Update: See Roy Spencer discuss the EPA run amuk on John Stossel’s show.

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There has been a stunning disconnect involving land temperatures globally and CO2, whether man-made or naturally sourced.  The Oceans continue to warm, while the surface record flatlines.

Check out the Hadley CRU World temperature record over the past 15 years. 

The Recent Temperature and CO2 Disconnect

It is obvious that the surface records are NOT going up - they are basically in a 0.2C flatline, while Sea Surface temperatures are still somewhat rising, as you see below; (both with an obvious Mt. Pinatubo signal).

This is totally expected behavior in a Ewing-Donn oriented system, as the recently enhanced albedo effects first affect land and only considerably later, do the oceans overcome their heat content lag.

Even going back ten centuries, there have been total disconnects between temperature and the CO2 impact, or lack thereof.  From 1000AD to 1800, over a period of relatively stable CO2 values that bounced around the 280ppm level, temperatures plummeted in the Little Ice Age (LIA) and then rebounded over a century later.  CO2 values neither led nor followed the temperature declines and recoveries.  Now we have CO2 ranges that almost double the maxima reached in the past 4 interglacial periods (over 450,000 years), and temperatures remaining relatively stable for most of the last 10K year span.  CO2 seems to have had little impact in EITHER direction on the observed temperatures over that 10k year period.  Neither have sunspots, for that matter, nor their lack, and their signal is largely absent from the temperature record, except for the LIA Maunder Minimum of the 16-1700s, and the Dalton to a lesser extent.

There have been times that CO2 direction paralleled temperature trends, but coincidence is not causation, and the short term uncoupling of temperature from a previous parallel growth assumption has now become totally obvious!

Now here’s a different way of seeing 2011, in that for the recent term, it has been the third coldest of the last 15!  2012 is starting out even lower, and will likely be the winner in the “coldest” of the now 16 year timeframe.

The decided 15 year flatline in temperatures is very evident, even as CO2 has continued to increase regularly from 1997’s 364 ppm to today’s 392 ppm.  Here’s the up-to-date Mauna Loa CO2 record:

If CO2 is to be considered a major driver of temperatures, it is doing a counterintuitive dance around the numbers.  Now 15 years should not be relied upon for any trend, but the short term uncoupling of CO2 from temperature is evidence that far greater complexities are at hand and to be found in the climate sphere given appropriate research and analysis.  Albedo effects from an open Arctic, melted by warming oceans streaming into the Arctic basin, and a decided La Nina are also among the “Usual Suspects.”

In today’s report

■ Arctic Sea Ice on the rise again, presently in the range of normal levels
■ Antarctic Sea Ice is at slightly above normal levels
■ Why is early satellite data for Arctic and Antarctic Ice extent referenced in the first IPCC report missing from today’s data?
■ Is revisionism going on with the date of the famous USS Skate photo in the Arctic?
■ Bonus - it seems NOAA is taking Arctic soot seriously

First the Arctic from NSIDC:



After being out of the ±2 STD area since before peak melt last year, Arctic extent has spent most of March in near normal territory. After what looked like a maximum earlier this month, it was false peak, and ice is on the rise again.

NORSEX SSM/I shows the current value within ±1 STD

A caution, as we saw in 2010, extent hugged the normal line for quite awhile, and that didn’t translate into a reduced or normal summer melt. So, forecasting based on this peak might not yield any skillful ice minimum forecasts.

Antarctic Sea Ice is at slightly above normal levels, as it has been for some time:

Why is early satellite data for Arctic and Antarctic Ice extent referenced in the first IPCC report missing from today’s data?

In a post last week, Steve Goddard pointed out that in the original IPCC FAR in 1990, there was an interesting graph of satellite derived Arctic sea ice extent:

This is from page 224 of IPCC FAR WG1 which you can download from the IPCC here

And here is figure 7.20 (a) magnified:

The IPCC descriptive text for these figures reads:

Sea-ice conditions are now reported regularly in marine synoptic observations, as well as by special reconnaissance flights, and coastal radar. Especially importantly, satellite observations have been used to map sea-ice extent routinely since the early 1970s. The American Navy Joint Ice Center has produced weekly charts which have been digitised by NOAA. These data are summarized in Figure 7.20 which is based on analyses carried out on a 1° latitude x 2.5° longitude grid. Sea-ice is defined to be present when its concentration exceeds 10% (Ropelewski, 1983). Since about 1976 the areal extent of sea-ice in the Northern Hemisphere has varied about a constant climatological level but in 1972-1975 sea-ice extent was significantly less. In the Southern Hemisphere since about 1981, sea-ice extent has also varied about a constant level. Between 1973 and 1980 there were periods of several years when Southern Hemisphere sea-ice extent was either appreciably more than or less than that typical in the 1980s.

I find it interesting and perhaps somewhat troubling that pre-1979 satellite derived sea ice data was good enough to include in the first IPCC report in 1990, but for some reason not included in the current satellite derived sea ice data which all seems to start in 1979:

Since the extent variation anomalies in 1979 seem to match with both data sets at ~ +1 million sq km, it would seem they are compatible. Since I’m unable to find the data that the IPCC FAR WG1 report references so that I can plot it along with current data, I’ve resorted to a graphical splice to show what the two data sets together might look like.

I’ve cropped and scaled the IPCC FAR WG1 Figure (a) to match the UUIC Cryosphere Today Arctic extent anomaly graph so that the scales match, and extended the base canvas to give the extra room for the extended timeline:

Click here to enlarge.

Gosh, all of the sudden it looks cyclic rather than linear, doesn’t it?

Read more here

Let’s clarify a few things on another of Anthony’s excellent posts, like this one ‘Hey Hansen! Where’s the Beef !?‘ -

It’s lengthy, but gives the view of a person who was there on the ground, covering climate science and global warming in the late 1980s - years before the AGW mania took off.

I worked as a journalist in the late 1980s in Colorado, home state of Senator Tim Wirth. I had interviewed him several times on other topics. As part of my general assignment beat, I also covered science, climate and weather, regularly at NOAA, NCAR and other federal science agencies headquarted in Colorado.

I clearly remember the tone of articles on global warming during the 1980s. Most of the concern came out of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) on the ozone layer. By the way, this was during the new era of climate scientists working with high-grade graphic computer modelling.

The problem with NCAR’s interpretation on the ozone fluctuations were that some, like Hanson, took an immediate ideological tone to explain the ozone shifts - not once mentioning the Sun or the Interplanetary Magnetic Field effect on Earth’s ozone layers. For some reason, there was a resistance to even mentioning the Sun’s effects on earth by these new climate scientists getting jobs at the science agencies. It was odd I thought.

When news editors assigned stories on the climate back then it was usually spurred by press releases out of places like NCAR, NWS, NOAA, etc., which usually featured a talk, lecture, or findings that were sent to the media. Global warming, in the mid-to-late 1980s was not the AGW ideological era that it is today.

In fact, climate scientists were not in any agreement if the earth was ‘warming’ in the 1980s - though it was true. Many scientists would roll their eyes at the mention of ‘global warming’ but many changed their tune in the 1990s just as major federal dollars were being directed to ‘man-made’ global warming’ - which I continue to remind everyone cannot ever happen on Earth due to the laws of thermodynamics. The Earth can never become a greenhouse according to the laws of physics.

But I digress - in short, when I wrote pieces on the climate, I refused to write on the theory that chlorofluorocarbons were the sole cause of worldwide warming because that had never been proved. Now, though there was evidence that the use of aerosols were clearly evident in the upper atmosphere; the data did not support that this was the cause of the fear-mongering on ozone holes which was all the rage in the climate community of the late 1980s and 1990s.

NCAR had modeled on the theory that aerosols were the cause, but not the Sun, which again, I found odd, since the only major source of radiation that can only affect the opening and closings and sizes of the Earth’s ozones IS the Sun.

There is no other source of radiation that can effectively destroy the earth’s ozone layer. But what was curious (and unbelievable) is that there were obvious determined efforts (in the mid-to-late 1980s) to blame mankind for something it could not do on a planetary level - and that is to change the climate.

Only the Sun can do that.

What I noticed about Sen. Wirth and Hansen back in the late 1980s, is that there was a obvious concerted effort within the emergence of baby boomer management and personnel into climate science on the federal level; that they were pushing ideology as policy. This was a prepatory assault that was planned out.

When Al Gore rose to the vice-presidency by 1993 - Wirth and Hansen were already well out in front of the ‘man-made’ global warming pack - extending the ‘man-made’ ideology to other federal agencies and the university-level climate community - with federal dollars.

Follow the money pushing the ideological AGW lie. If one examines climate science funding from 1986 to 1996 and then from 1996 to the present - you may find some amazing numbers.

Incredible amounts - increasing yearly and wasted on every bigger and more expensive computers to run models. Careerists who cannot forecast seasonal weather were making things up (and began to alter weather data on purpose) while spending lavishly on computers pushing the AGW ideology - all at the public’s great expense.

But the media was not on board. Most journalists are ignorant of climate and weather science. I was fortunate in that I was not, so my editors passed on to me the great amount of work - and I was busy enough as it was a police reporter as it was! Since my beat included covering the climate science community in the heart of it in Colorado, I was well-attuned to how events were shaping up by 1989.

Since the mid-1980s, what I saw were articles like the one Anthony posted from 1986 were becoming more common. What I observed as professional reporter was that the ozone-layer press releases from NOAA and NCAR and other climate centers were beginning to use the same talking points in their different releases to news desks. Sometimes, these went out on the wire which were then placed into newspapers across the country without the resources to assign reporters to cover the climate.

I did not have that problem since this was part of my beat. In interviews with the particular scientists (including Hansen) what I observed was that they were heavy on the ideology, yet not sure if it was strong enough because the global weather data in the late 1980s did not strongly support their case that the world was warming because of man.

Still, by 1989, the AGW science did not make sense to me in light that it would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Which I remind everyone - remains in effect to this very day.

Anyhow, it did not seem to matter to Wirth’s office, Hansen, or the growing careerists at NCAR and NOAA; because whomever was pushing ‘man-made global warming’ on the United States, were also doing it at the international level too.

My view was that it was a conspiracy right from the start to bamboozle the world on the lie of anthropogenic global warming sandbagging much of the mainstream media, the markets and the educational system to not believe their own eyes and ears.

Events have since proven that I was right.

All this - while AGW ideologists reaped untold profits convincing populations that carbon (the very stuff we are made of) is bad and so we all have to pay for carbon to a global mafia.

In short, the careerist climate AGW scientists and their political insiders conspired to convince the world that humans had to pay dearly for exhaling the carbon gases that the natural world and our trees inhales to flourish.

Carbon is natural to Earth. It is driven by the Sun’s activity. Carbon lags far, far behind temperature (also driven by the Sun) and carbon is not - and never has been - a threat to the Earth.

Why?

Because the laws of thermodynamics and physics that govern our system says so.

Vote in FOX News poll at www.GerriWillis.com: 

Is the ‘green’ industry doing more harm than good?

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Something extraordinary is happening in the great Climate Wars. I had a taste of it just the other day on an LBC talk show. The producer had only booked me in for a ten-minute slot, in case the listeners weren’t interested in my boring new book about that tediously hackneyed subject Man Made Global Warming. But the switchboards were jammed and the station ended up keeping me in for a full hour to reply to all the calls.

There was one big problem though: “We can hardly find ANYONE who disagrees with you,” whispered the show’s host, Julia Hartley-Brewer. This was true. By the end, things had got so desperate that I found myself accidentally picking fights with callers who were on my side. An easy mistake to make for someone on my (sceptical) side of the debate: we card-carrying Satanic “deniers” are so used to being vilified at every turn it really feels kind of weird suddenly to be in tune with the popular mood.

And I’m not the only one to have noticed. A climate sceptical blogger called Pointman has written a superb post on the subject(which is well worth reading in full). The enemy - that’s the alarmists who’ve been making most of the running in the last two decades - is in serious disarray. As Pointman puts it: “All reason has fled. There’s a real feeling of April 1945, Berlin, der Fuhrerbunker and its mad occupants, barking unrealistic orders down phones and moving long ago destroyed units around on maps, as if it really meant something.”

It’s a good point and an accurate analogy. The kind of analogy, unfortunately, which will undoubtedly have the usual greenie/lefty suspects wheeling out their favourite Godwin’s Law defence: ie if you ever mention the Nazis it invalidates you argument because, er, it does because someone called Godwin made a “law” saying it does.....

Yup, I’m weariedly familiar with the Godwin’s law weasel-out. Just as I’m familiar with: the “Appeal to Authority” (eg “the Royal Society/the National Academy of Sciences says”; “98 per cent of the world’s climate scientists agree....."); the crude ad hom: ("James Delingpole is a C***”; “James Delingpole is in the pay of Big Koch”, etc); the straw man ("How can you deny climate change is happening when four of the ten hottest years happened this decade?"). The Warmists use them all the time.

What all these tricks have in common is this: they’re not arguments; they don’t address any of the points we sceptics (or “realists” as we prefer to term ourselves) painstakingly make in article after article, blog after blog; they’re simply rhetorical tropes designed to confuse, obfuscate, distract, wear down, bruise, irritate, hurt, clog up the comments section and give the illusion of moral and intellectual victory. Above all, though, their purpose is to distract from what you might call the climate alarmists’ Polar Bear In The Room: the world stopped warming in 1998, even as CO2 emissions continued to rise; not only that but none of the computer modelers’ doomsday “projections” of runaway climate catastrophe have been even closely matched by observed real world data.

Or, if you prefer to hear this truth served up with world-weary scientific uber-authority, here’s MIT atmospheric physicist Professor Richard Lindzen addressing the House of Commons in February: “Perhaps we should stop accepting the term ‘skeptic’ because ‘skepticism’ implies doubts about a plausible proposition. Current global warming alarm hardly represents a plausible proposition. Twenty years of repetition and escalation of claims does not make it more plausible. Quite the contrary, the failure to improve the cause over 20 years makes the case even less plausible, as does the evidence from Climategate and other instances of overt cheating.”

Ouch!

In the past - till very recently in fact - the powerful, hugely well-funded alarmist lobby has been able to skate over these inconvenient truths by relying on the propaganda techniques outlined above, as well as on the complicity of the political establishment. Not even the Climategate revelations were quite enough to derail the global warming alarmist gravy train.

So what has changed now? One factor, undoubtedly, has been the fall-out from Fakegate or Gleickgate - the failed attempt by prominent environmental activist Peter Gleick to smear the Heartland Institute (the US think tank best known for its annual climate sceptics’ conference) using stolen or faked documents. The attempted smear was bad enough (imagine the media outrage if climate realists had tried something similar!) but where the stunt really backfired was as a consequence of its handling by left-liberal news organisations like the Guardian, the BBC and the New York Times.

All of them leapt into report the story gleefully without bothering to check whether or not it was true. And when evidence began to emerge that it wasn’t true, they compounded their error by seeking to defend Gleick’s duplicity and criminal actions regardless. Numerous left-liberal commentators argued that Gleick was in fact a hero whose crime was entirely justified in seeking to expose the manifest evils of this sinister, right-wing think tank.

Problem was, even this argument wasn’t borne out the facts. As far as environmental think tanks go, Heartland is little more than a Mom & Pop operation, run on the relative shoestring budget of $4.7 million (only a proportion of which goes towards “climate change” issues). Now compare this with the budgets of left-leaning environmentalist pressure groups such as the Sierra Club ($84.8 million), Natural Resources Defense Council ($97 million), or the World Wildlife Fund ($177.7 million). And that’s before you take into account US government spending on climate change issues, which according to calculations by blogger Jo Nova exceeds spending on sceptical science by 3500 to one.

During the last two decades global warming alarmist propaganda has depended on Hitler’s Big Lie principle (whoops: Godwin’s Law. So shoot me). But that principle, as first Hitler discovered and now the AGW lobby is discovering too, is flawed. In fact there are only so many times you can tell a whopping great lie (be it on the solidity of AGW theory or that climate sceptics are lavishly funded by Big Oil) before the people see through it. And once the people discover that they have been consistently lied to (and cheated out of a great deal of money to boot) they don’t like it one bit.

Coming soon - indeed it has already started - is the mother of all backlashes against the AGW alarmism industry. It will happen on lines predicted over a century ago by Gustave Le Bon in his seminal 1895 work, The Crowd.

Le Bon (whose analysis of crowd mentality influenced Freud, Hitler and Mussolini) argued that the secret of demagoguery was to repeat an idea over and over again in order to create a “contagion” which would infect the popular mind and hold the culture in its grip. This is what, until very recently, happened with the global warming religion.

But this contagion can only keep going, Le Bon argues, so long as those spreading it possess “prestige” in the eyes of the mob. Once that “prestige” is lost, the crowd turns brutally against those seers and experts and leaders in whom it once had such faith. Suddenly it sees them for the liars and cheats and manipulators they really are.

This is what is happening now in the great climate debate. Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann’s new book is not selling; George Monbiot is mocked as a conspiracy theorist; the Royal Society’s Sir Paul Nurse climate science ignorance is eviscerated in a report by the Global Warming Policy Foundation; Yale economics professor William D Nordhaus publishes an essay in the New York Review of Books called Why the Global Warming Skeptics Are Wrong - and is almost instantaneously and comprehensively rebutted at Watts Up With That?

The high priests of global warming have lost their prestige. They’re still chanting the same old mantras. But no one’s listening, no one cares.

Orrin Pilkey’s Feb. 23 Point of View article, “The state’s sea level retreat,” reveals a serious misunderstanding of what the scientific evidence tells us about sea level. The current rate of sea level rise is minuscule, but he’s bought into Al Gore’s alarmist prediction of dramatically accelerated sea level rise because, he says, “meltwater from Greenland and Antarctica” might increase the rate of sea level rise.

That’s contrary to the best scientific evidence. Greenland is colder now than it was in the1930s and 1940s, and much colder than during the Medieval Warm Period (800-1100 years ago), neither of which saw substantial sea level rise. Antarctic ice melt won’t drive up sea level, either. (East Antarctica is the coldest place on earth, and its ice hasn’t melted in millions of years.)

Alarmists like Gore say increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide will, through what MIT climatologist Richard Lindzen calls “implausible chains of inference,” cause huge increases in the rate of sea level rise. But the science tells a different story.

Human CO {-2} emissions have been increasing atmospheric CO {-2} levels substantially since about the 1940s. So how much has rate of sea level rise increased in response? None.

We have an excellent, nearly continuous record of sea level from North Carolina’s best tide gauge, in Wilmington, since 1935. In 76 years, sea level has gone up only about six inches, and the rate of sea level rise is decreasing. (The northern end of the North Carolina coast, near Kitty Hawk, sees about twice that rate, due to land subsidence there, but there’s no reason to expect subsidence to accelerate.)

Elsewhere, tide gauges have been measuring sea level for more than 150 years. Most show either no trend or decreasing rates of sea level rise in response to human CO {-2} emissions. The best and most comprehensive analyses of sea level measured by tide gauges around the world show slight decelerations in the rate of sea level rise over the last 80 years.

We also have 19 years of satellite altimeter measurements of sea level over the open ocean. They also show decreasing rates of sea level rise. The measurements all agree: the last two-thirds century of human CO {-2} emissions resulted in no increase at all in the rate of sea level rise. It’s irrational and unscientific to expect that the next two-thirds century will be different. The best evidence is that most of the North Carolina coast will see at most 6-10 inches of sea level rise by 2100.

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Developer may sue to trigger rethink on sea level rises
Ben Cubby

CRACKS are appearing in the state’s response to rising sea levels, with one council facing potential legal action from a developer and other residents worried about planning controls and insurance risks.

Lake Macquarie Council recently updated its recommendations for about 10,000 people living up to three metres above the average sea level. All their properties could be exposed to inundation and increased flood risks by the end of the century, according to guidelines developed by the CSIRO.

But a property developer, Jeff McCloy, said he was contemplating leading a class action suit against the council, which he said was ‘’falling for this unjustified, worldwide idiocy about sea level rises’’.

Mr McCloy recently arranged for climate change sceptics Ian Plimer, Bob Carter and David Archibald to address residents and councillors, and said the presentation seemed to convince many people there was nothing to worry about.

It comes as the NSW government reassesses its plans regarding sea level rises, including the possibility of a moratorium on sea level-related planning restrictions until more studies are done.

Mr McCloy is seeking to gain approval for a subdivision of 24 homes that is likely to be affected by the Lake Macquarie planning guidelines.

‘’This is not about me though; this is about the poor little property owner who had had hundreds of thousands of dollars knocked off the value of their property,’’ Mr McCloy said.

He said he had studied sea level rise on the internet and concluded it was rising at only a very slow rate, and that rate had slowed in the past decade, so any planning restrictions were unjustified.

Lake Macquarie Council said its guidelines were based on rational science.

‘’Our position is informed by the available evidence,’’ said the council’s sustainability manager, Alice Howe.

‘’In November last year we revised our policy in light of new flood-mapping, and we have written to all the affected residents,’’ Dr Howe said. The area in question consists of a low-lying area near the lake that is expected to be partly submerged by the end of the century, a middle zone that could be affected by extreme weather and high tides, and an outer zone including areas up to three metres above sea level that could be affected by extreme events in 2100.

The mapping is based on coastal projections developed under the previous state government that used CSIRO studies to determine sea level heights as climate change intensifies in coming decades.

A committee chaired by the the Environment Minister, Robyn Parker, will review the coastal planning guidelines.

‘’Establishing this task force is an important step in ensuring that NSW has the best arrangements in place to manage coastal erosion and other coastal hazards,’’ a spokesman for the minister said.

Read more.

Headlines said Friday that Kenneth T. Cuccinelli, the Virginia attorney general and Republican gubernatorial candidate, had lost his bid to wrest a huge trove of climate-change e-mails and other documents away from the University of Virginia. But did he really lose?

In one way, yes. Virginia’s Supreme Court confirmed what Mr. Cuccinelli may well have suspected all along: that the anti-fraud statute he tried to use to demand the documents did not apply to state agencies, including state universities. The tactic had always seemed to many people like a stretch.

But looked at from a political perspective, Mr. Cuccinelli may not only have won but may also continue to win, for some time to come.

How? His effort to gain access to nearly a decade’s worth of e-mail traffic among top climate researchers was a bold, high-profile undertaking that brought him lots of attention from skeptics of climate change - skeptics who are well financed and wrestle well above their weight, politically speaking, in that they publicize their views far more effectively than a much larger cohort of climate researchers with Ph.D.’s from first-rate universities.

Combined with his earlier legal opinion holding that state universities have no authority to prevent discrimination against gay students or employees, and his lawsuit challenging President Obama’s health-care law, the demand for documents from UVa has helped make Mr. Cuccinelli a rising star of the right, both in Virginia and on the national stage. Losing in court to a university that spent more than half a million dollars on the case is, in a political context like this one, almost as good as winning: The publicity is invaluable. (Ironically enough, Mr. Cuccinelli is a graduate of the university.)

Mr. Cuccinelli, who counts himself among those skeptical of climate-research findings, has said all along that he was looking for evidence of research fraud by the climate researcher Michael E. Mann, who was a faculty member at UVa from 1999 to 2005 and is now director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University at University Park.

The attorney general’s demand for documents arose out of the “Climategate” theft of researchers’ e-mails, including some of Mr. Mann’s, from a server at the University of East Anglia, in England, in 2009. Even though multiple reviews had failed to find any wrongdoing on Mr. Mann’s part, Mr. Cuccinelli said the Climategate e-mails gave him some reason to suspect that the scientist might have relied on manipulated data in seeking grants during his years in Virginia.

Mr. Cuccinelli’s document demand, however, was nothing short of astonishing in its breadth: It sought “all documents that constitute or are in any way related to correspondence, messages, or e-mails” between Mr. Mann and 39 other scholars, including many prominent climate scientists. What Mr. Cuccinelli expected to find in all those documents he never said, though Mr. Mann and many others, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, called the document demand a “fishing expedition” conducted in the hope of turning up something that climate-change skeptics could use to embarrass researchers. In an era when fierce partisanship means that a politician’s enemies may define him more clearly than his friends, being denounced repeatedly by the Union of Concerned Scientists could be more of a boon to Mr. Cuccinelli than a bane.

And long before Friday’s court decision ended it, Mr. Cuccinelli’s quest inspired another conservative organization, the American Tradition Institute, to find a significantly easier means to the same end - the institute and a Republican member of the state legislature filed a request for much of the same material under Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act. So far, the university has turned over some 2,000 e-mails out of 14,000 covered by the request, and whether it will have to turn over more is now before a state court.

Mr. Cuccinelli’s biggest contribution in all of this may be in having shown conservatives - even those within state governments—new ways to score political points with attacks on higher education, which the right has for years successfully labeled as a bastion of the left. Using a state attorney general’s office to carry out an assault on one of that state’s most respected universities for what many people would describe as political gain was a daring and unprecedented move that would appear - from some perspectives, however cynical -to have paid off handsomely, no matter what the justices of the state Supreme Court think.

And that payoff could help Mr. Cuccinelli beat Virginia’s current lieutenant governor to become the GOP gubernatorial candidate in 2013. That prospect that can’t be anything but unsettling for administrators and faculty members at Mr. Cuccinelli’s alma mater and the state’s other public universities.

RALEIGH - State officials are pressuring local governments to plan for a one-meter sea-level rise by 2100, even though many independent scientists have argued the rise is highly unlikely if not impossible.

Even though a state advisory panel no longer recommends regulations based on the one-meter projection, local government officials worry that state regulators will try to implement those rules.

Such a policy, they say, would have a devastating impact on coastal economies, property values, and citizens’ ability to secure financing and property insurance. North Carolina also would become the first state to enact policies consistent with a projected sea-level rise of that magnitude.

In a 2010 report (PDF), the Coastal Resource Commission’s Science Panel said the sea level is likely to rise one meter by 2100. Now the commission is drafting policy “encouraging” coastal communities to consider accelerated rates of sea-level rise in local land-use and development planning.

A group of independent scientists have challenged the panel’s report, pushing the CRC to revise its draft sea-level rise policy so that the regulations in it read more like suggestions and the one-meter benchmark no longer appears.

There’s nothing scientific about the way the science panel came up with its one-meter projection, said John Droz, a physicist and environmental activist. Droz, with the help of more than 30 other scientists, wrote a critique (PDF) of the panel’s “NC Sea-Level Rise Assessment Report.”

Droz’s first complaint is that the panel based its one-meter projection on a review of scientific studies, but the review excluded studies concluding that sea-level rise is not happening. Also, the study cited most by the panel is no longer supported by its own author.

“They never mentioned this,” he said. “These people are either totally incompetent or they’re just totally dishonest.”

Droz also criticizes the broadness of the range of possible scenarios the panel came up with.

The report states that the panel has not attempted “to predict a specific future rate or amount of rise because that level of accuracy is not considered to be attainable at this time.” Instead, the panel predicts a “likely range of rise” between 15 and 55 inches and settles on 39 inches (one meter) as the “amount of rise that should be adopted for policy development and planning purposes.”

“It appears the authors want to have it both ways,” Droz said. “They rightfully acknowledge an accurate future prediction is unattainable, yet they make a future prediction that they expect North Carolina to use for development and planning purposes.”

Droz also takes issue with the tide gauge measurements the panel relied on. Of the eight measuring stations in North Carolina, the panel said it “feels most confident in the data retrieved from the Duck gauge,” which shows the highest measurements of all eight stations and which has been collecting data for the fewest number of years.

The Duck station’s 24 years of data show an average rate of sea-level rise at 16 inches per century. By contrast, a measuring station in Wilmington with 67 years of data shows an average rate of 8 inches per century.

Additionally, Droz calls the tide gauge measurements too crude to provide useful data. The report says that “a tide gauge can be as simple as a long ruler nailed to a post on a dock.”

It also admits “a drawback to tide gauges in North Carolina, in addition to their small number, is that most of them don’t extend back in time more than 50 years, making it difficult to resolve changes in the rate of rise over the decades.”

The report adds, “More accurate” satellite measurements have been available only since 2001. Droz argues that 10 years of data are “clearly insufficient in determining things like hundred-year trends.”

Droz said some scientists believe the sea is not rising at all. He points to a recent newspaper profile of Dr. Nils-Axel Morner, former head of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics Department at Stockholm University and former head of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change.

“Despite fluctuations down as well as up, the sea is not rising,” Morner said. “It hasn’t risen in 50 years. If there is any rise this century it will not be more than 10 centimeters (4 inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10 centimeters.”

Droz asked Morner what he thought of the science panel’s prediction.

“Sorry, simply physically impossible,” Morner wrote. “It is, for sure, not rising by one meter by year 2100. Our best estimate for 2100 is 5 centimeters with a 15 centimeter margin of error, and that is nothing to worry about.”

Damage control

After circulating his critique, Droz was invited to make a presentation to state lawmakers, who put pressure on the CRC to change the language in their sea level rise policy draft.

After reviewing his critique, Droz said one member of the science panel sent him a confidential message. “He apologized for signing off on it and said he was totally remiss in his obligation to do the right thing.”

Because of Droz’s work, the North Carolina Office of Emergency Management now is studying the impact of a range of potential levels in sea rise from zero to 15 inches by 2100, instead of 15 to 55 inches.

“We brought it down after talking with Droz and other individuals,” said John Dorman, director of the flood mapping program for the Office of Emergency Management. “We believe, as Mr. Droz says - and I’ll give him credit for that - that it needs to be based on science.”

February 16th, 2012 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

The unauthorized release of supposedly scandalous Heartland Institute documents has been pretty thoroughly addressed on many blogs over the last day or so. The documents are being used in an attempt to “expose” a “well-funded” “climate denial machine”, which is laughable on several levels.

The only document involved that could be viewed as damning in any way is almost certainly a fake. The others are fairly boring, unless you really are surprised that any organization would take (very modest) donations to explore alternative hypotheses on the subject of global warming and climate change.

Supporting alternative hypotheses in science...what a scandal!

Only fringe lunatic save-the-Earth-by-killing-everyone-but-me types could really believe that any organization would actually promote “dissuading teachers from teaching science”. The person who wrote this obviously fraudulent Heartland goal clearly knows little about science or what kind of organization Heartland is.

That so many media outlets (especially the Guardian) ran with the story without checking its veracity is another black eye for what passes as journalism these days.

I know Joe Bast, the president and CEO of Heartland. He is of the highest character and intelligence, and I would consider his motives on the climate subject to be at or above anyone I have met in this business, on either side of the issue. This is why I agree to take part in the Heartland climate conferences, for less than half of my normal speaking fee. I don’t necessarily agree with all the science and ideas presented there, but I would rather it be presented and discussed than be censored, which is the U.N. IPCC’s modus operandi.

The last conference even showcased a debate between me (a “luke-warmer”, I’m told) and a scientist-supporter of the IPCC position. That’s a level of openness you will not find on the IPCC’s side of the issue.

Due to popular demand, Joe organized the last conference without sufficient funding. At the end of the conference he confided that he was still trying to find donors who would cover the expenses. It almost seemed like his organization really didn’t need the headaches involved in the effort, but no one else was stepping up to the plate to do a job which needed to be done.

The real scandal is that it took a private organization like Heartland to compile the hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific publications which suggest that increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere might not be a problem for humanity or the biosphere. This is what the IPCC should have done, if it had any scientific objectivity.

I hope that this hoax backfires on the person who started it. I hope it leads to even more donations to Heartland, which has played the role of David in its battle against the Goliath multi-billion dollar climate alarmist machine.