Much as when the organization he leads quietly made changes to the United States historical climate record at the prodding of Climate Audit’s Stephen McIntyre, James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies finally released critical computer codes scientists have wanted for years, but did so with absolutely no official press release. As a result, not one media outlet covered this occurrence that years from now could be seen as a huge turning point in the climate change debate.

Despite the secrecy, there was great celebration amongst anthropogenic global warming skeptics that have wanted these closely held codes to be able to identify how NASA and the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration make adjustments to raw climate data collected by weather stations. One such skeptic is Anthony Watts, who happily reported Saturday: “Apparently us “court jesters” (as as Dr. James Hansen calls us) carry some weight after all.

I’m happy to report that NASA GISS has in fact released the computer code used to arrive at temperature adjustments for the USA and the world. The first task is to make sure it matches what has been seen, and to verify that we have all of it. This is hugely important in doing independent verification of the surface temperature record. Following that, an analysis of the methodology and replication of the computer program output to see if it matches the current data sets. Then perhaps we can fully understand why some stations that are in “pristine” condition, such as Walhalla, SC, with no obvious microsite biases, get “adjusted” by Hansen’s techniques. Shouldn’t good data stand on it’s [sic] own?” Yes, that sounds reasonable, Anthony, unless your goal is to manipulate the data to support your agenda. Of course, another happy skeptic was Stephen McIntyre who reported the news at Climate Audit.

Regardless, it seems a metaphysical certitude that the same media which ignored the changes to the climate record a month ago will be equally disinterested in reporting this information. Read more here.

Further evidence that global warming enthusiasts have jumped the shark comes with the box office disaster experienced by Leonardo DiCaprio’s film 11th Hour. Roger Friedman of Foxnews.com reports: “The 11th Hour,” has been a total bust at the box office. After 18 days in release, the film has grossed only $417,913 from ticket sales. The 90-minute snore-fest is playing on 111 screens this week, but that number is likely to be reduced this Friday. The film will be sent to DVD heaven after that.

I confess to being personally incapable of evaluating all the scientific evidence on climatology, physics, and the other relevant disciplines. But I am experienced in the scholarly method of evaluating alternative hypotheses, and well understand that accepted “consensus” views are often overturned by subsequent generations armed with better data. Thomas Kuhn wrote the classic book on the subject, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a work which I used to ask doctoral candidates to master, in order to learn the lesson that all hypotheses, no matter how widely accepted, remain but tentative models of reality, subject to being replaced by better ones as more evidence comes in.

I wonder how many years it will require for global warming’s snake oil faction to become ashamed of their role in pushing their dogma with their chosen methods. The public seems to have caught on, judging by the box office surprise Leo got, not to mention all the empty seats at various Live Aid concerts. By the way, have you seen Al Gore in the news recently? I haven’t. Maybe he and his obsession have become what Variety used to call “B.O. Poison”. Read more here.

If dissent is so rare, why do global-warming conformists feel the strong need to argue that minority views should be dismissed as nutty or venal? Why not posit that there is such a thing as honest disagreement on the science?

As for the overwhelming majority of scientists believing that man is behind global warming, former NASA scientist Roy Spencer, now at the University of Alabama, told me: “It’s like an urban legend. There has never been any kind of vote on this issue.” He referred me to a 2003 survey in which two German environmental scientists asked more than 530 climate scientists from 27 countries if they thought humans caused climate change: Fifty-six percent answered yes, 30 percent said no.

What really frosts me about the Newsweek story is that it concentrates on industry funding for skeptics while ignoring the money that pours into pro-global-warming coffers. That focus ignores where the big grant money goes: to pay for crisis-mongering research. Or as Reid Bryson, the father of scientific climatology, told the Capital Times in Madison, Wis.: “If you want to be an eminent scientist, you have to have a lot of grad students and a lot of grants. You can’t get grants unless you say, ‘Oh, global warming, yes, yes, carbon dioxide.’”

True believers appear to be afraid of a fair fight. In March, when the audience was polled before a New York “Intelligence Squared U.S.” debate, 30 percent agreed with the motion that global warming is not a crisis; 57 percent disagreed. After the debate, 46 percent agreed with the motion, while 42 per cent disagreed. Read more here.

Brussels: Carbon dioxide is not the big bogeyman of climate change and global warming. This is the conclusion of a comprehensive scientific study performed by the Royal Meteorological Institute, which will be published this summer. The study does not state that CO2 plays no role in warming the earth. “But it can never play the decisive role that is currently attributed to it,” climate scientist Luc Debontridder says.

“Not carbon dioxide, but water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas, responsible for at least 75 % of the greenhouse effect. This is a simple scientific fact, but Al Gore’s movie has hyped carbon dioxide so much that nobody seems to take note of it.” said Luc Debontridder. “Every change in weather conditions is blamed on carbon dioxide. But the warm winters of the last few years (in Belgium) are simply due to the ‘North-Atlantic Oscillation’. And this has absolutely nothing to do with carbon dioxide.”

Translated into English from this story here.

The latest twist in the global warming saga is the revision in data at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, indicating that the warmest year on record for the U.S. was not 1998, but rather 1934 (by 0.02 of adegree Celsius). Canadian and amateur climate researcher Stephen McIntyre discovered that NASA made a technical error in standardizing the weather air temperaturedata post-2000. These temperature mistakes were only for the U.S.; their net effect was to lower the average temperature reading from 2000-2006 by 0.15C.

The new data undermine another frightful talking point from environmentalists, which is that six of the 10 hottest years on recordhave occurred since 1990. Wrong. NASA now says six of the 10 warmest years were in the 1930s and 1940s, and that was before the bulk of industrial CO2 emissions were released into the atmosphere. It’s also not clear that the 0.15 degree temperature revision is as trivial as NASA insists. Total U.S. warming since 1920 has been about0.21 degrees Celsius. This means that a 0.15 error for recent years is more than two-thirds the observed temperature increase for the period of warming.

What’s more disturbing is what this incident tells us about the scientific double standard in the global warming debate. If this kind oferror were made by climatologists who dare to challenge climate-change orthodoxy, the media and environmentalists would accuse them of manipulating data to distort scientific truth. NASA’s blunder only became a news story after Internet bloggers played whistleblower by circulating the new data across the Web. So far this year NASA has issued at least five press releases that could be described as alarming on the pace of climate change. But the correction of its overestimate of global warming was merely posted on the agency’s Web site. James Hansen, NASA’s ubiquitous climate scientist and a man who has charged that the Bush Administration is censoring him on global warming, has been unapologetic about NASA’s screw up. He claims that global warming skeptics—“court jesters,” he calls them --are exploiting this incident to “confuse the public about the status of knowledge of global climate change, thus delaying effective action to mitigate climate change.” So let’s get this straight: Mr. Hansen’s agency makes a mistake in a way that exaggerates the extent of warming, and this is all part of a conspiracy by “skeptics”? It’s a wonder there aren’t more of them. Read more here.

A new survey about to be published by the journal Energy and Environment finds that less than 50 percent of the scientific papers written about climate change since 2004 have endorsed the view that man’s activities are causing global warming. Think Katie, Charlie, and Brian will be discussing this tonight?

As reported by DailyTech Wednesday: Medical researcher Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte recently updated this research. Using the same database and search terms as [history professor Naomi] Oreskes, he examined all papers published from 2004 to February 2007. The results have been submitted to the journal Energy and Environment, of which DailyTech has obtained a pre-publication copy. The figures are surprising.

Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers “implicit” endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis. This is no “consensus

Read more here.

What’s up with journalists in the mainstream media? In most cases, they tend to be unconditional supporters of free expression and strive to report on controversial views. However, reporting on issues relating to global warming has become strikingly one-sided. With no need to persuade using rational argument, a new conventional wisdom is being formulated that is beyond challenge by “sensible” people.

Creating group-think and mass behavior should be anathema to honest journalists. Otherwise, reporters become opinion makers rather than neutral observers. Along these lines, there are signs of a growing intolerance in the debate on global climate change. Climate-change denial has become a taboo that invites a sense of moral repugnance toward deniers.

As it turns out, most “skeptics” are simply those that raise doubts about the certainty of computer models of the future that predict climate doom. For their part, nondeniers readily accept long-term projections for climate change that rely upon computer models.

Citing computer model forecasts to justify scientific consensus about climate change beggars logic and denies real-world experience. As it is, weather forecasters and economists using similarly elaborate computer models are legendarily inept in making short-term predictions. Read more here.

Never underestimate the power of the blogosphere and a quarter of a degree to inflame the fight over global warming.  quarter-degree Fahrenheit is roughly the downward adjustment NASA scientists made earlier this month in their annual estimates of the average temperature in the contiguous 48 states since 2000. They corrected the numbers after an error in meshing two sets of temperature data was discovered by Stephen McIntyre, a blogger and retired business executive in Toronto. Smaller adjustments were made to some readings for some preceding years.

Jay Lawrimore, a scientist at the National Climatic Data Center of the Commerce Department who works on assembling the climate records that NASA analyzed, said his agency could probably do a better job of emphasizing the uncertainty surrounding its annual temperature announcements.
Mr. McIntyre and the government scientists do agree on at least one more thing: the need to improve the quality of climate data gathered around the world, including in the United States, which has by far the planet’s biggest network of meteorological stations.

Mr. McIntyre is not alone in pointing out that the need to adjust and revise such data — with the attendant risk of mistakes — would be reduced with more care and consistency taken in collecting climate data.

The National Academy of Sciences has repeatedly called for improvements in climate monitoring. An independent group of meteorologists and weather buffs is compiling its own gallery of American weather stations at www.surfacestations.org, with photographs showing glaring problems, like thermometers placed next to asphalt runways and parking lots. Dr. Lawrimore said that the government is preparing to build a climate reference network of more sophisticated, and consistent, monitoring stations that should cut uncertainty in gauging future trends.  Read more here. Also read McIntyre’s blog on Revkin’s take on the Hansen Fiasco here.