By Allan MacRae, Calgary, June 12, 2015
Temperature, among other factors, drives atmospheric CO2 much more than CO2 drives temperature. The rate of change dCO2/dt varies ~contemporaneously with temperature, which reflects the fact that the water cycle and the CO2 cycle are both driven primarily by changes in global temperatures (Veizer et al).
To my knowledge, I initiated in January 2008 the hypothesis that dCO2/dt varies with temperature (T) and therefore CO2 lags temperature by about 9 months in the modern data record, and so CO2 could not primarily drive temperature. Furthermore, atmospheric CO2 lags temperature at all measured time scales. See more including the referenced figures below here.
In my Figure 1 and 2, global dCO2/dt is closely correlated with global Lower Tropospheric Temperature (LT) and Surface Temperature (ST). The temperature and CO2 datasets are collected completely independently, and yet this close correlation exists.
After publishing this paper, I also demonstrated the same close correlation with different datasets, using Mauna Loa CO2 data and Hadcrut3 ST back to 1958. Later I examined the close correlation of LT measurements taken by satellite and those taken by radiosonde.
Earlier papers by Kuo (1990) and Keeling (1995) discussed the delay of CO2 after temperature, although neither appeared to notice the even closer correlation of dCO2/dt with temperature. This correlation is noted in my Figures 3 and 4.
My hypothesis received a hostile reaction from both sides of the fractious global warming debate. All the “global warming alarmists” and most “climate skeptics” rejected it. First I was just deemed wrong - the dCO2/dt vs T relationship was allegedly a “spurious correlation”.
Later it was agreed that I was correct, but the resulting ~9 month CO2-after-T lag was dismissed as a “feedback effect”. This remains the counter-argument of the global warming alarmists - apparently a faith-based rationalization to be consistent with their axiom “WE KNOW that CO2 drives temperature”.
This subject has generated spirited discussion among scientists. Few now doubt the close correlation dCO2/dt vs T. Some say that humankind is not the primary cause of the current increase in atmospheric CO2 - that it is largely natural. Others rely on the “mass balance argument” to refute this claim.
The natural seasonal amplitude in atmospheric CO2 ranges up to ~16ppm in the far North (at Barrow Alaska) to ~1ppm at the South Pole, whereas the annual increase in atmospheric CO2 is only ~2ppm. This seasonal “CO2 sawtooth” is primarily driven by the Northern Hemisphere landmass, which has a much greater land area than the Southern Hemisphere. CO2 falls during the Northern Hemisphere summer, due primarily to land-based photosynthesis, and rises in the late fall, winter and early spring as biomass decomposes.
Significant temperature-driven CO2 solution and exsolution from the oceans also occurs. See the beautiful animation.
In this enormous CO2 equation, the only signal that is apparent is that dCO2/dt varies approximately contemporaneously with temperature, and CO2 clearly lags temperature.
CO2 also lags temperature by about 800 years in the ice core record, on a longer time scale. I suggest with confidence that the future cannot cause the past.
I suggest that temperature drives CO2 much more than CO2 drives temperature. This does not preclude other drivers of CO2 such as fossil fuel combustion, deforestation, etc.
My January 2008 hypothesis is gaining traction with the recent work of several researchers. Here is Murry Salby’s address to the Sydney Institute in 2011:
See also this January 2013 paper from Norwegian researchers: The Phase Relation between Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Global Temperature Global and Planetary Change, Volume 100, January 2013 by Humlum, Stordahl, and Solheim
- Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging 11-12 months behind changes in global sea surface temperature.
- Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging 9.5-10 months behind changes in global air surface temperature.
- Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging about 9 months behind changes in global lower troposphere temperature.
- Changes in ocean temperatures explain a substantial part of the observed changes in atmospheric CO2 since January 1980.
- Changes in atmospheric CO2 are not tracking changes in human emissions.
Observations and Conclusions:
1. Temperature, among other factors, drives atmospheric CO2 much more than CO2 drives temperature. The rate of change dCO2/dt is closely correlated with temperature and thus atmospheric CO2 LAGS temperature by ~9 months in the modern data record
2. CO2 also lags temperature by ~~800 years in the ice core record, on a longer time scale.
3. Atmospheric CO2 lags temperature at all measured time scales.
4. CO2 is the feedstock for carbon-based life on Earth, and Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are clearly CO2-deficient. CO2 abatement and sequestration schemes are nonsense.
5. Based on the evidence, Earth’s climate is insensitive to increased atmospheric CO2 - there is no global warming crisis.
6. Recent global warming was natural and irregularly cyclical - the next climate phase following the ~20 year pause will probably be global cooling, starting by ~2020 or sooner.
7. Adaptation is clearly the best approach to deal with the moderate global warming and cooling experienced in recent centuries.
8. Cool and cold weather kills many more people than warm or hot weather, even in warm climates. There are about 100,000 Excess Winter Deaths every year in the USA and about 10,000 in Canada.
9. Green energy schemes have needlessly driven up energy costs, reduced electrical grid reliability and contributed to increased winter mortality, which especially targets the elderly and the poor.
10. Cheap, abundant, reliable energy is the lifeblood of modern society. When politicians fool with energy systems, real people suffer and die. That is the tragic legacy of false global warming alarmism.
From Judith Curry, H. Sterling Burnett
A new paper by researchers Thorsten Mauritsen and Bjorn Stevens in Nature Geoscience lends credence to climate scientist Richard Lindzen’s speculation changes in cloud cover in the tropics in response to surface warming could act as a natural infrared iris, allowing increased infrared radiation to escape back into space, a kind of natural release valve to moderate temperatures.
In 2001, when Lindzen and his colleagues released their paper, it was largely dismissed, without any substantive analysis or further study, and deemed discredited by the climate alarmists who dominate the peer-review process and the media. As Judith Curry notes, pressure from the climate alarm industry meant Lindzen’s theory essentially languished until Mauritsen and Stevens’ paper. Curry quotes Andrew Dessler:
“By 2006, when I submitted an analysis of tropospheric water vapor that investigated whether there was an iris in that, one of the reviewers pointedly questioned why anyone was still working on this issue. I subsequently withdrew the paper. Nevertheless, just because Lindzen et al. did not convincingly demonstrate their case does not mean the iris hypothesis is wrong.”
Curry summarizes,
So the “consensus enforcers” found it necessary to “discredit” the iris hypothesis, and by extension Lindzen himself, since the reduced sensitivity threatened the “consensus.” You can see how this pernicious behavior discouraged scientists from investigating the iris hypothesis (I can only imagine how a grant proposal to investigate the iris hypothesis would have fared in peer review).
The observational record suggests climate sensitivity is lower than model predictions and indicates climate models underestimate changes in the water cycle. Those observations opened the door for Mauritsen and Stevens to investigate the possible existence of important feedbacks like the iris effect.
Running multiple iterations of the ECHAM6 general circulation climate model developed by Germany’s Max Planck Institute, with a mathematical representation of the iris effect, Mauritsen and Stevens found the “inclusion of such an effect in a climate model moves the simulated responses of both temperature and the hydrological cycle to rising atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations closer to observations.”
In other words, a widely used climate model, modified to account for Lindzen’s iris effect, better reflects measured temperatures and changes in the water cycle than do climate models not accounting for the iris effect.
-- H. Sterling Burnett
SOURCES: Nature Geoscience and Climate Etc.
By E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D.
Some folks just don’t play fair.
Instance?
Media Matters and ForecasttheFacts.org have just teamed up to pressure the media to not to characterize scientists who doubt claims of dangerous manmade global warming as “skeptics.”
Their preferred term?
“Deniers.”
Why?
Two reasons:
First, because skepticism is a scientific virtue, which they don’t want to attribute to those who dare question them.
Second, because “denier” smacks of Holocaust denial, anti-Semitism, and Nazism and so is the perfect smear word.
As expressed in a petition ForecasttheFacts.org sent to the Associated Press (AP), they want the AP Stylebook (which many newspapers follow) to include “an entry that captures the following guideline: Don’t use the term ‘skeptic’ to describe anyone who denies scientific facts (such as...man-made climate change).”
“Our country’s top newspapers are still calling climate change deniers ‘skeptics,’” ForecasttheFacts.org complains on its petition page, “and thereby lending them scientific legitimacy and confusing the public on climate change.”
The problem? None of the thousands of scientists and other scholars who doubt dangerous manmade global warming deny climate change, or even manmade climate change. We just think its magnitude is less than alarmists claim - and on that, the scientific facts are solidly on our side.
As we pointed out in our Open Letter to Pope Francis on Climate Change (Read and sign it now!):
On average, [computer climate] models simulate more than twice the observed warming over the relevant period. Over 95% of the models simulate greater warming than has been observed, and only a tiny percentage come tolerably close. None simulated the complete absence of observed warming over approximately the last 16 (according to UAH satellite data) to 26 (according to RSS lower tropospheric data) years.
Nonetheless, ForecasttheFacts.org and Media Matters demand that the media mischaracterize skeptics.
And they claim a good response from New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan, who on May 7 wrote, “readers are right to watch these choices carefully. The difference between skeptic and denier...may seem minor, but it’s really not. Simply put, words matter.”
Well, yes, words matter. “Skeptic” and “denier” aren’t interchangeable. Not only is the first a term of honor for any scientist, and the second a term of scorn. But also, the first is accurate, and the second isn’t.
We hope the Times, and the AP, will remember that.
Just who are Media Matters and ForecasttheFacts.org?
Media Matters for America is, as Byron York points out, “a left-wing media watchdog founded by former right-wing media star David Brock[,] ...part of a group of institutions - the Center for American Progress, MoveOn.org, and others - that have become increasingly important in Democratic politics.”
The Center for American Progress, in turn, is a Left-wing organization run by Neera Tanden, formerly of the Clinton and Obama administrations and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. And MoveOn.org is another Left-wing organization. Both are funded by self-proclaimed “stateless statesman” billionaire George Soros.
ForecasttheFacts.org is “a project launched ...in January 2012, by 350.org, created by notorious anti-corporation activist Bill McKibben (whom I debated in April in New Orleans), and Citizens Engagement Lab, itself a creation of MoveOn.org, a George Soros-funded appendage of the Democratic Party,” as our friends at the Heartland Institute report.
Its aim is “to expose meteorologists blowing” what ForecasttheFacts.org calls “hot air.” Their “hot air”? Climate facts that don’t line up with the climate alarmist message.
So now you know. Those calling for the media to describe skeptics of dangerous manmade global warming as “deniers” are really just Left-wing, anti-industry, pro-Democratic Party shills.
And since they deny the scientific facts that recent warming has been less than half what the models predicted, and that indeed there’s been no warming at all for at least the last 18 years and 5 months, maybe they should be called “deniers.”
By Denis G. Rancourt
The human animal has an instinct to identify potential dangers and to warn others. It is a built-in survival mechanism of any animal that lives in a group. And it is a strong and constant activity, re-enforced by environmental stressors.
This plays out on several time scales, from the immediate in the case of a potential physical assault, to the weekly in checking the weather forecast, to seasonal in preparing for winter, to life-long in planning for inevitable aging, to leaving good things for our grandchildren…
It is in our fiber to look ahead and to plan ahead, especially in the face of foreseeable or detected dangers.
The whole process can spin out of control when the danger is difficult to perceive yet could be lethal. Think of baboons who are on the lookout for a stalking lion. The slightest shadow movement can make them scream and run for the trees. It’s a tense and highly volatile situation.
At this stage in our evolution we are faced with a pathological extension of our collective survival reflex, which is entirely fabricated by our high priests (government funded scientists and talking heads).
If these high priests were not here to tell us that the atmospheric concentration of the minor constituent CO2 is increasing, and that “global mean surface temperature” has increased by some 0.5 C in the last 100 years, then we would never know about these imperceptible causes of our certain eventual collective death as a species.
The priests explain that our certain extinction will occur from a rising sea level and changing regional climates. That these changes will cause mass migrations, ecosystem collapses, agricultural failures, famines, and disease. They also inform us that those who will suffer most are the most vulnerable inhabitants of the planet, as though this were a new feature of the effects of natural disasters.
Therefore, they urge, we must tax carbon emissions, apply cap and trade, and create a global carbon economy to limit CO2 in the atmosphere. And who better to coordinate it all than the World Bank, IMF, and such, given their stellar records in managing equitable development on this little rock. (Or is that economic enforcement of US regime supremacy?)
Forgive me for saying, but this all sounds rather nutso to me.
Nothing could be more like a religion than this crazy movement. We are expected to accept that an essential and growth-limiting plant nutrient (CO2: [1]) is a toxic pollutant, that the world will be destroyed because of our collective and intrinsic wickedness of emitting CO2, via floods no less.
Take a deep breath (exhale if you dare) and allow me to state a few facts that might help put things into perspective.
Read the rest of his post here.
The video of Denis’s March 27, 2015, University of Ottawa talk entitled “The science and geopolitics of climate change” was produced by filmmaker Peter Biesterfeld and turned out to be of very good image and sound quality.
Michael Bastasch
This past winter broke tons of low temperature records across the eastern seaboard, but would you have guessed the Northeast just had the snowiest winter since the “Little Ice Age”?
“Looking back through accounts of big snows in New England by the late weather historian David Ludlum, it appears for the eastern areas, this winters snowblitz may have delivered the most snow since perhaps 1717,” wrote seasoned meteorologist Joe D’Aleo with Weatherbell Analytics.
“That year, snows had reached five feet in December with drifts of 25 feet in January before one great last assault in late February into early March of 40 to 60 more inches,” D’Aleo wrote. “The snow was so deep that people could only leave their houses from the second floor, implying actual snow depths of as much as 8 feet or more.”
The New England Historical Society wrote that the so-called “Great Snow” of 1717 was so intense that “Puritans in Boston held no church services for two successive weeks” - and if you know anything about Puritans, you know they don’t take missing church lightly.
“Entire houses were covered over, identifiable only by a thin curl of smoke coming out of a hole in the snow,” the Historical Society noted. “In Hampton, N.H., search parties went out after the storms hunting for widows and elderly people at risk of freezing to death.” Sometimes snow would pile so high people would burn “their furniture because they couldn’t get to the woodshed.”
“It wasn’t uncommon for them to lose their bearings and not be able to find the houses,” the society wrote in its account of winter 1717. “People maintained tunnels and paths through the snow from house to house.”
Luckily, in the modern world snow storms are more manageable thanks to plows, de-icing agents and so forth, but even so, some East Coast cities were caught off guard by the extraordinary amount of snow and record cold.
In late January, New York City shut down transit services in the face of about two feet of snow. Similar moves were made in New Jersey, even though the blizzard was not nearly as bad in these two states compared to states in New England.
During that same blizzard, about 30,000 homes in the Boston-Cape Cod area lost power, and near-80 mile per hour winds were reported on Martha’s Vineyard. By March, the city of Boston had gotten more than 110 inches of snow- an all-time record.
Federal agencies in Washington, D.C. shut down in mid-February when the National Weather Service predicted there would be six to eight inches of snow on the ground. The U.S. government was shut down again in early March when forecasters predicted six to seven inches of snow.
The D.C. area’s public schools were also shut down, with students in Fauquier County, Virginia getting 11 snow days and Howard County, Maryland getting seven snow days.
Meteorologists and climate scientists have hotly debated what has caused fierce winters in the last two years. Some climate scientists say it’s global warming, saying warmer temperatures in the Arctic have made the jet stream more wobbly or that warmer temperatures caused more precipitation to build up leading to bigger snowstorms.
Others have argued natural climate cycles are driving the heavy snowfall. Two recent studies from the University of Washington argue that activity in the Pacific Ocean drove warm, dry air into the western U.S. while forcing cold, wet air east.
D’Aleo says a “super La Nina in 2010/11 (2nd strongest in 120 years, by some measures), set up warm water in the central Pacific and cold water near the west coast of North America” and caused drought in the west and frigid weather in the east.
“That warm water came east first to off of Alaska last year leading to the historic winter near the western Lakes and North Central and then the warm water was carried by the currents southeast to the entire west coast forcing the cold to take aim more on the eastern Lakes and Northeast,” D’Aleo wrote.
“The combination of cold and snow here to northern areas and back to the Great Lakes the last two winters, harkens back to the Little Ice Age that ended in the early 20th century,” D’Aleo wrote.
Ross McKitrick
Its ideas would send the West back 100 years and keep poor nations impoverished and wretched
A few years ago, a journalist asked me for my thoughts on the importance of “Earth Hour” which was reprised this past weekend. What I told him applies today, perhaps even more so.
I abhor Earth Hour. Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century. Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity.
Giving women the freedom to work outside the home depended on the availability of electrical appliances that free up time from domestic chores. Getting children out of menial labour and into schools depended on the same thing, as well as on the ability to provide safe indoor lighting for reading.
Development and provision of modern health care without electricity is absolutely impossible. The expansion of our food supply, and the promotion of hygiene and nutrition, depended on being able to irrigate fields, cook and refrigerate foods, and have a steady indoor supply of safe hot water.
Many of the world’s poor suffer brutal environmental conditions in their own homes because of the necessity of cooking over indoor fires that burn twigs and dung. This causes local deforestation and the proliferation of smoke-and parasite-related lung diseases.
Anyone who wants to see local conditions improve in the Third World should realize the importance of access to cheap electricity from fossil-fuel based power generating stations. After all, that’s how the West developed.
The whole mentality around Earth Hour demonizes electricity. I cannot do that. Instead, I celebrate it and all that it has provided for humanity. Earth Hour celebrates ignorance, poverty and backwardness.
By repudiating the greatest engine of liberation, it becomes an hour devoted to anti-humanism. It encourages the sanctimonious gesture of turning off trivial appliances for a trivial amount of time, in deference to some ill-defined abstraction called “the Earth,” all the while hypocritically retaining and enjoying the real benefits of continuous, reliable electricity.
People who see virtue in doing without electricity should shut off their fridge, stove, microwave, computer, water heater, lights, TV and all other appliances for a month, not an hour. And pop down to the cardiac unit at the hospital and shut the power off there, too.
I don’t want to go back to nature. Travel to a zone hit by earthquakes, floods and hurricanes to see what it’s like to go back to nature. For humans, living in “nature” meant a short life span marked by violence, disease and ignorance. People who work for the end of poverty and relief from disease are fighting against nature. I hope they leave their lights on.
Here in Ontario, through the use of pollution control technology and advanced engineering, our air quality has dramatically improved since the 1960s, despite the expansion of industry and the power supply. If, after all this, we are going to take the view that the remaining air emissions outweigh all the benefits of electricity, and that we ought to be shamed into sitting in darkness for an hour, like naughty children who have been caught doing something bad, then we are setting up unspoiled nature as an absolute, transcendent ideal that obliterates all other ethical and humane obligations. No thanks.
I like visiting nature, but I don’t want to live there, and I refuse to accept the idea that civilization with all its tradeoffs is something to be ashamed of.
Ross McKitrick is Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph, a Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute and an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute.
By Ron Arnold
Harvard historian of science Naomi Oreskes is best known to climate realists for her 2010 screed Merchants of Doubt, but a short, obscure, error-riddled essay she wrote as a chapter in the book How Well Do Facts Travel? The Dissemination of Reliable Knowledge is more significant. In it she examines the 1991 origin of the “skeptics are paid industry shills” narrative found in a legendary set of “leaked Western Fuels memos.”
Oreskes’ chapter is important because she interprets the memos as industry’s plan for a vast national campaign using paid climate scientists to create lasting public doubt about global warming. That’s the same interpretation repeated ad nauseam by climate alarmists such as Al Gore, Ross Gelbspan (1997’s The Heat Is On), and Canadian attack website DeSmogBlog.
Appallingly, nobody in this parade of critics ever fact-checked the memos, not even historian Oreskes. Critics misinterpreted what they were looking at in the hundred-or-so pages of “Western Fuels memos.” They cherry-picked pieces that made skeptics look worst and patched them together into an assumption- laden fairy-tale.
Memos Misnamed, Misunderstood
According to Russell Cook’s excellent Heartland Institute Report Merchants of Smear, and numerous interviews with the “memo” sources, all the critics had was a hodgepodge of e-mail exchanges from a loose coalition of 24 large and small electric utilities worried about a carbon tax bill in Congress.
The fairy tale spinners focused only on emails from the utilities’ coal suppliers. The coalition explored lobbying to raise public concern about the impact of the tax, along with pointing out the weaknesses in the claims humans were causing climate change, using well-established skeptical scientists as spokesmen to balance the deluge of alarmist publicity.
The “memos” were the everyday work products of coalition members- including the Edison Electric Institute, a large trade group of investor-owned utilities-filed away in no particular order. EEI coordinated the most misinterpreted document, a campaign proposal by opinion survey firm Cambridge Reports of Massachusetts. The other “memos” included letters, meeting notices, reports from a hired Washington public relations firm, sample ads from a North Dakota direct mail firm, and similar items.
Innocuous Trade Association Demonized
Less than one-third of the jumbled “memos” involved Western Fuels Association. It’s ironic that they became known as the “Western Fuels memos,” because WFA is just the opposite of what the alarmist critics thought. It wasn’t a lobbying group but rather a nonprofit, member-owned co-op serving consumer-owned rural electric cooperatives and other public power systems. WFA manages mining and transportation of coal from member-owned mines and buys additional coal in the open market, facts printed on the inside cover of WFA’s annual reports.
The coalition’s climate skeptics picked the semi-humorous acronym “ICE,” and Cambridge Reports suggested several names to fit, including “Informed Citizens for the Environment” and “Information Council for the Environment.” Western Fuels used the latter.
The single most misinterpreted page, “Strategy,” listed nine goals, topped by “Reposition global warming as theory (not fact).” Critics mischaracterized that as “orders from headquarters” to reposition the public into believing global warming is not a fact. Al Gore even featured it in ominous red letters spread across a frame of his movie An Inconvenient Truth. Actually, it was merely a suggestion offered by Cambridge Reports.
Coalition Dissolves
Even more importantly, Western Fuels Association officials did not even read the Cambridge Reports proposal, because they had already hired Simmons Advertising of Grand Forks, North Dakota. They never saw the “Reposition global warming as theory (not fact)” goal, and they say they wouldn’t have used it if they had, because it was too abstract.
The national campaign never happened, a three-city test run flopped, and the coalition dissolved amid disagreements between skeptics and pragmatists. In July 1991, coalition members went their separate ways. Smaller ones, generally skeptics, chose to fight for sound science and against new regulations, whereas big, investor-owned utilities abandoned the science debate and chose to lobby to favorably influence legislation.
Slanted Focus, Coverage
Of the original “Western Fuels memos,” only fifty poorly scanned, frustratingly incomplete images on a Greenpeace Investigations site are publicly available today. So, where did Oreskes get the entire set?
She claims she found them “in the archives of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) in Washington, D.C.” and advises, “scholars wishing to consult these materials should contact the AMS.”
AMS is actually headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts It maintains a small Washington, DC office for government affairs, but it has no archives. The AMS archivist in Boston verified no such documents ever existed in the society’s archives.
Oreskes said an “Anthony Socci” brought the documents to her attention. The AMS archivist said Socci-a Senate Commerce Committee staffer from 1991 to 1993 who managed hearings for Sen. Al Gore - had been an AMS employee for a time, and likely had a personal copy he made available to Oreskes.
How did Socci get the documents? The most likely answer comes from a letter on EEI letterhead dated May 6, 1991, showing the group’s global warming task force strongly disparaged the skeptic campaign. Within a month, the memos were circulating among environmentalists in Washington. The Sierra Club forwarded a copy to the New York Times, mentioned in a July 8, 1991 article headlined, “Pro Coal Ad Campaign Disputes Warming Idea.”
A noted historian, when asked for the simplest definition of history, said, “History is what really happened.” That’s not what Oreskes wrote.
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
Daniel J. Boorstin
Ron Arnold (arnold.ron@gmail.com) is a free-enterprise activist, author, and commentator.
In Oreskes name, these signs are being posted on lakes across the country.
Penn and Teller get hundreds of knucklehead enviros like Oreskes to sign a DHMO (water) ban petition.
By Michael Bastasch
Are government climate agencies tampering with climate data to show warming? Some Republicans think so. California Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher says to expect congressional hearings on climate data tampering.
@caerbannog666 expect there to be congressional hearings into NASA altering weather station data to falsely indicate warming & sea rise - Dana Rohrabacher (@DanaRohrabacher) February 20, 2015
Rohrabacher serves as the vice chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, which has jurisdiction over NASA and other agencies that monitor the Earth’s climate.
Rohrabacher has long been critical of the theory of man-made global warming. Lately, the California Republican has criticizing NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for allegedly tampering with temperature data to create an artificial warming trend. Such data is then used to justify regulations aimed at curbing fossil fuel use and other industrial activities.
@grngamine journalist investigation shows records of various weather stations altered by AGW advocates to make it appear to be warming. -Dana Rohrabacher (@DanaRohrabacher) February 19, 2015
@caerbannog666 U seem unaware of latest revelation of data manipulation. NASA reported higher temp than what was record at weather stations - Dana Rohrabacher (@DanaRohrabacher) February 19, 2015
Rohrabacher isn’t the only one to call for hearings on the science behind global warming. Oklahoma Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe has also promised to hold hearings on global warming data.
“We’re going to have a committee hearing on the science,” said Inhofe, who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. “People are going to hear the other side of the story.”
For years, those skeptical of man-made global warming have argued that government agencies are altering raw temperature data to create a warming trend. Allegations of tampering have increased as satellite temperature readings show much less warming than land and ocean-based weather stations show.
Science blogger Steven Goddard (a pseudonym) has been a major critic of NASA’s and NOAA’s temperature measurements. Goddard points out that NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center makes the present look warmer by artificially cooling past temperatures to show a warming trend.
“NCDC pulls every trick in the book to turn the US cooling trend into warming. The raw data shows cooling since the 1920s,” Goddard told The Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview last month.
“NCDC does a hockey stick of adjustments to reverse the trend,” Goddard said. “This includes cooling the past for ‘time of observation bias’ infilling missing rural data with urban temperatures, and doing almost nothing to compensate for urban heat island effects.”
NOAA does make temperature adjustments, but it argues such adjustments are necessary to remove “artificial biases” in surface temperature data. The biggest adjustment made by NCDC scientists is cooling past data to take into account the fact that there was a big shift from taking temperature readings in the afternoon to the morning.
“We get a lot of people questioning our data adjustments,” Thomas Peterson, NCDC’s principal scientist, told TheDCNF. There was an “artificial cool bias in the data,” Peterson said.
Switching the time of the day temperatures were taken from the afternoon, when temperatures are warmer, to the morning, when temperatures are cooler, caused a cooling bias in the data. Temperature data from nearby weather stations was used to help create a baseline temperature for different regions.
But there are some drawbacks in surface temperature readings from a few thousand weather stations, boats and buoys spread out across the world. Peterson said the weather station system is “only really good for the U.S.”
“The main problem is where there are a few stations in the middle of nowhere.” Peterson said, specifically referring to weather station data problems on St. Helena Island.
UK Telegraph writer Christopher Booker joined the fray recently, using work by Goddard and other bloggers to criticize climate agencies for data tampering.
“Of much more serious significance, however, is the way this wholesale manipulation of the official temperature record...has become the real elephant in the room of the greatest and most costly scare the world has known,” Booker wrote. “This really does begin to look like one of the greatest scientific scandals of all time.”