Vijay Kumar Raina is amused. The 76-year old retired geologist who lives in Sector 17, Panchkula in Haryana has been blitzkrieged by the media, government, world scientist community and the average citizen since December 2009. Why? Because he blew the lid off the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC), headed by the charismatic R.K. Pachauri, claims that the Himalayan glaciers will be extinct by 2035.

Raina’s life has taken a complete turnaround in the last six months. Like most retirees, Raina had followed a routine: Early morning walks, discussing politics, attending to his plants and working religiously on his book devoted to ‘tracing the work done on Indian glaciers’. He was on the receiving end of jibes from Pachauri who dismissed his claims as school-boy science. Now Pachauri has been keeping a low profile, his reputation at stake. However, neighbours call on Raina non-stop. There is no time to work on his book. But Raina laughs off the publicity. “The last one month has been absolutely maddening. Morning to evening, I am either talking to the press or answering questions on email and I haven’t been able to even touch my book. [But] so far I am concerned, the case is closed,” he says.

However simple this may sound, it makes a lot of difference to the authenticity of the data collected. By November, the first snowfall has already taken place because of which it is very difficult to identify the outline of the glaciers. That’s why many glaciers outlined in the maps show much larger outlines than actually present. So, when the SAC compared the current size of glaciers using satellite imagery with the 1962 maps they obviously found a lot of shrinkage. “We told the minister that we do not agree what SAC says. At least that is our experience of the glaciers we have gone to,” adds Raina.

Ramesh took notice and asked Raina if he would prepare a ‘white paper on the status of work done on Himalayan glaciers’. He was given a window of three weeks to complete the white paper. Raina claims he had no idea what a white paper meant. But he checked. “I found that a white paper means truthful expression of facts,” he says. On August 4, 2009, Raina submitted his report. It contained 150 years of data collected by the GSI of 25 Indian glaciers. It said that the Himalayan glaciers and glaciers in the rest of the world have retreated and advanced irregularly with no direct link to warming or cooling of the earth’s climate. “This is one of the many issues of climate change science that we do not fully understand,” says Dr. Madhav L. Khandekar, a scientist based out of Canada who has been an expert reviewer of the 2007 IPCC report.

On November 9, 2009, Jairam Ramesh released the Himalayan glacier document at a press conference in New Delhi. “There is no conclusive scientific evidence to link global warming with what is happening with the Himalayan glaciers,” he said.

Hell Breaks Loose

Raina vividly remembers the day the report was released. “It is surprising that even on the day when this document was released by the minister, a lot of press asked me questions but nobody bothered to put them in the papers because probably at that time they thought this fellow knows nothing… yeh to mantriji ne kar diya,” he says. He was partially correct. Not many took the statement too seriously in the beginning, except for some stray critics writing in the media. But the one man who took immediate note of it and reacted bitterly was R. K. Pachauri, chairman of IPCC.

Pachauri came down strongly on the report. The following day, in an interview with The Guardian newspaper, he questioned the minister’s intentions behind releasing such a report terming it as ‘an extremely arrogant statement’. And he didn’t refrain from taking pot shots at Raina either. “With the greatest of respect, this guy retired years ago and I find it totally baffling that he comes out and throws out everything that has been established years ago.” He went on to say that such claims were those of “climate change deniers and school boy science.” Scientists across the world and six of them who shared their perspective on this issue with Forbes India say that Pachauri’s comments were out of order because they were very personal.

In December, 2009, however, Dr. Murari Lal, a scientist and one of the authors of the chapter on glaciers in the IPCC 4th Assessment Report spilled the beans at a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) conference held in New Delhi at the headquarters of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI). He said that he had cited the ‘Himalayan glaciers to disappear by 2035’ claim from a 2005 World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report.

The implication of this “"confession" was serious. Lal was saying his data was from a secondary source. The events quickly unravelled. WWF quickly responded and said it had, in turn, take the information from a quote in the New Science Journal given by Dr. Syed Iqbal Hasnain, who was then at the Jawaharlal Nehru University and who later became the head of glaciology at TERI. Hasnain, on his part, denied making any such statement. The source of the claim in IPCC’s report thus entered a blackhole.

The moment this story made headlines, scientists and policy makers across the world started questioning IPCC’s credibility. Dr. Vincent Gray, a scientist based out of New Zealand who has been an expert reviewer on all IPCC reports, puts IPCC’s current state of affairs in perspective. “This Himalayan story is so obviously fraudulent that it is surprising that people have only just noticed it. I blame myself that I should have noticed it long ago,” says Gray. It is the IPCC’s motivation and hand-in-glove nature with policy makers that have come into question. “It is not a scientific body and it has become a political body, dedicated to distorting evidence to support the view that human emissions are dangerous,” says Gray. Read much more here.

Several errors have been recently uncovered in the 4th Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). These include problems with Himalayan glaciers, African agriculture, Amazon rainforests, Dutch geography, and attribution of damages from extreme weather events. More seem to turn up daily. Most of these errors stem from the IPCC’s reliance on non-peer reviewed sources.

The defenders of the IPCC have contended that most of these errors are minor in significance and are confined to the Working Group II Report (the one on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability) of the IPCC which was put together by representatives from various regional interests and that there was not as much hard science available to call upon as there was in the Working Group I report ("The Physical Science Basis"). The IPCC defenders argue that there have been no (or practically no) problems identified in the Working Group I (WGI) report on the science.

We humbly disagree.

In fact, the WGI report is built upon a process which, as revealed by the Climategate emails, is, by its very nature, designed not to produce an accurate view of the state of climate science, but instead to be an “assessment” of the state of climate science - an assessment largely driven by preconceived ideas of the IPCC design team and promulgated by various elite chapter authors. The end result of this “assessment” is to elevate evidence which supports the preconceived ideas and denigrate (or ignore) ideas that run counter to it.

These practices are clearly laid bare in several recent Petitions to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) petitions asking the EPA to reconsider its “Endangerment Finding” that anthropogenic greenhouse gases endanger our public health and welfare. The basis of the various petitions is that the process is so flawed that the IPCC cannot be considered a reliable provider of the true state of climate science, something that the EPA heavily relies on the IPCC to be. The most thorough of these petitions contains over 200 pages of descriptions of IPCC problems and it a true eye-opener into how bad things had become.

There is no doubt that the 200+ pages would continue to swell further had the submission deadline not been so tight. New material is being revealed daily.

Just last week, the IPCC’s (and thus EPA’s) primary assertion that “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG [greenhouse gas] concentrations” was shown to be wrong. This argument isn’t included in the Petition.

This adds yet another problem to the growing list of errors in the IPCC WGI report, this one concerns Antarctic sea ice trends. While all the press is about the observed declines in Arctic sea ice extent in recent decades, little attention at all is paid to the fact that the sea ice extent in the Antarctic has been on the increase. No doubt the dearth of press coverage stems from the IPCC treatment of this topic.

In the IPCC AR4 the situation is described like this in Chapter 4, “Observations: Changes in Snow, Ice, and Frozen Ground” (p. 351): As an example, an updated version of the analysis done by Comiso (2003), spanning the period from November 1978 through December 2005, is shown in Figure 4.8. The annual mean ice extent anomalies are shown. There is a significant decreasing trend in arctic sea ice extent of –33 plus/minus 7.4 × 103 km2 yr–1 (equivalent to -2.7 plus/minus 0.6% per decade), whereas the Antarctic results show a small positive trend of 5.6 plus/minus 9.2 × 103 km2 yr-1 (0.47 plus/minus 0.8% per decade), which is not statistically significant. The uncertainties represent the 90% confidence interval around the trend estimate and the percentages are based on the 1978 to 2005 mean.

Notice that the IPCC states that the Antarctic increase in sea ice extent from November 1979-December 2005 is “not statistically significant” which seems to give them good reason to play it down. For instance, in the Chapter 4, Executive Summary (p. 339), the sea ice bullet reads: Satellite data indicate a continuation of the 2.7 plus/minus 0.6% per decade decline in annual mean arctic sea ice extent since 1978. The decline for summer extent is larger than for winter, with the summer minimum declining at a rate of 7.4 plus/minus 2.4% per decade since 1979. Other data indicate that the summer decline began around 1970. Similar observations in the Antarctic reveal larger interannual variability but no consistent trends.

Which in the AR4 Summary For Policymakers becomes two separate items:

Satellite data since 1978 show that annual average arctic sea ice extent has shrunk by 2.7 [2.1 to 3.3]% per decade, with larger decreases in summer of 7.4 [5.0 to 9.8]% per decade. These values are consistent with those reported in the TAR. {4.4}

and,

Antarctic sea ice extent continues to show interannual variability and localised changes but no statistically significant average trends, consistent with the lack of warming reflected in atmospheric temperatures averaged across the region. {3.2, 4.4}

“Continues to show no statistically significant average trends”? Continues?

This is what the IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR), released in 2001, had to say about Antarctic sea ice trends (Chapter 3, p. 125): Over the period 1979 to 1996, the Antarctic (Cavalieri et al., 1997; Parkinson et al., 1999) shows a weak increase of 1.3 plus/minus 0.2%/decade.

By anyone’s reckoning, that is a statistically significant increase.

In the IPCC TAR Chapter 3 Executive Summary is this bullet point:

Satellite data indicate that after a possible initial decrease in the mid-1970s, Antarctic sea-ice extent has stayed almost stable or even increased since 1978. So, the IPCC AR4’s contention that sea ice trends in Antarctica “continues” to show “no statistically significant average trends” contrasts with what it had concluded in the TAR.

Interestingly, the AR4 did not include references to any previous study that showed that Antarctic sea ice trends were increasing in a statistically significant way. The AR4 did not include the TAR references of either Cavalieri et al., 1997, or Parkinson et al., 1999. Nor did the IPCC AR4 include a reference to Zwally et al., 2002, which found that:

The derived 20 year trend in sea ice extent from the monthly deviations is 11.18 plus/minus 4.19 x 103 km2yr-1 or 0.98 plus/minus 0.37% (decade)-1 for the entire Antarctic sea ice cover, which is significantly positive. [emphasis added]

and (also from Zwally et al. 2002),

Also, a recent analysis of Antarctic sea ice trends for 1978-1996 by Watkins and Simmonds [2000] found significant increases in both Antarctic sea ice extent and ice area, similar to the results in this paper. [emphasis added]

Watkins and Simmonds (2000) was also not cited by the AR4.

So just what did the IPCC AR4 authors cite in support of their “assessment” that Antarctic sea ice extent was not increasing in a statistically significant manner? The answer is “an updated version of the analysis done by Comiso (2003).” And just what is “Comiso (2003)”? A book chapter!

Comiso, J.C., 2003: Large scale characteristics and variability of the global sea ice cover. In: Sea Ice - An Introduction to its Physics, Biology, Chemistry, and Geology [Thomas, D. and G.S. Dieckmann (eds.)]. Blackwell Science, Oxford, UK, pp. 112-142.

And the IPCC didn’t actually even use what was in the book chapter, but instead “an updated version” of the “analysis” that was in the book chapter.

And from this “updated” analysis, the IPCC reported that the increase in Antarctic sea ice extent was an insignificant 5.6 plus/minus 9.2 × 103 km2 yr–1 (0.47 plus/minus 0.8% per decade) - a value that was only about one-half of the increase reported in the peer-reviewed literature.

There are a few more things worth considering.

1) Josefino Comiso (the author of the above mentioned book chapter) was a contributing author of the IPCC AR4 Chapter 4, so the coordinating lead authors probably just turned directly to Comiso to provide an unpeer-reviewed update. (how convenient)

and 2) Comiso published a subsequent paper (along with Fumihiko Nishio) in 2008 that added only one additional year to the IPCC analysis (i.e. through 2006 instead of 2005), and once again found a statistically significant increase in Antarctic sea ice extent, with a value very similar to the value reported in the old TAR, that is:

When updated to 2006, the trends in ice extent and area in the Antarctic remains slight but positive at 0.9 plus/minus 0.2 and 1.7 plus/minus 0.3% per decade. These trends are, again, by anyone’s reckoning, statistically significant.

Figure 1. Trend in Antarctic ice extent, November 1978 through December 2006 (source: Comiso and Nishio, 2008) enlarged here.

And just in case further evidence is needed, and recent 2009 paper by Turner et al. (on which Comiso was a co-author), concluded that: Based on a new analysis of passive microwave satellite data, we demonstrate that the annual mean extent of Antarctic sea ice has increased at a statistically significant rate of 0.97% dec-1 since the late 1970s. This rate of increase is nearly twice as great as the value given in the AR4 (from its non-peer-reviewed source).

So, the peer reviewed literature, both extant at the time of the AR4 as well as published since the release of the AR4, shows that there has been a significant increase in the extent of sea ice around Antarctica since the time of the first satellite observations observed in the late 1970s. And yet the AR4 somehow “assessed” the evidence and determined not only that the increase was only half the rate established in the peer-reviewed literature, but also that it was statistically insignificant as well. And thus, the increase in sea ice in the Antarctic was downplayed in preference to highlighting the observed decline in sea ice in the Arctic. It is little wonder why, considering that the AR4 found that “Sea ice is projected to shrink in both the Arctic and Antarctic under all SRES scenarios.” See full report with references here.

Hold on to your wallets and purses.

A recent Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ruling declaring CO2 a harmful pollutant will generate hundreds of new regulations that will drive up the cost of living for financially strapped Americans while severely burdening small businesses and hampering U.S. competitiveness in the world marketplace.

The EPA ruling, which is designed to curb greenhouse gas emissions, “amounts to little more than a new tax on businesses and consumers,” says the National Taxpayers Union. “If EPA’s ‘endangerment finding’ is fully implemented, all kinds of products and services - from milk and paper towels to gasoline and electric bills - will cost more. And these new taxes are the last things Americans can afford right now as they attempt to crawl out of a recession.”

The EPA finding has been challenged by several industry groups, including the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute.
“This action poses a threat to every American family and business if it leads to regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. Such regulation would be intrusive, inefficient, and excessively costly. It could chill job growth and delay business expansion,” said Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute. “The Clean Air Act was meant to control traditional air pollution, not greenhouse gases that come from every vehicle, home, factory and farm in America,” he said.

The new finding has been denounced by members of both political parties, including Collin Peterson, the Democratic Chairman of the House Agriculture Committee from Minnesota’s seventh congressional district. “With or without congressional action, EPA will be free to regulate greenhouse gases, resulting in one of the largest and most bureaucratic nightmares that the U.S. economy and Americans have ever seen,” Peterson warned in a recent press announcement.

Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski from Alaska also condemned the ruling. “Businesses will be forced to cut jobs, if not close their doors for good. Domestic energy production will be severely restricted, increasing our dependence on foreign suppliers and threatening our national security. Housing will become less affordable, and consumer goods more expensive, as the impacts of the EPA’s regulations ripple and rake their way across our economy . . . The EPA’s endangerment finding may be intended to help protect our environment, but the regulations that inevitably follow will only endanger our economy,” she said.

Economy-killing ruling based on flawed science

The EPA ruling is based on the theory that rising CO2 levels, caused by human activity, amplify the earth’s normal greenhouse effect, which, in turn, causes global warming. But the hotly debated theory has come under increasing attack in recent months following the release of pilfered e-mails from Britain’s Climate Research Unit (CRU). The correspondence shows leading climate scientists conspiring to manipulate data, evade freedom of information requests, silence critics, and interfere with the publication of research challenging the man-caused warming theory.

Much of the manipulated data found its way into U.N. International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report published in 2007, a primary source of research used by the EPA to justify its endangerment finding. The IPCC report has been attacked in recent months by critics who accuse the organization of using non-peer-reviewed research to support its predictions of catastrophic climate change. In February, the IPCC was forced to retract statements in its assessment claiming that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 and 40 percent of the Amazon rainforest would very likely disappear if temperatures continued to rise.

The IPCC also had to back away from a statement in the report claiming that rising seas would endanger the 55 percent of the countryside in Netherlands that is below sea level. The embarrassing truth: only 20 percent of the Netherlands is below sea level. All three fraudulent claims were lifted from non-peer-reviewed magazine articles or studies supplied by writers or researchers linked to environmental pressure groups and the climate-change movement. Britain’s Sunday Telegraph documented at least 16 non-peer-reviewed articles produced by the preservationist group World Wildlife Fund - all used as sources in the IPPC report.

Ross McKitrick, a professor of economics at the University of Guleph in Ontario, Canada, says the U.N. needs to determine how much other research has been “likewise compromised.” He claimed in a FoxNews.com interview that the IPCC is “admitting what they did only because they were caught. The fact that so many IPCC authors kept silent all this time shows how monumental has been the breach of trust.”

In its independent assessment of the IPPC report, the Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) described the document as “flawed.” “The overall tone of AR4 is highly alarmist, with evidence that might point in other directions deliberately edited out or buried out of sight. It is not a reliable basis for making public policy.”

According to the NIPCC, most of the “2,500 scientists” who contributed to the assessment were never given a chance to review the conclusions contained in the final Summaries for Policymakers (SPM). Instead, the summaries were written by a small group of scientists and then revised and agreed to, line-by-line, by representatives of member governments prior to publication.

NIPCC claims the IPCC’s full report was revised after the executive summaries were written to make it agree with the political documents.

The state of Texas recently filed a petition with the EPA, asking it to reconsider its endangerment finding and accusing climate scientists affiliated with the IPCC of an “orchestrated effort to violate freedom of information laws, exclude scientific research, and manipulate temperature data.” In a Feb. 16 announcement, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said the agency had outsourced “the scientific basis for its greenhouse gas regulation to a scandal-plagued international organization that cannot be considered objective or trustworthy.”

CO2 a harmless trace gas

The EPA’s endangerment finding identifies six greenhouse gases - carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride - which it asserts are the “primary driver of climate change” and “threaten the public health and welfare of the American people.” But according to paleobotany research site Geocraft, total human contributions to greenhouse gases account for only about 0.28 percent of the greenhouse effect. Anthropogenic (man-mad) carbon dioxide comprises about 0.117 percent of this total, and man-made emissions of other gases (e.g. methane, nitrous oxide, and hydrofluorocarbons) contribute another 0.163 percent. Using a real-world comparison, 0.117 percent of a football field—the amount of CO2 in the air—would equal just over 4 inches.

As Geocraft explains: “At 385 parts per million, CO2 is a minor constituent of earth’s atmosphere - less than 4/100 of 1 percent of all gases present. Compared to earlier geologic times, earth’s current atmosphere is CO2-impoverished.

“Human activities contribute slightly to greenhouse gas concentrations through farming, manufacturing, power generation, and transportation. However, these emissions are so dwarfed in comparison to emissions from natural sources we can do nothing about, that even the most costly efforts to limit human emissions would have a very small - perhaps undetectable - effect on global climate.”

As physical science and mathematics professor Richard F. Yada writes in his 2009 paper, “Reality Check: CO2”: “The great lesson from geologic history is that carbon dioxide is critical to life. The move to label it as a pollutant is simply preposterous. The logical extension to that thought process is that the government has legally regulated life. The notion would be laughable if it were not so tragically real.”

IPCC uncertain of its own climate models

If the EPA had dug more deeply into IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, it would have found this stunning admission in the section, “Working Group 1: The Physical Science Basis: IPCC 8.6.4”:

“A number of diagnostic tests have been proposed since the TAR [Third Assessment Report] (see Section 8.6.3), but few of them have been applied to a majority of the models currently in use. Moreover, it is not yet clear which tests are critical for constraining future projections. Consequently, a set of model metrics that might be used to narrow the range of plausible climate change feedbacks and climate sensitivity has yet to be developed.”

In plain English, the IPCC is admitting it doesn’t know which metrics to employ in its models to test their reliability. And it is not sure how high or low temperatures will be in the future, because the models it relies on are incapable of calculating climate sensitivity to CO2.

In short, the incessant fear-mongering about rising CO2 emissions – and the EPA’s decision to declare an atmospheric plant nutrient dangerous – is based on unrealistic and unproven climate models whose predictive accuracy is questionable, if not completely unsound.

The hare-brained anti-CO2 schemes advocated by overwrought global warming alarmists would border on theatrical if it were not for the clear and present danger they pose to economic development and human advancement.

As MIT professor of meteorology Richard Lindzen opines: “Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age.”

The big picture: 65 million years of temperature swings

David Lappi is a geologist from Alaska who has sent in a set of beautiful graphs - including an especially prosaic one of the last 10,000 years in Greenland - that he put together himself.

If you wonder where today’s temperature fits in with the grand scheme of time on Earth since the dinosaurs were wiped out, here’s the history. We start with the whole 65 million years, then zoom in, and zoom in again to the last 12,000 from both ends of the world. What’s obvious is that in terms of homo sapiens history, things are warm now (because we’re not in an ice age). But, in terms of homo sapiens civilization, things are cooler than usual, and appear to be cooling.

Then again, since T-rex & Co. vanished, it’s been one long slide down the thermometer, and our current “record heatwave” is far cooler than normal. The dinosaurs would have scoffed at us: “What? You think this is warm?”

With so much volatility in the graphs, anyone could play “pick a trend” and depending on which dot you start from, you can get any trend you want.

Greenland ice core temperatures last 10,000 years, enlarged here

This does not look like dangerous global warming. In fact the big picture looks more like long term cooling. For the full Guest post report see here.

----------------------

Climate Panel Vows New Review
By Jeffrey Ball, WSJ

The world’s leading organization on climate change says it is working on a strategy to better police the experts who produce its high-profile reports, to try to ensure they adhere to rigorous scientific standards. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change needs to “leave no stone unturned to come up with a set of measures so this can be ensured,” Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the United Nations-sponsored organization, said.
Separately, the Met Office, a U.K. agency that does prominent weather and climate research, said it was proposing a new effort to improve temperature measurement.

The move by Mr. Pachauri and other IPCC leaders to step up oversight and enforcement of the panel’s existing policies follows a string of revelations that have prompted criticism of the organization, which won a 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for its report that year concluding that climate change is “unequivocal” and is “very likely” caused by human activity."We certainly don’t feel comfortable with the loss of even one iota of trust,” Mr. Pachauri said. “We are grappling with this issue and we’ll come up with some measures.”

Chief among the revelations was that the IPCC’s 2007 report, which runs to about 3,000 pages, erroneously projected that Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035. “That’s a classic case that should have got caught,” Mr. Pachauri said. “That one single instance is enough of a lesson that we do something to make sure it doesn’t recur.”

As the IPCC moves forward with its review, the Met Office, a U.K. government meteorological agency and research center, announced a new planned effort to improve the measurement of the earth’s temperatures - data it said is necessary to “strengthen decisions on adapting to climate change.”
The Met Office, whose research is often cited by the IPCC, said in a statement that a more-robust set of data on surface temperatures around the globe will provide a clearer picture of how the planet’s climate is changing.

Government officials in many countries have asked for detailed information as they mull whether, and how, to implement policies designed to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that the IPCC says are contributing to climate change. Much of climate science focuses on making broad projections about how increased greenhouse-gas emissions might change the global average temperature.

But even as political bids to curb emissions stumble - a big U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen in December ended without agreement on mandatory steps - policy makers want to better understand how climate change might affect temperature extremes and particular regions. That, the Met Office said, will require more-granular temperature data. Yhe new effort “will augment, not replace,” current temperature data, the Met Office said. It will provide more-frequent temperature readings. And the information will be “fully peer reviewed and open to scrutiny,” the Met Office noted.

The transparency of climate-science data has come into question in the wake of the release late last year of more than 1,000 emails from the computers of another U.K. scientific center, the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Those emails appeared to show scientists there trying to squelch the views of others who questioned their research pointing to a significant human influence on the climate. The university has launched an investigation.

The changes at the IPCC will focus less on rolling out new policies than on enforcing those already in effect, Mr. Pachauri said. Among them: extensive checks on the research that is to be cited in IPCC reports. In addition, some IPCC leaders said, the organization needs better procedures to correct any errors in its reports once they are found. “I hope we’ll be able to do something by which we can infuse confidence in our audience and assure them that the IPCC takes this issue very seriously,” Mr. Pachauri said.

Opinion by Anthony Watts

There has never been a time at WUWT that I’ve used the word “slimy” in a headline. This is a special case. I thought of about a half dozen words I could have used and finally decided on this one. I chose it because of precedence in a similar situation where Steve McIntyre wrote his rebuttal to a similar piece of amateur journalism entitled Slimed by Bagpuss the Cat Reporter.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is the Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University

Last week, the Guardian invited me to participate in their new online story forum. They were seeking the input from climate sceptics on issues they were writing about. They especially wanted my input. I said I’d consider it, but was a bit hesitant given the Guardian’s reporting history. But, after some discussion with one of the reporters, it seemed like a genuine attempt at outreach. I suggested that if they really wanted to make a gesture that would make people take notice, they should consider banning the use of the word “denier” from climate discourse in their newspaper. Nobody I know of in the sceptic community denies that the earth has gotten warmer in the past century. I surely don’t. But we do question the measured magnitude, the cause, and the scientific methods.

Now, any progress that has been made in outreach by the Guardian has been dashed by the most despicably stupid newspaper article I’ve ever seen about climate skeptics. The Guardian for some reason thought it would be a good idea to print it while at the same time trying to reach across the aisle to climate skeptics for ideas. Needless to say, they’ve horribly botched that gesture with the printing of this article.

Here’s the headline and link to the Guardian article:

Climate sceptics are recycled critics of controls on tobacco and acid rain

It’s full of the kind of angry, baseless, stereotypical innuendo I’d expect Joe Romm to write. Instead, the writer is Jeffrey D Sachs. who is professor of economics and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, home to NASA GISS.

And it’s not just the Guardian. Apparently this article has been shopped around. It made it into The National in Abu Dhabi which you can read here. Apparently the article from Columbia’s Sachs was distributed by an outfit called The Project Syndicate.

A check of their website show the author list, some of the stories they are pushing to media, and they seem to be rather vague about where their money comes from. In their contact and support page all they offer is a PO box for their HQ in Prague:

Project Syndicate PO Box 130 120 00 Prague 2 Czech Republic

So much for transparency.

Back to the article. After reading it, one can see that Sachs is simply repeating the same sort of drivel we get from trolls every day on climate science discussions. Baseless accusations of being involved with deep pockets, connections to tobacco, denial of links to cancer, and other assorted decades old slimy talking points that have nothing to do with the real issue at hand: scientific integrity in climate science.

It is clear that professor Sachs didn’t do any original research for this article, he simply repeated these same slimy talking points we see being pushed by internet trolls and NGO’s like Greenpeace. He provided no basis for the claims, only the innuendo. It’s a pathetic job of journalism. It’s doubly pathetic that the Guardian allowed this to be printed at a time when they were reaching out to skeptics.

It seems incomprehensible to Sachs and others like him that people like myself, Steve McIntyre, Jeff Id, Joe D’Aleo, John Coleman, and others who write about climate science issues might have original thoughts and do original research of our own. It seems impossible to him that an “army of Davids”, such as the readers and contributors to CA and WUWT, could shake the money bloated foundations of climate science today with daily blog posts, FOI requests, and commentary. No it had to be big money funding these skeptics somewhere.

Newsflash: It’s worse than you thought. It’s a growing revolution of like minded people worldwide that want to see the climate science done right and without the huge monied interests it has fallen prey to.. Tobacco, big oil, and other assorted contrived boogeymen haven’t anything to do with skeptics that question CRU, GISS, NOAA, etc.on these pages and the pages of other blogs.

Oh sure they’ll say “but you went to the Heartland convention, and they took money from Exxon once, they defended smokers rights, that makes you complicit.” Bull. I’ve made my objections loudly known to Heartland on these issues, but the fact is that no other organizations stepped up to help skeptics with a conference to exchange information. While people like Sachs were denouncing “deniers”, and Al Gore was leading multimillion dollar media campaigns saying we were “flat earthers” and “moon landing deniers”, no scientific organizations were stepping forward to ask the tough questions, or to even help regular people like you and me who were asking them. Had any such scientific organization had the courage, you can bet that skeptics would have flocked there. Instead these organizations all got on the consensus bandwagon.

The claims made that skeptics are connected to tobacco companies is ludicrous. It is especially ludicrous in my case.

So here’s my challenge to Professor Sachs. Give me ten minutes in a room with you. That’s all I need. I’ll tell you about my story related to tobacco. I’ll tell you how secondhand smoke most likely contributed to my profound hearing loss through a series of badly treated ear infections as a child, I’ll tell you about my efforts to get my parents to stop smoking , and then, I’ll tell you how I watched both of my parents die of tobacco related disease. I’ll tell you what I think of tobacco products and companies. I’ll tell you to your face. I promise you it won’t be pretty, I promise you that you’ll feel my pain caused by tobacco.

Finally, I’ll tell you what I think of you for writing this crap you market as journalism without asking leading skeptics any questions, but instead relying on this slimy innuendo that’s been repeated for years.

Professor Sachs, contact me by leaving a comment if you have personal integrity enough to hear it. Read more and see comments here.

We are well into 2010, and depending on how you count, the decade of the 2000’s, the “oughts” is over. This is a time when climate scientists have been looking back over the decade in order to compare it to previous decades. We hear from some of these scientists that this decade was the warmest ever, even warmer than the 1990s. This fact was proclaimed happily at the Copenhagen conference in December, and then it is often repeated by the media and scientists who attended the meeting.

Also, the year 2009 is cited as being one of the top 10 warmest years ever. Additionally, other studies cite the increase in the ratio of record warm days to cold days during the decade points to a human contribution. Thus, the relative warmth of the “oughts” is cited in and of itself as proof of the human impact on climate.

Aside from the fact that these statements are making these observations only within the context of the instrumental record since 1850, these proclamations are attempting to establish the correlation (warmth to increases in human numbers and activities) as a cause. This is something that we caution against in undergraduate statistics classes.

Often, these climatologists claim that it is highly unlikely from a statistical standpoint that the warmest years in a time series should be clustered at one end of the record or time series . A study showed this to be the case whether you impose long or short term variations on the record and generate a random series from these data. This is true, but only if you assume that there is no general trend over the entire length of the time series.

It is relatively easy to demonstrate that one can construct a “time series” in which the “warmest” years are clustered at the end of the series without invoking a human cause. This “time series” will even look similar to the instrumental record. Keep in mind that this demonstration is purely linear (does not include non-linearity, which would be a part of any observed or natural time series).

A study by Suhler and O’Brien postulated that most natural variations in climate occur on a time-scale of close to 2 to the nth power. While external climate forcing and non-linearity may make this assumption difficult to show conclusively, the formula itself provides us with the easy way to demonstrate that a simple “time series” can be constructed such that the “warmest” years occur late in the time series (figure 1 top). Here we take n = 3, 6, and 8, representing cycles of 8, 64, and 256 years, respectively, and simply add them. It is even possible to demonstrate that the latest “decade” is warmer than the previous one. Note the similarity to the observed record. The technique is similar to that used by Klyshtorin and Lybushkin (2007).

Additionally, such a record should produce a higher ratio of warm “days” and record warm “days” as compared to cold “days” if you examine the distribution of temperatures in the latest 30 years in figure 1 as compared to the previous 30 years. Again, this is regardless of the causation of the variations in figure 1.

Finally, it is worth reminding the reader that the temperature changes which occurred during the 20th century were not inconsistent with inferred changes during the last two millennia. An examination of the 20th century temperature records showed approximately a 1 degree Fahrenheit temperature rise overall, but with two distinct periods of temperature increases broken by a period of temperature decreases between 1940 and the late 1970s.

Figure 2. Global temperature anomaly reconstructions for the last 2000 years . Figure provided courtesy of Dr. Roy Spencer.

During both of these 20th century periods of global temperature increase, the total rise for each was about 0.5 degrees Fahrenheit or an average increase of about 0.2 degrees rise decade. Temperatures then reached a peak in the 1998-2000 time frame and have since leveled off, or even begun to fall. This could be due to natural variations such as a quieter sun, and changes occurring in the Pacific Ocean temperatures. This temperature trend is projected to continue for about 5 - 20 years by reputable scientists, even some supporters of anthropogenic global warming.

So while it is fashionable to review the best and the worst of the decade that just ended (or will end, again depending on your count), the relative warmth of the “oughts” is not proof that humans are altering the climate.

See full post with the references here.

In Trek to Northern Pole of Inaccessibility called off because of thin ice by Randy Boswell, Canwest News Service, February 12, 2010 we read:

“Citing the “perilous” frailty of the polar ice cap, a British team’s bid to trek from the edge of Arctic Canada to the Northern Pole of Inaccessibility - the most remote place in the Arctic Ocean - has been scuttled just days ahead of the planned departure from Nunavut’s Ellef Ringnes Island. Warned by Environment Canada that the High Arctic is experiencing the “worst conditions” for winter ice cover in decades, the leader of the proposed 1,100-kilometre journey said making the attempt would be “foolhardy” and “endanger lives unnecessarily.”

It’s the third time adventurer Jim McNeill has been thwarted in his quest to complete what’s been called exploration’s “last true world first” - a slog to the spot in the Arctic Ocean that lies the greatest distance from any point of land. In 2003, a bout of flesh-eating disease in his ankle ended the trip. In 2006, the attempt was aborted due to disintegrating ice and equipment problems. And the latest cancellation follows last week’s release of a landmark Canadian study that highlighted unprecedented expanses of open water in the polar sea and predicted ice-free summers in the central Arctic Ocean much sooner than previously forecast.” The story was carried in numerous papers includingt the Star Phoenix.

In actual fact the summer ice has recovered 26% from its 2007 minimum (below and enlarged here).

Professor Brian Pratt of the University of Saskatchewan posts in the Star Phoenix a rebuttal.

SP parroting nonsense
By Brian Pratt, The StarPhoenix, February 12, 2010
Re: Arctic sea ice vanishing faster than expected (SP, Feb. 6).

Brian Pratt
Saskatoon

Anthony Watts adds the punctuation mark with this image with likely path below, enlarged here.

Hat tip to Susan for the story.

Our old friend Jo Abbess BSc is back. And she’s got some searching, pertinent questions which could put paid to my AGW-denying antics once and for all!

Dear James,

Inquisitively yours,

Now the only reasons I’m rising to Jo’s bait are a) because I know it will give you all so much pleasure and b) because of what it says about the delusions of the Warmist lobby. They really do seem to imagine, bless, that the only reason anyone could possibly have for being sceptical about AGW is if they were being bribed by sinister business concerns (Big Oil, etc) or had some similar vested interests.

The Independent On Sunday had another feeble attempt at resurrecting this myth at the weekend. But the sad truth (sad, that is, for those of us who really wouldn’t mind being funded by Exxon and wouldn’t feel compromised one bit) is that all the big money has long since migrated to the other side. For Warmists, there are fortunes to be made in lavish grant funding, carbon trading, government subsidised green non-jobs, and so on. For us sceptics there’s little more than the satisfaction of having right and truth on our side.

As Richard North points out, the amount Exxon spent over 10 years funding sceptics is as nothing to the quantities of public money which has been splurged on funding climate change alarmism:

Over ten years, the company paid a grand total of $23 million to sceptics (by no means the larger part of which was devoted to climate change) less than a thousandth of what the US government has put in, and less than one five-thousandth of the value of carbon trading in just the single year of 2008.

Against that, over the last 20 years, by the end of fiscal year 2009, the US government had poured in $32 billion for climate research. In 1989, the first specific US climate-related agency was created with an annual budget of $134 million. Today in various forms the funding has leapt to over $7 billion per annum, around 50 fold higher.

That, of course, is only the US picture - and government funding. To that, one must add the hundreds of millions, if not billions, poured in by the charitable foundations, and the massive funding from industry - much of which ends up in the pockets of advocacy groups such as the WWF.

Then, albeit on a smaller scale, we have other nations around the world adding to the funds. In the UK we have seen that the Met Office has been given 243 million pounds of taxpayers’ money on “climate research”, and that represents just the tip of the iceberg.

Today, the good Dr North has yet another shocking story about taxpayers’ money being squandered on global warming drivel. Turns out that man in charge of discredited Working Group II section (yep: the one which responsible for Glaciergate, Amazongate and Africagate) of the risibly flawed Fourth IPCC assessment report was paid over one third of a million quid for supervising this piece of tosh. His name is Professor Martin Parry.

Dr North reports:

Through his own personal consultancy, Martin Parry Associates, he was paid 330,187 pounds by Defra, for the part-time post of: “Acting as Co-chair of Working group II at meetings of IPCC WG II and associated groups.”

Additionally, his consultancy was paid 10,690 pounds, again by Defra to “assess the global impact of climate change on world food supply and global food security” - the very issue in which Parry is supposedly expert.

That was, presumably, separate from the contract in the financial year 2002/2003 for a study on “Global Impacts of Climate Change on Food Security”. For that, Parry Associates were paid 64,020 pounds. That was the year, incidentally, that the Global Atmosphere Division of Defra supported 35 research contracts on climate change, in 21 different establishments, at a total of 12 million pounds.

These sums, however, are only a small part of the total which went into preparing the WGII report. Defra also paid 1,436,162 to “provide the scientific and administrative Technical Support Unit (TSU) for Working Group II (WGII) on Impacts and Adaptation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and to provide support for the chair of WGII, Professor Martin Parry and the preparation of the IPCC AR4 Synthesis report,” paid via the UK Met Office.

An entirely separate sum of 1,144,738 was awarded to Working Group II Technical Support Unit under the amorphous title “An international commitment to provide technical support on climate change,” also paid to the Met Office.

This means that the scientists and experts who “volunteered their time” on WGII were paid to the tune of nearly 3 million (2,921,777) by British taxpayers alone - which does not of course include the sums paid by other nations and the production costs, or the payments by the IPCC directly.

Let me run that one by you again, just in case the full horror didn’t sink in properly. YOU paid 3,000,000 pounds of your hard-earned dosh in order to fund a farrago of nonsense concocted in order to justify still more of your money being spent in the future to deal with a crisis which only exists in the imaginations of corrupt scientists, EU apparatchiks, One-World-governmenters, carbon-traders, third world kleptocrats and hysterical eco-loons.

Just for your amusement, here’s Professor Parry two years ago, boasting on the BBC website about the, er, robust integrity of the IPCC review process.

Several thousand scientists are asked to review the authors’ drafts, at two different stages; and there are also two stages of review by governments. The purpose of the review is to ensure that the assessments are a fair reflection of the views of the whole scientific community, not just of the authors themselves. Each chapter has two review editors to ensure that reviews are considered and responded to appropriately. The assessments are therefore stuffed with references regarding one tendency suggested by some sets of data, and other tendencies suggested by others.

It is a summary of what we know and - just as importantly - what we do not know.

Earlier he claims:

This is why they err, if anything, on the side of conservatism and have been criticised for not exploring the outer edges of knowledge. And if you want to make yourself even more depressed have a guess where he is now.