Andy Revkin at the New York Times asked Al Gore’s office for their comments on Gore’s use of data from CRED in Belgium in recent versions of his talk to illustrate the impacts of human-caused climate change on disasters. In response, Gore’s office has said that they will pull the slide, as it does not have a scientific foundation. Kudos to Al Gore who has demonstrated a commitment to scientific accuracy in his presentation. However there are still some issues with their response. Here is how Gore’s office responded to Revkin as related at Dot Earth:

“I can confirm that historically, we used Munich Re and Swiss Re data for the slide show. This can be confirmed using a hard copy of An Inconvenient Truth. (It is cited if you cannot recall from the film which is now several years old!). We became aware of the CRED database from its use by Charles Blow in the New York Times (May 31, 2008). So, it’s a very new addition.

As to climate change and its impacts on storms and floods, the IPCC and NOAA among many other top scientific groups have indicated that climate change will result in more extreme weather events, including heat waves, wildfires, storms and floods. As the result of briefings from top scientists, Vice President Gore believes that we are beginning to see evidence of that now.”

Switching from the CRED dataset to Munich Re (and Swiss Re) data does not solve the basic problem. As we found in an expert workshop organized in 2006 with Munich Re -The Munich Re dataset has exactly the same problems as the CRED dataset. Attribution of the role of greenhouse gas driven climate change in the increasing economic costs of disasters has yet to occur. So using a different dataset does not address the underlying problem.

So when Al Gore’s office says “We have found that Munich Re and other insurers and their science experts have made the attribution”, they are either cherry picking the selective views of a few people or simply mistaken. The scientific workshop that I co-organized with Peter Hoeppe of Munich Re concluded the following, with unanimous agreement among participants (PDF):

“Because of issues related to data quality, the stochastic nature of extreme event impacts, length of time series, and various societal factors present in the disaster loss record, it is still not possible to determine the portion of the increase in damages that might be attributed to climate change due to GHG emissions. We also published this view in Science, see PDF)."

So while Gore’s office was right to pull the CRED information from their talk as lacking a scientific basis, the continuing reliance on data from Munich Re does not solve the basic issue, which is that attribution of the increasing toll of disasters to human-caused climate change remains speculative at best and not supported by science. To the contrary, increasing societal exposure and growing wealth in vulnerable locations are the overwhelming drivers of the increasing losses, a conclusion well supported by many studies. Here is a test to see how far Gore is willing to go in maintaining standards of accuracy in his talk.

Now that Gore has admitted that including the slide based on CRED data was a mistake, it raises a more fundamental question: How could it be that Al Gore presented obviously misleading information before a large audience of the world’s best scientists, which was then amplified in a press release by AAAS, and none of these scientists spoke up? Read more here.

I was quite stunned this morning to read the following news articles ”Global warming seen worse than predicted” by Julie Steenhuysen of Reuters ”Scientists: Pace of Climate Change Exceeds Estimates” by Kari Lydersen of the Washington Post. These news is also reported at 431 other sites according to a search on google.

These articles are based on statements by Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University. I have a lot of respect for Dr. Field as an expert on the carbon cycle [I also have worked with him in the past]. However, while he is credentialed in climate science and certainly can have his own opinion, the selection of his statements to highlight in prominent news articles, without presenting counter perspectives by other climate scientists, is a clear example of media bias. Dr. Fields is reported to have said “We are basically looking now at a future climate that’s beyond anything we’ve considered seriously in climate model simulations”.

This claim, though, conflicts with real world observations! For example, Climate Science has recently weblogged on the issue of global warming; see Update On A Comparison Of Upper Ocean Heat Content Changes With The GISS Model Predictions. Since mid-2003, there has been no upper ocean global average warming; an observation which is not consistent with the GISS model predictions over this time period. The recent and current tropospheric temperature data (e.g. see Figure 7 in this RSS MSU data), also show that the global lower tropospheric temperatures today are no warmer than they were in 2002.

See larger image here of temperatures vs MSU (UAH and Hadley).

The recent global warming is less than the IPCC models predict, and, even more so, in disagreement with the news articles.  Since papers and weblogs have documented that the warming is being over-estimated in recent years, and, thus, these sources of information are readily available to the reporters, there is, therefore, no other alternative than these reporters are deliberately selecting a biased perspective to promote a particular viewpoint on climate. 

The reporting of this news without presenting counter viewpoints is clearly an example of yellow journalism; “Journalism that exploits, distorts, or exaggerates the news to create sensations and attract readers.” When will the news media and others realize that by presenting such biased reports, which are easily refuted by real world data, they are losing their credibility among many in the scientific community as well as with the public.  See Roger’s post here.

In our review of the data, it appears we would get 40 times more temperature reduction if we de-urbanize instead of de-carbonize. The solution to global warming is one that will be embraced by most of my environmental 1960s comrades, bulldoze down all cities, plant grass and trees and relocate everyone to rural areas.

URBANIZATION AND LAND USE CHANGES DWARF CO2 WARMING

See this NASA GISS US temperature plot which shows a warming of just 0.18F since 1930. This data set is adjusted for urbanization. The stations though are subject to poor siting which induces an artificial warming. In fact Anthony Watts has found only 11% of the 841 US climate stations surveyed to data meet the government’s own standards for siting in all cases introducing a localized warming. Assuming many of these issues (constructing buildings near sensors, allowing vegetation to grow, placing air conditioner exhausts near sensors, paving roads near sensors) occurred in recent years, one would assume an apparent warming would result, so even this small warming is likely exaggerated.

Runnalls and Oke (2006) concluded that “Gradual changes in the immediate environment over time, such as vegetation growth, or encroachment by built features such as paths, roads, runways, fences, parking lots, and buildings into the vicinity of the instrument site typically lead to trends in the series. Distinct regime transitions can be caused by seemingly minor instrument relocations (such as from one side of the airport to another, or even within the same instrument enclosure) or due to vegetation clearance.”

Oke (1973) and Hoyt (2002) have shown that a town of 1000 could see a warming of 2.2°C, (3.6F) especially in winter. Hinkel et al (2003) showed that even the village of Barrow, Alaska, with a population of 4600, there is a measurable warming of 2.2°C (3.96F) in winter over surrounding rural areas. Oke had a formula for the warming that is tied to population. The UHI (in °C) increases according to the formula UHI= 0.73 log10 POP where pop denotes population. This means that a village with a population of 10 has a warm bias of 0.73°C (1.3F), a village with 100 has a warm bias of 1.46°C (2.6F) , a town with a population of 1000 people has a warm bias of 2.2°C (3.6F), and a large city with a million people has a warm bias of 4.4°C (7.9F) .

The Hadley global data set shows more warming because it has NO ADJUSTMENT for urbanization and suffers from the same poor station siting issue. It shows about a 0.45F warming since 1930.

Ross McKitrick and Patrick Michaels (2007) showed a strong correlation between urbanization indicators and the “urban adjusted” temperatures, indicating that the adjustments are inadequate. Their conclusion was: “Fully correcting the surface temperature data for ‘non-climatic effects reduce the estimated 1980-2002 global average temperature trend over land by about half.’” Over half a dozen other peer-reviewed papers agree with this assessment that the global data bases are significantly contaminated by urban heat island effect.

The 50% contamination means that even if we ignore the bad siting, the warming in the global data base would be around 0.2F, in close agreement with the US data. Again due to the siting contamination, this again is likely exaggerated. Even so there are no assurances that these changes if real are not natural, for example related to the solar grand maximum in the late 20th century. Whatsmore in looking at the trends in both data sets we see cooling trends in the decades from the 1940s to the 1970s and after 2000 and warming from 1979 to 1998 (the 1980s and 1990s). That means in 5 of the 7 decades since the post warm boom, temperatures have fallen while CO2 rose, with a rise coincident with CO2 only from 1979-1998, not exactly a ringing endorsement for man made carbon dioxide caused climate change.

But let’s assume it does relate to CO2. Given that a large city of 1 million has an artificial warming of 4.4C (7.9F), we get about 40 times more bang from the buck from deurbanization than decarbonization. What a perfect way to spend the money in the stimulus bill for green jobs. Reid and Pelosi please take note.

Hugh H. Eye stands for UHI, the Urban Heat Island, of course. He doesn’t exist but UHI certainly does.

Christopher Booker says that the Government must be absolutely sure that their data on climate change is accurate.

It was another bad week for the “warmists”, now more desperate than ever to whip up alarm over an overheating planet. It began last weekend with the BBC leading its bulletins on the news that a “leading climate scientist” in America, Professor Chris Field, had warned that “the severity of global warming over the next century will be much worse than previously believed”. Future temperatures “will be beyond anything predicted”, he told a Chicago conference. The Intergovernmenta l Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had “seriously underestimated the size of the problem”.

The puzzle as to why the BBC should make this the main news of the day only deepened when it emerged that Prof Field was not a climate scientist at all but an evolutionary biologist. To promote its cause the BBC website even posted a video explaining how warming would be made worse by “negative feedback”. This scientific howler provoked much amusement and derision on expert US blogs, such as Anthony Watts’s Watts Up With That – since “negative feedback” would lower temperatures rather than raise them. The BBC soon pulled its video.

This was followed on Sunday by yet another outburst from the most extreme of all the scientists crying wolf on global warming, Al Gore’s ally Dr James Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. In The Observer he launched his most vitriolic call yet for the closing down of the coal-fired power stations which are the world’s main source of electricity, repeating his claim to a British court last year that the new coal-fired plant at Kingsnorth will alone be responsible for “the extermination of 400 species”. “Coal-fired power plants are factories of death,” wrote Hansen, “the trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains”. This deliberate echo of the trains carrying Jews to Nazi death camps recalled how the more extreme warmists like to equate sceptics on climate change with “Holocaust deniers”. But such overheated language seemed somehow at home in the newspaper which in 1996 solemnly predicted that by 2016 half a million Britons would be dying each year from having eaten BSE-infected beef.

Later in the week sceptics were struck by an admission from Professor William Schlesinger, a lead author for the IPCC. Since one of the enduring myths of our time is that the case for global warming is supported by “the world’s top 2,500 climate scientists” on the IPCC, Schlesinger was asked in a public debate how many of its contributors are in fact climate experts. The best he could come up with was that “something on the order of 20 per cent have had some dealing with climate”. (This will not of course stop the BBC calling any old evolutionary biologist or economist who supports its views a “leading climate scientist").

Finally there was the strange case of the vanishing Arctic ice. Just how far Arctic sea-ice is melting or growing is one of the issues which arouses most passionate interest in the global-warming debate. Observers were therefore startled last week to see the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) showing a very dramatic drop in sea-ice cover, 500,000 square kilometres of ice suddenly disappearing in the depths of the Arctic winter. When this was queried by a puzzled Anthony Watts, the NSIDC somewhat shamefacedly admitted that a problem had developed with one of its satellites. The data for the previous 45 days was found to be so faulty that it had been withdrawn. But inevitably this provoked the question as to why quality control seemed to be so poor on one of the world’s leading official sources of climate data that it had taken an outside observer to point out that something was wrong.

This is by no means the first time that data on which the official case for global warming rests have had to be corrected, some of the more notorious instances involving temperature data supplied by Dr Hansen’s GISS. Yet this is one of the four official sources of temperature data on which the IPCC itself relies. When politicians plan measures to “combat climate change” costing tens of trillions of dollars, we can at least expect them to ensure that their figures are halfway believable. Read full post here.

Al Gore, testifying before a Senate Committee on a bitterly cold, snowy late January day in 2009, said the ‘global community’ was facing “the dangerous and growing threat of the climate crisis’. He used the words ‘climate crisis” eight times in his written 15-minute testimony. The text of Gore’s testimony, unlike previous statements by him about the “climate crisis”, contained no scientific information.

Gore now says little in public about the science of climate, because he has been proven wrong on his facts so often in the past. Two years ago a High Court Judge in London ordered the British Government to correct nine “errors” in Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, before allowing innocent schoolchildren to be exposed to it. Gore’s propaganda movie in fact contained at least 35 serious scientific errors.

The Fact-Based Response
There was not, is not, and will not be any “climate crisis” – or, if there is, the human contribution to it will be negligible. In the four years since Gore’s movie was released, global surface temperatures have fallen at a rate equivalent to 6 degrees Celsius per century, enough to usher in an Ice Age if this exceptional and rapid rate of global cooling were to continue as far as 2100.

See larger image here.

The above graph shows the very rapid decline in global mean surface temperatures between January 2005 and December 2008, compared with the range of projections (shown as a pink region) made by the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC, in its 2007 report. The shortfall between the IPCC’s central projection and the real-world decline in temperatures is an astonishing 0.4 Celsius degrees (0.7 F) in only four years. This is hardly the profile of a “climate crisis” caused by “global warming”.

Gore now routinely refers to CO2 as “global warming pollution” - a term he used twice in his presentation to the Senate Committee. However, CO2 is not a pollutant - it is essential food for plants and trees, and, together with water, sunlight, and chlorophyll, it is an essential ingredient in photosynthesis, on which all plant life and hence all life on Earth depends. The chart below, from the US Forest Service, shows the remarkable and very rapid growth in the cubic footage of standing timber in the United States over the past half-century. The additional CO2 in the atmosphere has helped trees and plants to grow at record rates, and has been an important factor in increasing crop yields worldwide.

See larger image here.

Though Gore says “global warming pollution” is getting worse, in fact the atmospheric concentration of CO2 has been increasing at a rate well below the IPCC’s range of official projections.

See larger image here.

For good measure, Gore demands a carbon cap’n’trade system, just as the European system is about to collapse for the second time. The EU’s first attempt ended in ignominious failure when the price of carbon emissions fell below 50 cents/ton. Its second attempt is also now failing, with the price of what the traders on the London market call “hot air” falling below $15/ton. The system has enriched various City of London traders while impoverishing the taxpayers and industries that must pay the prodigious bureaucratic costs of this purposeless and harmful scheme. Read much more here.

See also Lord Monckton’s reply to those who questioned why the July 2008 edition of Physics and Society carries a disclaimer saying that my scientific paper Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered, published in that edition, was “not peer-reviewed”. 

This is the latest NSIDC Northern Hemisphere Arctic sea ice extent. See the sudden dip below the 2007 February level.

But wait a minute. Take a look at the Northern Hemisphere Ice Extent according to the Cryosphere Today which shows a blip up not down

...and an anomaly which is diminishing towards last years and normal.

The anomaly is clearly smaller than February 2007.

AMSR data agrees with Cryosphere with the 2nd or third highest level in the 9 years of record.

Larger image here.

Note: Anthony Watts on Watts Up With That has posted on this issue with a response from Dr. Walt Meier at NSIDC that the error related to satellite imaging dropout, mainly ice in Hudson Bay that went “missing” in the scan. Anthony explains why posting on these data discrepancy, questioned by Dr. Meier is valid.

See also NSIDC’s description of the problem, a failing satellite and why they chose to continue to use the older DMSP SSM/I data satellite data than to go to the newer more reliable and accurate satellite AMSR-E here.

Science Convention Convenes, Gore To Appear. Why do the rank and file AAAS members put up with this?

Says AAAS president James J. McCarthy, “Today, the warming of our planet is unequivocal, and human activities are a primary cause. Within the next few human generations, the effect of these climate changes could put the survival of many species at risk.”

McCarthy’s Annual Meeting theme, “Our Planet and Its Life: Origins and Futures,” recognizes the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, as well as the 150th anniversary of three other events - the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, the first commercial oil well, and Sir John Tyndall’s discovery of carbon dioxide’s greenhouse effect.

Of course, what’s a global warming conference without Mr. Global Warming himself, Al Gore? Gore will be making a special address tomorrow for registered conference attendees. It’s a perfect fit for the inconvenient truther.

AAAS - Annual Meeting - Special Invited Address: Al Gore

“Al Gore has been a world leader in confronting the threat of global climate change, and a staunch supporter of science and technology,” said McCarthy, the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography at Harvard University.

“He was among the very first political leaders to recognize the urgency of unequivocal scientific evidence pointing to global climate change related to human activities,” McCarthy added. “He understands that climate change could soon put the survival of many species at risk, and it affects the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. Moreover, he is also an ardent advocate for the scientific research, technological developments, and policies that will reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. It will be a tremendous honor for the AAAS and AAPT communities to hear his special invited address."Science Convention Convenes, Gore To Appear.  See post here.

This is yet another example of what Bill Gray wrote this week and of what Dr. Lindzen had shown about the back door infiltration of what were once great professional scientific societies (and once great universities like Harvard). 

I had a career in computer software and therefore know that computer models have to be proven.  They should never be used to prove anything.  They can only be used to give a best guess prediction that reflects the beliefs of those who designed the model.  This made me doubt carbon dioxide was causing global warming, because the only proof given was from computer models.  This is not scientific proof.  I have a bachelor’s degree in physics that did not specialize in any particular field of physics.  Instead it gave me a broad knowledge of physics, which includes thermodynamics.  With this little bit of knowledge I did research to answer the questions I had about climate change.  I had 13 questions which I researched.  The results of my research did not solve the question as to what to expect for climate change, but it did give me a better understanding of the causes of climate change.  I would like to share the results of my research with you and the readers of your website. 

I hope this will give a better understanding (on an undergraduate level) of the causes of climate change and stimulate others to research the subject.

1. Burning fossil fuels creates carbon dioxide.  Where did the carbon in fossil fuels come from ?
All the carbon in fossil fuels came from the atmosphere via photosynthesis.  Photosynthesis took carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, energy from sunlight, and water to make biomass.  Overtime the biomass was converted into fossil fuels.  Burning fossil fuels recycles carbon back into the atmosphere from where it came.

2. What are the primary Greenhouse Gases
Water vapor and carbon dioxide are the main greenhouse gases.  Water vapor varies from 0 to 4 percent of the atmosphere.  Water vapor is about 1 percent of the atmosphere.  Carbon dioxide is about .04 percent of the atmosphere.  Water vapor makes up 95 percent of the greenhouse gases.  The warmest temperatures on earth are recorded in the driest deserts where 95 percent of the greenhouse gases are absent.  Why does this happen?

Temperatures rise rapidly where there is an absence of water vapor because a lot of heat energy (latent heat) is required to change ice into water and to change water into water vapor.

Water vapor allows clouds to form, increasing the earth’s albedo (the percentage of radiation reflected into space).  Warming is hindered until the water droplets in the clouds are changed into water vapor.  After the clouds are changed into water vapor temperatures begin to rise more rapidly. Temperature is is a poor indicator of how much heat energy is in the atmosphere.  Humidity and heat capacity must be considered.  The latent heat required to to change water droplets into water vapor is still in the atmosphere, but this latent heat did not change the temperature.

3.  What causes an ICE AGE?
There are many possible causes of ice ages, but the lack of carbon dioxide is not one of them.  Even those who believe carbon dioxide can cause great warming don’t believe the lack of carbon dioxide causes great cooling.

Just as you don’t need a degree in astrophysics to know the sun will rise tomorrow, you don’t need advanced degrees in climatology to know there will be another ice age.  The simple proof is “They have always occurred and they will continue to occur”.  Carbon dioxide has no influence in the matter. Those who want to know more about the most likely cause of ice ages should read about Milankovitch cycles.

David J. Ameling

Read more here and comment back to David via Icecap email.