What separates a scientific claim from mere opinion is its ability to be tested by experiment. No true scientist objects to having his theories verified; the charlatan is the one with something to hide. Not surprisingly, purveyors of global warming have proved anything but open.

In the current issue of the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Law and Management, Australian researchers evaluated the community of so-called climate scientists and found them to be “antagonistic toward the disclosure of information.” Professor John Abbot of Central Queensland University, a chemist and lawyer, and biologist Jennifer Marohasy studied the response of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (CRU) and the Met Office - Britain’s national weather service - to various information requests. The most noteworthy of these was United Kingdom resident David Holland’s demand for the raw data underlying the infamous “hockey stick” graph that was published in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports. This chart was the centerpiece of the claim that the 20th century was the hottest in a thousand years. The stir that Mr. Holland’s request triggered among the scientists who worked on the report was captured in the Climategate e-mails.

“If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone,” CRU scientist Phil Jones wrote in a February 2005 e-mail. “We think we’ve found a way around this.” So much for transparency.

Under the British Freedom of Information law, like the similar U.S. statute, information created at the public expense must - with limited exceptions - be made available to the public that paid for it. At first, the Met Office answered Mr. Holland’s request for data regarding a relatively uncontroversial chapter in the IPCC report. When he asked them for similar details regarding the hockey stick, the Met Office got around the law by claiming the data were “personal information” generated in the free time of the scientists involved. When this dodge failed to hold up, the Met Office began claiming that the records had been deleted.

“Of concern is evidence of a predisposition towards uncooperativeness on the part of the Met Office, which also used spurious claims of deleted correspondence and personal information in attempts to block the release of information,” Mr. Abbot and Ms. Marohasy wrote. The attitude isn’t limited to Britain. The Washington Times asked the White House Council on Environmental Quality for its oldest pending FOIA requests. Among the top five was an August 26 letter from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce seeking documents related to its work on climate-change legislation and the Environmental Protection Agency’s so-called greenhouse gas ruling.

None of these simple requests should have been denied or delayed. Many of those involved in purported climate science seem more preoccupied with advancing a leftist, anti-business legislative agenda than respecting the integrity of the scientific method. It’s obvious why. Their cataclysmic scare stories are unable to withstand scrutiny. By deleting e-mails and using tricks to hide the inconvenient decline in global temperatures, the climate alarmists prove to be not men of science, but ordinary frauds.

Read more here.

After a brief respite to digest the “climategate” scandal and the IPCC’s negligent acceptance of fraudulent claims about melting Himalayan glaciers, the SDN echo chamber of environmental propaganda has resumed in full form with the Peters-deBuys article of July 17. Such activists are trumpeting the recent spring increase of 0.1 C in average temperature while they completely ignored the previous decade decrease of 0.25 C. The environmental propagandists are now back on message with their talking points in preparation for the Senate’s consideration of an energy bill. The article is right about one thing: namely, that you should look at the data yourself; but not the eco-massaged data they recommend but rather the raw data as summarized in www.climate4you then click on May 2010.

The data show nothing particularly dramatic for the last several decades: temperatures, polar ice coverage, and sea level fluctuations that are all well within the range of normal variability. For more details, see my recent Cafe Scientifique talk on www.youtube.com and enter “climategate” and “hertzberg” in the search box. The data show that average Earth temperatures do not correlate with the recent increases in atmospheric CO2 concentrations, and that neither of those quantities correlate in any way with the human emission of CO2 by fossil fuel combustion. The entire theory that “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere can reradiate energy back to the Earth and thus cause more heating, has been proven to violate the laws of thermodynamics, and thus to be completely devoid of physical reality. Acceptance of that theory by some journals, scientific organizations, and government agencies both national and international, represents scientific malfeasance on a grand scale. See letter here.

A broad coalition of oil, trucking, airline, manufacturing and other companies Tuesday will roll out a two-week advertising campaign accusing senators of hurting consumers and jobs if they lower the greenhouse gas content of fuels.

“Our families are struggling, but unfortunately it’s business as usual in Washington,” according to a 60-second radio ad sponsored by the Consumer Energy Alliance (CEA) and running in four Midwestern states.

The “latest bright idea” from Congress is a low-carbon fuel standard, according to the ad. Auto companies and the autoworkers union are pushing such a standard.

CEA’s radio campaign cites unnamed studies that claim a standard would cost consumers up to $2,000 annually and increase gas prices at the pump by up to 170 percent.

The coalition funded a recent study by Charles River Associates that contended a low-carbon fuels standard starting in 2015 and reducing the carbon intensity of transportation fuels by 10 percent after that would increase transportation fuels to consumers by 90 to 170 percent by 2025.

A low-carbon standard would also “further damage our ailing economy” and kill up to 1.1 million jobs and “10s of billions of dollars” in economic investment in the Midwest, according to the coalition’s ad. “Low-carbon fuel standards may sound like a good idea, but as usual Congress wants you to pay the price,” according to the ad.

Both the radio ads and accompanying cable TV ads will run for two weeks starting Tuesday in Michigan, Minnesota, Indiana and Ohio at a price tag of about $1 million. The TV ads were still being finalized late Monday.

Each of the four radio ads gives out the number for the U.S. Capitol switchboard and asks listeners to call the senators - both Democratic and Republican - in that particular state. 

The low-carbon fuel standard idea has received some bipartisan backing. Michigan Democratic Sens. Debbie Stabenow and Carl Levin are looking to include it in an evolving three-tier package they are working on to limit the impact to their state’s auto industry of plans curbing transportation sector emissions. The package would be offered as part of a broader Senate climate and energy strategy expected to hit the Senate floor as early as next week. Major auto companies and the United Auto Workers are helping Stabenow and Levin draft their ideas.

Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) have also espoused the idea of a low-carbon fuel standard. President Obama did as well as a U.S. senator and on the 2008 presidential campaign trail.

California has adopted a standard and 11 East Coast states have pledged to model a regional plan from it.

The National Petrochemical & Refiners Association (NPRA), American Trucking Associations (ATA), and other industry groups have filed a lawsuit against California’s plan, alleging the state’s standard is an unconstiutional attempt to regulate interstate and foreign commerce. Both NPRA and ATA are members of CEA.

The ethanol industry has also filed suit against the California standard - which requires fuel providers to cut the carbon intensity of fuels sold in the state 10 percent by 2020.

I receive many e-mails, and a recurring complaint is that many of my posts are too technical to understand. This morning’s installment arrived with the subject line, “Please Talk to Us”, and suggested I provide short, concise, easily understood summaries and explanations “for dummies”.

So, here’s a list of basic climate change questions, and brief answers based upon what I know today. I might update them as I receive suggestions and comments. I will also be adding links to other sources, and some visual aids, as appropriate.

Deja vu tells me I might have done this once before, but I’m too lazy to go back and see. So, I’ll start over from scratch. (Insert smiley)

It is important to understand at the outset that those of us who are skeptical of mankind’s influence on climate have a wide variety of views on the subject, and we can’t all be right. In fact, in this business, it is really easy to be wrong. It seems like everyone has a theory of what causes climate change. But it only takes one of us to be right for the IPCC’s anthropogenic global warming (AGW) house of cards to collapse.

As I like to say, taking measurements of the climate system is much easier than figuring out what those measurements mean in terms of cause and effect. Generally speaking, it’s not the warming that is in dispute...it’s the cause of the warming.

If you disagree with my views on something, please don’t flame me. Chances are, I’ve already heard your point of view; very seldom am I provided with new evidence I haven’t already taken into account.

1) Are Global Temperatures Rising Now? There is no way to know, because natural year-to-year variability in global temperature is so large, with warming and cooling occurring all the time. What we can say is that surface and lower atmospheric temperature have risen in the last 30 to 50 years, with most of that warming in the Northern Hemisphere. Also, the magnitude of recent warming is somewhat uncertain, due to problems in making long-term temperature measurements with thermometers without those measurements being corrupted by a variety of non-climate effects. But there is no way to know if temperatures are continuing to rise now…we only see warming (or cooling) in the rearview mirror, when we look back in time.

2) Why Do Some Scientists Say It’s Cooling, while Others Say that Warming is Even Accelerating? Since there is so much year-to-year (and even decade-to-decade) variability in global average temperatures, whether it has warmed or cooled depends upon how far back you look in time. For instance, over the last 100 years, there was an overall warming which was stronger toward the end of the 20th Century. This is why some say “warming is accelerating”. But if we look at a shorter, more recent period of time, say since the record warm year of 1998, one could say that it has cooled in the last 10-12 years. But, as I mentioned above, neither of these can tell us anything about whether warming is happening “now”, or will happen in the future.

3) Haven’t Global Temperatures Risen Before? Yes. In the longer term, say hundreds to thousands of years, there is considerable indirect, proxy evidence (not from thermometers) of both warming and cooling. Since humankind can’t be responsible for these early events, this is evidence that nature can cause warming and cooling. If that is the case, it then opens up the possibility that some (or most) of the warming in the last 50 years has been natural, too. While many geologists like to point to much larger temperature changes are believed to have occurred over millions of years, I am unconvinced that this tells us anything of use for understanding how humans might influence climate on time scales of 10 to 100 years.

4) But Didn’t the “Hockey Stick” Show Recent Warming to be Unprecedented? The “hockey Stick” reconstructions of temperature variations over the last 1 to 2 thousand years have been a huge source of controversy. The hockey stick was previously used by the IPCC as a veritable poster child for anthropogenic warming, since it seemed to indicate there have been no substantial temperature changes over the last 1,000 to 2,000 years until humans got involved in the 20th Century. The various versions of the hockey stick were based upon limited amounts of temperature proxy evidence - primarily tree rings - and involved questionable statistical methods. In contrast, I think the bulk of the proxy evidence supports the view that it was at least as warm during the Medieval Warm Period, around 1000 AD. The very fact that recent tree ring data erroneously suggests cooling in the last 50 years, when in fact there has been warming, should be a warning flag about using tree ring data for figuring out how warm it was 1,000 years ago. But without actual thermometer data, we will never know for sure.

5) Isn’t the Melting of Arctic Sea Ice Evidence of Warming? Warming, yes…manmade warming, no. Arctic sea ice naturally melts back every summer, but that meltback was observed to reach a peak in 2007. But we have relatively accurate, satellite-based measurements of Arctic (and Antarctic) sea ice only since 1979. It is entirely possible that late summer Arctic Sea ice cover was just as low in the 1920s or 1930s, a period when Arctic thermometer data suggests it was just as warm. Unfortunately, there is no way to know, because we did not have satellites back then. Interestingly, Antarctic sea ice has been growing nearly as fast as Arctic ice has been melting over the last 30+ years.

6) What about rising sea levels? I must confess, I don’t pay much attention to the sea level issue. I will say that, to the extent that warming occurs, sea levels can be expected to also rise to some extent. The rise is partly due to thermal expansion of the water, and partly due to melting or shedding of land-locked ice (the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and glaciers). But this says nothing about whether or not humans are the cause of that warming. Since there is evidence that glacier retreat and sea level rise started well before humans can be blamed, causation is - once again - a major source of uncertainty.

7) Is Increasing CO2 Even Capable of Causing Warming? There are some very intelligent people out there who claim that adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere can’t cause warming anyway. They claim things like, “the atmospheric CO2 absorption bands are already saturated”, or something else very technical. [And for those more technically-minded persons, yes, I agree that the effective radiating temperature of the Earth in the infrared is determined by how much sunlight is absorbed by the Earth. But that doesn’t mean the lower atmosphere cannot warm from adding more greenhouse gases, because at the same time they also cool the upper atmosphere]. While it is true that most of the CO2-caused warming in the atmosphere was there before humans ever started burning coal and driving SUVs, this is all taken into account by computerized climate models that predict global warming. Adding more “should” cause warming, with the magnitude of that warming being the real question. But I’m still open to the possibility that a major error has been made on this fundamental point. Stranger things have happened in science before.

8 ) Is Atmospheric CO2 Increasing? Yes, and most strongly in the last 50 years…which is why “most” climate researchers think the CO2 rise is the cause of the warming. Our site measurements of CO2 increase from around the world are possibly the most accurate long-term, climate-related, measurements in existence.

9) Are Humans Responsible for the CO2 Rise? While there are short-term (year-to-year) fluctuations in the atmospheric CO2 concentration due to natural causes, especially El Nino and La Nina, I currently believe that most of the long-term increase is probably due to our use of fossil fuels. But from what I can tell, the supposed “proof” of humans being the source of increasing CO2 - a change in the atmospheric concentration of the carbon isotope C13 - would also be consistent with a natural, biological source. The current atmospheric CO2 level is about 390 parts per million by volume, up from a pre-industrial level estimated to be around 270 ppm...maybe less. CO2 levels can be much higher in cities, and in buildings with people in them.

10) But Aren’t Natural CO2 Emissions About 20 Times the Human Emissions? Yes, but nature is believed to absorb CO2 at about the same rate it is produced. You can think of the reservoir of atmospheric CO2 as being like a giant container of water, with nature pumping in a steady stream into the bottom of the container (atmosphere) in some places, sucking out about the same amount in other places, and then humans causing a steady drip-drip-drip into the container. Significantly, about 50% of what we produce is sucked out of the atmosphere by nature, mostly through photosynthesis. Nature loves the stuff. CO2 is the elixir of life on Earth. Imagine the howls of protest there would be if we were destroying atmospheric CO2, rather than creating more of it.

11) Is Rising CO2 the Cause of Recent Warming? While this is theoretically possible, I think it is more likely that the warming is mostly natural. At the very least, we have no way of determining what proportion is natural versus human-caused.

12) Why Do Most Scientists Believe CO2 is Responsible for the Warming? Because (as they have told me) they can’t think of anything else that might have caused it. Significantly, it’s not that there is evidence nature can’t be the cause, but a lack of sufficiently accurate measurements to determine if nature is the cause. This is a hugely important distinction, and one the public and policymakers have been misled on by the IPCC.

13) If Not Humans, What could Have Caused Recent Warming? This is one of my areas of research. I believe that natural changes in the amount of sunlight being absorbed by the Earth - due to natural changes in cloud cover - are responsible for most of the warming. Whether that is the specific mechanism or not, I advance the minority view that the climate system can change all by itself. Climate change does not require an “external” source of forcing, such as a change in the sun.

14) So, What Could Cause Natural Cloud Changes? I think small, long-term changes in atmospheric and oceanic flow patterns can cause ~1% changes in how much sunlight is let in by clouds to warm the Earth. This is all that is required to cause global warming or cooling. Unfortunately, we do not have sufficiently accurate cloud measurements to determine whether this is the primary cause of warming in the last 30 to 50 years.

15) How Significant is the Climategate Release of E-Mails? While Climategate does not, by itself, invalidate the IPCC’s case that global warming has happened, or that humans are the primary cause of that warming, it DOES illustrate something I emphasized in my first book, “Climate Confusion”: climate researchers are human, and prone to bias.

16) Why Would Bias in Climate Research be Important? I thought Scientists Just Follow the Data Where It Leads Them When researchers approach a problem, their pre-conceived notions often guide them. It’s not that the IPCC’s claim that humans cause global warming is somehow untenable or impossible, it’s that political and financial pressures have resulted in the IPCC almost totally ignoring alternative explanations for that warming.

17) How Important Is “Scientific Consensus” in Climate Research? In the case of global warming, it is nearly worthless. The climate system is so complex that the vast majority of climate scientists - usually experts in variety of specialized fields - assume there are more knowledgeable scientists, and they are just supporting the opinions of their colleagues. And among that small group of most knowledgeable experts, there is a considerable element of groupthink, herd mentality, peer pressure, political pressure, support of certain energy policies, and desire to Save the Earth - whether it needs to be saved or not.

18) How Important are Computerized Climate Models? I consider climate models as being our best way of exploring cause and effect in the climate system. It is really easy to be wrong in this business, and unless you can demonstrate causation with numbers in equations, you are stuck with scientists trying to persuade one another by waving their hands. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that climate models will ever produce a useful prediction of the future. Nevertheless, we must use them, and we learn a lot from them. My biggest concern is that models have been used almost exclusively for supporting the claim that humans cause global warming, rather than for exploring alternative hypotheses - e.g. natural climate variations - as possible causes of that warming.

19) What Do I Predict for Global Temperature Changes in the Future? I tend to shy away from long-term predictions, because there are still so many uncertainties. When pressed, though, I tend to say that I think cooling in our future is just as real a possibility as warming. Of course, a third possibility is relatively steady temperatures, without significant long-term warming or cooling. Keep in mind that, while you will find out tomorrow whether your favorite weather forecaster is right or wrong, no one will remember 50 years from now a scientist today wrongly predicting we will all die from heat stroke by 2060.

Concluding Remarks

Climate researchers do not know nearly as much about the causes of climate change as they profess. We have a pretty good understanding of how the climate system works on average...but the reasons for small, long-term changes in climate system are still extremely uncertain.

The total amount of CO2 humans have added to the atmosphere in the last 100 years has upset the radiative energy budget of the Earth by only 1%. How the climate system responds to that small “poke” is very uncertain. The IPCC says there will be strong warming, with cloud changes making the warming worse. I claim there will be weak warming, with cloud changes acting to reduce the influence of that 1% change. The difference between these two outcomes is whether cloud feedbacks are positive (the IPCC view), or negative (the view I and a minority of others have).

So far, neither side has been able to prove their case. That uncertainty even exists on this core issue is not appreciated by many scientists!

Again I will emphasize, some very smart people who consider themselves skeptics will disagree with some of my views stated above, particularly when it involves explanations for what has caused warming, and what has caused atmospheric CO2 to increase.

Unlike the global marching army of climate researchers the IPCC has enlisted, we do not walk in lockstep. We are willing to admit, “we don’t really know”, rather than mislead people with phrases like, “the warming we see is consistent with an increase in CO2”, and then have the public think that means, “we have determined, through our extensive research into all the possibilities, that the warming cannot be due to anything but CO2”.

Skeptics advancing alternative explanations (hypotheses) for climate variability represent the way the researcher community used to operate, before politics, policy outcomes, and billions of dollars got involved. See post and comments here.

NASA-funded researchers are monitoring a big event in our planet’s atmosphere. High above Earth’s surface where the atmosphere meets space, a rarefied layer of gas called “the thermosphere” recently collapsed and now is rebounding again.

“This is the biggest contraction of the thermosphere in at least 43 years,” says John Emmert of the Naval Research Lab, lead author of a paper announcing the finding in the June 19th issue of the Geophysical Research Letters (GRL). “It’s a Space Age record.”

The collapse happened during the deep solar minimum of 2008-2009 - a fact which comes as little surprise to researchers. The thermosphere always cools and contracts when solar activity is low. In this case, however, the magnitude of the collapse was two to three times greater than low solar activity could explain.

“Something is going on that we do not understand,” says Emmert.

The thermosphere ranges in altitude from 90 km to 600+ km. It is a realm of meteors, auroras and satellites, which skim through the thermosphere as they circle Earth. It is also where solar radiation makes first contact with our planet. The thermosphere intercepts extreme ultraviolet (EUV) photons from the sun before they can reach the ground. When solar activity is high, solar EUV warms the thermosphere, causing it to puff up like a marshmallow held over a camp fire. (This heating can raise temperatures as high as 1400 K-hence the name thermosphere.) When solar activity is low, the opposite happens.

Lately, solar activity has been very low. In 2008 and 2009, the sun plunged into a century-class solar minimum. Sunspots were scarce, solar flares almost non-existent, and solar EUV radiation was at a low ebb. Researchers immediately turned their attention to the thermosphere to see what would happen.

Enlarge here.

These plots show how the density of the thermosphere (at a fiducial height of 400 km) has waxed and waned during the past four solar cycles. Frames (a) and (b) are density; frame (b) is the sun’s radio intensity at a wavelength of 10.7 cm, a key indicator of solar activity. Note the yellow circled region. In 2008 and 2009, the density of the thermosphere was 28% lower than expectations set by previous solar minima. Credit: Emmert et al. (2010), Geophys. Res. Lett., 37, L12102.

How do you know what’s happening all the way up in the thermosphere?

Emmert uses a clever technique: Because satellites feel aerodynamic drag when they move through the thermosphere, it is possible to monitor conditions there by watching satellites decay. He analyzed the decay rates of more than 5000 satellites ranging in altitude between 200 and 600 km and ranging in time between 1967 and 2010. This provided a unique space-time sampling of thermospheric density, temperature, and pressure covering almost the entire Space Age. In this way he discovered that the thermospheric collapse of 2008-2009 was not only bigger than any previous collapse, but also bigger than the sun alone could explain.

One possible explanation is carbon dioxide (CO2).

When carbon dioxide gets into the thermosphere, it acts as a coolant, shedding heat via infrared radiation. It is widely-known that CO2 levels have been increasing in Earth’s atmosphere. Extra CO2 in the thermosphere could have magnified the cooling action of solar minimum.

“But the numbers don’t quite add up,” says Emmert. “Even when we take CO2 into account using our best understanding of how it operates as a coolant, we cannot fully explain the thermosphere’s collapse.”

An NCAR video shows how carbon dioxide warms the lower atmosphere, but cools the upper atmosphere.

According to Emmert and colleagues, low solar EUV accounts for about 30% of the collapse. Extra CO2 accounts for at least another 10%. That leaves as much as 60% unaccounted for.

In their GRL paper, the authors acknowledge that the situation is complicated. There’s more to it than just solar EUV and terrestrial CO2. For instance, trends in global climate could alter the composition of the thermosphere, changing its thermal properties and the way it responds to external stimuli. The overall sensitivity of the thermosphere to solar radiation could actually be increasing.

“The density anomalies,” they wrote, “may signify that an as-yet-unidentified climatological tipping point involving energy balance and chemistry feedbacks has been reached.”

Or not.

Important clues may be found in the way the thermosphere rebounds. Solar minimum is now coming to an end, EUV radiation is on the rise, and the thermosphere is puffing up again. Exactly how the recovery proceeds could unravel the contributions of solar vs. terrestrial sources.

“We will continue to monitor the situation,” says Emmert.

More information: Emmert, J. T., J. L. Lean, and J. M. Picone (2010), Record-low thermospheric density during the 2008 solar minimum, Geophys. Res. Lett., 37, L12102.

Source: Science@NASA

Something remarkable happened last night in the polarised world of “warmists” versus “sceptics”: a candid but not rancorous public debate. I’m sure you’ll correct me if I’m wrong but, to my knowledge, never before have all sides of this frequently poisonous debate shared a stage. The outcome was illuminating.

Listen to a recording of the debate Link to this audio With no little effort, I had persuaded a star panel to convene to discuss the fall out from the “Climategate” affair which followed the exposure of 1,000 private emails between climate scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and their international colleagues. Three inquiries had emphasised that the science of global warming remained clear and that the scientists had not fiddled their data but also that there had been serious shortcomings in the transparency with which they worked and in how they dealt with freedom of information requests.

So almost 300 people squeezed into Riba in London last night, ready to witness a fight. Instead, they were treated to a heated argument, in the best sense of that word, with my colleague George Monbiot, who chaired magnificently, only having to threaten one heckler with ejection (yes, Piers Corbyn, it was you).

Link to this video. There’s a news story here, but here’s my take on the panellists and the debate:

• Professor Trevor Davies, ex-head of CRU and now pro-vice chancellor for research at UEA: Davies had the toughest brief, given the lurid nature of some of the emails, which he said had initially “shocked” him, as well as the pounding UEA has taken in the media. But he was clear and calm, if a little stiff, backing the researchers’ science while fully acknowledging the need to work more openly and be more helpful in responding to FOI requests. Inevitably, he failed to woo a sceptical chunk of the audience, who jeered when he failed to recall the exact date when the last inquiry panel was set up, but all were glad he was there.

• Steve McIntyre, editor of ClimateAudit: It was hard to reconcile the much-demonised McIntyre with the open and avuncular Canadian on the stage. Despite being the highest-profile critic of CRU, he pointed out none of the three enquires had asked him to give evidence. He ducked a question on how much the Earth was warming - “I don’t know” - he was convincing in saying his motive had always been wanting the temperature data only because he felt it was important and should be available. He noted that if he was running a government, he would be taking action on climate change. Hardly a classic sceptic.

• Professor Bob Watson, chief scientific advisor at Defra, visiting professor at the University of East Anglia and former head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: Watson took a twin-track approach: bluntly unequivocal that human activities are warming the planet but also genuine and insistent that sceptical views must be reflected in reports such as that by the IPCC: “We must not hide minority views”, when based on “evidence, not ideology”. But he added, reflecting on his work in the Clinton White House and the current UK government, that: “Evidence is a necessary but not sufficient condition for good policymaking.”

• Fred Pearce, environmental journalist and author of The Climate Files: Pearce was passionate in arguing that ‘Climategate’ was a very human tragedy, in respect of scientists feeling under siege and becoming fiercely defensive - which only spurred on the sceptics, who thought there must be something to hide. But he thought many CRU critics were not sceptics at all: “They are actually data libertarians, rather than climate sceptics, still less climate deniers. It turned into data wars.” Pearce’s conclusion was that at this turning point for climate science, more “candour” was needed from all.

• Doug Keenan, independent researcher and blogger, was focused and feisty, and did not hold back from his central theme that scientists of all stripes remain unacceptably unaccountable for the probity of their work: “Scientists are human and the prerequisite for integrity in human affairs is transparency.” He made allegations of fraud in climate science but revealed his true interests were not in climate change at all, but in the founding of early civilisations, archeo-astronomy and carbon dating.

The audience played a big part too, and was mixed with both warmist and sceptic points getting loudly cheered and booed. More than one suggested the media had hyped the “Climategate” tale beyond all reason, though none of the panel fully endorsed this view.

In the bar later, the extraordinary events continued, with Bob Watson and Doug Keenan swapping contact details and promising to stay in touch. Will the friendliness that broke out at the Guardian debate prove a mere holiday romance? Or will it be the start of a new way of conducting and communicating the science, especially online, that will shape how the world lives for centuries, as demanded by many?

Regrettably the authors use ad hominem attacks against opponents of global warming instead of discussing their science and then state: “We believe that the preponderance of evidence is such that scientists should now clearly label anthropogenic warming as a fact.” I disagree. I will present evidence not only that anthropogenic warming is not a fact but prove that it does not exist. Parts of their article that depend upon the existence of AGW are thereby invalidated.

Enlarged here.

The physical warming that global warming advocates refer to is the one that Hansen introduced [1] when he testified to the Senate in 1988 that warming had started and that its cause was carbon dioxide in the air. If you look at world temperature history from NOAA [2] you find indeed that there was a warming then which had started suddenly about 1977. For twenty years before this there was no warming. But carbon dioxide was on the rise and it did not even blink as it passed 1977 [3]. Laws of physics demand that to start a sudden warming like Hansen’s, CO2 partial pressure has to take a jump and this did not happen. Hence, it is quite impossible that carbon dioxide is the cause of this warming.

But NOAA’s graph is based on land-based measurements and satellites have been measuring global temperatures for the last thirty years. If you look at satellite temperatures from UAH MSU or from RSS they both tell the same story: there was no warming in the eighties and nineties [4]. What there was is a temperature oscillation, up and down by half a degree for twenty years, but no rise until 1998. That is ten years after Hansen’s claim that AGW had arrived. These oscillations are caused by the ENSO system in the Pacific. The peaks correspond to warm El Nino periods and the valleys to cool La Nina periods. There were five such peaks in a twenty year period. To find out what was going on I plotted satellite values on the same graph with the Met Office HadCRUT3 [5] temperatures. The same El Nino peaks are easily recognizable in both data sets. First thing to notice is that they start an upward trend by cherry picking the high peaks. But this works only with the first four El Ninos.

The fifth one is too low and gets put in line by being raised up bodily. But the valleys, not the peaks are the most important difference. What they have done is to raise up the bottoms of La Nina valleys and thereby change a horizontal temperature curve into a rising temperature curve. NASA [6] is similar. But NOAA [7] is even more outrageous: they stay with the peaks and jettison all low values in between. There is no doubt that the satellite temperatures I used [8] are accurate and that all three land-based curves have been manipulated to show warming where none existed.

But there is also future warming to worry about and that comes from the computers. Climate models use carbon dioxide partial pressure to calculate future warming and augment it by assuming positive water vapor feedback. But Ferenc Miskolczy used weather balloon observations and determined that the infrared optical thickness of the atmosphere remained unchanged for 61 years, with a value of 1.87 [9]. From this it may be inferred that CO2 does not affect the Earth’s climate through the greenhouse effect. Furthermore, he demonstrates that the feedback of water vapor effect on the greenhouse-gas optical thickness must be strongly negative [10], thoroughly contradicting the IPCC doctrine of its being positive.

Case closed. See full post with footnotes/references here.

Note from Arno: Nature published an opinion piece (Nature 10 June 2010, pp. 686-687) that was nothing more than a profusely illustrated free advertisement for that book. I found it objectionable and attempted to send Nature a “Brief Communications Arising” note. I was told that you can’t do that with an opinion piece, but send it to them instead as a letter to the Editor. I did that and was promptly turned down.

Review provides plenty of evidence that climate science has been and remains an uncertain shambles!

The last of three British investigations into the notorious Climategate emails, the Independent Climate Change Email Review, landed yesterday and left behind enough cherry-pickable material to give all sides an opportunity to claim modest vindication.

Defenders of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, the source of the emails, will be able to spin the 168-page review as proof that the CRU did little wrong. For climate skeptics and others, the review provides plenty of evidence that climate science has been and remains an uncertain shambles.

Before we begin our own cherry-picking, the words of Sir Muir Russell, who headed the review, will undoubtedly carry the day for the global community that is rock-solid behind the climate scientists at CRU and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“The honesty and rigour of CRU as scientists are not in doubt,” he said. “We have not found any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the IPCC processes and hence call into question the conclusions of the IPCC assessments in this area.”

That said, let’s move on to the review itself, which actually does quite a bit to undermine the science of climate change. While protective of CRU, the Russell review is far from a whitewash. It provides enough cover to allow the scientists to hang around and claim that the gods are on their side. But it mostly raises serious questions about the process by which official IPCC science was turned into a “consensus” that climate science is settled.

For all the defence it runs for CRU and the IPCC, the Russell review portrays climate science as a field filled with uncertainty, debate, lack of openness, data hoarding and ill-will. Modern science, especially climate science, it says, deserves better. “There needs to be better communication, as well as greater openness enabling more scientific debate.”

The Climategate emails, made public last November, have already rocked the climate science world, and climate science - even in the wake of this review - will never be the same.

The popular launch pad for the consensus proof that man-made climate science is a crisis was the famed Michael Mann 1999 hockey stick graphic that purported to show that temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere in the last half century were the hottest in 1,000 years. The Russell review, tip-toeing through the landmines in the emails about the “trick” of “hiding the decline”, ends up with the watery conclusion that the hockey stick graph was indeed “misleading.” In magic, being misleading via sleight of hand to hide something is pretty much the heart of a trick, but the Russell review twists itself around to downplay the trick element. “When used by scientists, [trick] can mean for example a mathematical approach brought to bear to solve a problem.”

But in the hockey stick graph, no such math was involved. The creators of the hockey stick took a thousand years worth of tree ring temperature data, eliminated some of the data from 1960 forward that didn’t support the 1,000-year claim, and then spliced on actual temperature data, without telling anybody what they had done. Then they magically announced they had found a smoking climate graphic that became a global icon for the climate crusade.

Since the 1999 hockey stick achieved that “iconic significance” and was used later in IPCC documents, the Russell review says, the presentation of the hockey stick was “misleading.” The misleading element was not the graph itself, but the fact that the trick was not disclosed. The review, therefore, has no problem with the later 2007 IPCC report on climate science that used a similar hockey stick graph but explicitly spelled out the use of a mixture of historical temperature sources.

The 2007 version, blending a slew of temperature data sets, was not technically misleading, says the review. But was it good science? It says “the depiction of uncertainty is quite apparent to any reader.” There are clear temperature trend divergences and discussion of uncertainty is “extensive.” Not extensive enough, however.

Ross McKitrick, the University of Guelph professor who with Steve McIntyre broke the hockey stick story, says the Russell review still misses the point. The 2007 version, for all its disclosure of uncertainty and the blending of unblendable temperature records, did not explain that key contradictory Siberian tree-ring data was deleted for the post-1960 period.

The story behind all this and other issues does not make for comfortable reading for IPCC supporters. On IPCC science, the Russell review takes a side shot at the official risk-rating system. The IPCC typically issues statements such as “the present is likely warmer than in the past.” What does this mean? The review has doubts. To issue such assessments “as objectively as possible would require a complex (and difficult) study to perform hypothesis resting in a mathematically rigorous way… We are not aware that this has been done in the producing of IPCC reports to date.” Is it therefore highly likely that the IPCC risk assessments are not based on good science and math?

There are scores of other highlights in the review that point to a science community in need of openness and reform, and as many that point to areas where the Russell review either evaded certain facts or fell into stiff technical treatment of instances where somebody obviously engaged in thuggish suppression of papers, but the evidence pointed no fingers - despite the emails. “Emails,” said the review, “are rarely definitive evidence of what actually happened.”

True, in one sense, but tell that to Wall Street bankers who have gone to criminal trial on the basis of a few lines of email. Read more here.