ignorance of scientific developments in the last 15 years.”
The graph published in the exam paper was titled ‘Timeline of the mean world temperatures over the last million years’, even though no such record exists. Pupils were asked to mark with an X the “recent rapid rise in global temperatures”, as well as the coldest period.
AQA said the graph was simply meant to show “generalised trends” in global temperature and claimed that it displayed a ‘similar” pattern to the ice core reconstruction.
But Dr Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation and a social anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University, said the graph contained “shocking inaccuracies. I have no idea where they have got their data from, but it’s completely wrong. The graph exaggerates the case of global warming and it shows scientific illiteracy. I think this is highly misleading and the fact that it was included in an exam papers just shows how suspicious we should be with a lot of the information presented to students. There is a lot of pressure on schools and exam boards from government to educate our children in this way, but if we want to have a well educated population children need to know how science works, and they shouldn’t be brainwashed with misleading information.”
The Global Warming Policy Foundation has recently commissioned a report into the way children are taught about climate change in schools.
Piers Corbyn, owner of the independent forecasting business WeatherAction and a vocal climate sceptic, said the inaccurate graph amount to a “dereliction of duty” by the exam board. The fact that an exam board is using this type of graph is monstrous and totally unacceptable,” he said. “On one hand, the government and schools claim they want children to be objective, yet in the real world pseudo science is used to propagate an ideology to justify increased taxation and carbon trading, and this anti-science must be stopped.”
The climate graph is the latest in a string of errors to hit GCSE exam papers in recent years.
In 2003, Thousands of English Literature students answered questions on the poem the Richest Poor Man in the Valley, by Lindsay Macrae, before their teachers discovered the last seven lines were missing from the exam paper. An official GCSE History textbook published by the exam board Edexcel last year told pupils that the US won the race to the moon in 1979. The Apollo 11 moon landing in fact took place in 1969.
The decision to pass over widely accepted climate data in favour of a “simplified” graph will also be seen by some as further evidence that exams are being “dumbed down”. A spokesman for AQA said: “We always seek to ensure that we use accurate information that is up-to-date and relevant, but just as importantly we need to ensure that figures are fit for purpose, appropriate for the qualification and, as was the case here, applicable for both foundation and higher tiers. The figure is a graph showing generalised trends of global temperature. It was taken from a highly regarded and widely used Geography textbook, Geography: An Integrated Approach. We took if from the 3rd Edition published in 2000 but the graph also appears in the 4th edition published in 2009. We therefore expect that many teachers and candidates will be familiar with this graph.
“The ice core data is very detailed and would have had to have been simplified for the purposes of the question that we wished to ask. Therefore we used a graph readily available in the textbook above that showed similar general trends.” See post and comments here.