Yesterday, Andrew Dessler graciously presented his viewpoint on the water vapor feedback (see). Today, I want to respond.

The first issue he raised is

1. Do observations indicate that the water vapor feedback strong and positive?

I completely agree with Andrew that, by itself, added water vapor is a positive feedback. We even see this on the local scale where minimum temperatures do not decrease at night as much when the air overhead is more humid.

However, the net effect of the water vapor feedback requires consideration of the other two phases of water (liquid and solid), in which our understanding is significantly incomplete. Andrew also raises this issue in his comment where he writes “[m]y opinion is that the cloud feedback is the only place where such a large negative feedback can lurk.”

The focus specifically on added CO2, though, as a source of a positive water vapor feedback ignores that any warming of the climate (such as from black carbon; e.g. see and see) must also necessarily result in such a positive water vapor feedback based on Andrew’s conclusions. Similarly, the human climate cooling forcings, such as from sulphates (e.g. see last paragraph), must result in a negative water vapor feedback.  Even the diurnal variation of the Earth’s temperature (e.g. see) would result in positive and negative water vapor feedbacks within a year.

In terms of peer-reviewed papers which examine the water vapor feedback issue, Andrew too quickly dismisses the Wu et al 2009 paper. While this study does focus in the region 5°N-5°S, 150°E-110°W, this is in the El Nino/La Nina region where the relatively high sea surface temperatures means that the water vapor feedback is particularly amplified (evaporation, of course, is proportional to the exponent of temperature). Slight changes in temperature in this region have a disproportionately larger effect than the same temperature change would have when the water surface is cold.

There are also studies which do not show a concurrent warming and moistening of the atmosphere, at least on the regional scale; see

Wang, J.-W., K. Wang, R.A. Pielke, J.C. Lin, and T. Matsui, 2008: Towards a robust test on North America warming trend and precipitable water content increase. Geophys. Res. Letts., 35, L18804, doi:10.1029/2008GL034564,

as well as vertical profiles of total column water vapor which do not show a long term moistening trend at particular sampling locations; e.g. see the figure provided by F. M. Mims III in

Climate Metric Reality Check #3 - Evidence For A Lack Of Water Vapor Feedback On The Regional Scale

There is also a fundamental issue with overstating the role of water vapor as a positive feedback. If the feedbacks are positive, the resulting radiative imbalance should be greater than the sum of the radiative forcings.  I discussed this, for example, in my posts

The Net Climate Feedbacks Must Be A Negative Effect On The Global Average Radiative Imbalance If The IPCC Conclusion Of Net Anthropogenic Radiative Forcings Is Correct

Climate Metric Reality Check #1 - The Sum Of Climate Forcings and Feedbacks Is Less Than The 2007 IPCC Best Estimate Of Human Climate Forcing Of Global Warming

I wrote in the above post

“One of the issues is whether climate feedbacks amplify or mute radiative forcings caused by human activities. The IPCC asserts that climate feedbacks in fact amplify the human effect. We can test this assertion using observational data.

If the magnitude of the IPCC estimates of radiative forcings from human causes are greater than or equal to the sum of the total observed radiative forcings and feedbacks (i.e. the total climate system radiative imbalance), then the feedbacks have actually reduced the effect of radiative forcings caused by human activities. By contrast, if the magnitude of radiative forcing caused by humans is less than the sum of the total observed radiative forcings and feedbacks than the feedbacks have amplified the human radiative forcings.

... the information that is used [to examine this] is

1. Total Radiative Forcing from Human Causes

The radiative forcings from human causes are provided by the 2007 IPCC Report [see page 4 of the Statement for Policymakers; Fig. SPM.2].

Their value is +1.6 [with a range of +0.6 to +2.4 Watts per meter squared]

This value, as reported in a footnote in the IPCC report, is supposed to be a difference with between current and pre-industrial values (but note that that this is not what is stated in the figure caption).

2. Total Observed Radiative Forcings and Feedbacks

Ocean heat content data can be used to diagnose the actual observed climate forcings and feedbacks [Pielke Sr., R.A., 2003: Heat storage within the Earth system]. Here I will use Jim Hansen’s value for the end of the 1990s of

+0.85 Watts per meter squared

(even though this is probably an overstatement (see)).

Thus, the total observed radiative forcing and feedback of 0.85 W/m^2 lies below the IPCC central estimate of 1.6 W/m^2 for just the human contribution to radiative forcing. This suggests that the climate feedbacks most likely act to diminish the effects of human contributions to radiative forcing, though it is important to recognize that a small part of the IPCC range (0.6 to 0.85) falls under the observed value from the work of Hansen.

This suggests that, at least up to the present, the effect of human climate forcings on global warming has been more muted than predicted by the global climate models.

This issue was inadequately discussed by the 2007 IPCC report. Climate Science has weblogged on this in the past (e.g. see), but so far this rather obvious issue has been ignored.

The second question is

2. Do models adequately reproduce the observed feedback?

There have been a number of studies which raise questions on the robustness of the IPCC-type models to skillfully represent the water vapor feedback. I reported on one study in my post

Major Issues With The Realism Of The IPCC Models Reported By Graeme Stephens Of Colorado State University

Among the findings that Graeme Stephens reported are

Model low, warm cloud optical and radiative properties are significantly different (biased) compared to those observed - two factors contribute to this extreme (bright) bias; the LWP [liquid water path] is one, particle size is another.

Models contain grave biases in low cloud radiative properties that bring into question the fidelity of feedbacks in models

While I believe the changes that are likely to occur are primarily driven by changes in the large scale atmospheric flows, we have to conclude our models have little or no ability to make credible projections about the changing character of rain and cannot conclusively test this hypothesis.

The paper Wang et al 2009 that I posted on (see) on this subject is another study which raises serious issues with the modeling of the water vapor feedback.

Thus, the magnitude of the water vapor feedback, when clouds and precipitation are included, along with other climate system feedbacks, such as atmospheric-ocean interfacial fluxes, remains an incompletely understood subject.

I thank again Professor Dessler for engaging in a constructive dialog on this subject. See post here.

Michael Mann’s Dec. 31 Letter to the Editor, ”Science Journals Must be Unpolluted by Politics,” states that I falsely claimed that work by me and “other fossil-fuel-funded climate change contrarians” has been “unfairly blocked . . . from appearing in mainstream science journals.”

In fact, this started nearly 20 years ago, when Stephen Schneider, the editor of Climatic Change, rejected a manuscript of mine reconstructing upper-air data, saying that its “counter-paradigm” nature required that it be subject to more vigorous peer review than other submissions.

Prof. Mann claims that other “skeptics” (whatever that means), such as University of Alabama’s John Christy, have “no problem” with the mainstream journals. Prof. Christy recently documented a remarkable series of publication irregularities directed against him and other scientists, revealed in the climategate emails.

Recently, Roger Pielke Jr., director of the University of Colorado’s Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, noted a series of “effort[s] by activist climate scientists to stage-manage the peer review process much like how one might manage a partisan blog for public consumption.” One of his sources is again climategate, which is rife with threats to boycott a journal that dared to publish papers that Prof. Mann and his friends disagreed with.

In passing, I would note that the University of Virginia, where I worked for nearly 30 years, has rather rigorous standards for promoting scientists like myself through the academic ranks. Instead, Prof. Mann cites President Barack Obama’s science adviser John Holdren as an authority on my work, all the while arguing for keeping science “unpolluted by politics”!

Patrick J. Michaels
George Mason University
Fairfax, Va.

Comments:

Prof. Mann claims that credible climate skeptics such as John Christy have had no problem publishing their work in mainstream scientific journals. But look at what Prof. Christy and co-author David Douglass wrote in Americanthinker.com on Dec. 20 about the extraordinary 11-month delay one of their recent papers encountered after its initial acceptance for publication:

“The CRU emails have revealed how the normal conventions of the peer review process appear to have been compromised by a team of global warming scientists, with the willing cooperation of the editor of the International Journal of Climatology (IJC), Glenn McGregor. The team spent nearly a year preparing and publishing a paper that attempted to rebut a previously published paper in IJC by Douglass, Christy, Pearson and Singer (DCPS). The DCPS paper, reviewed and accepted in the traditional manner, had shown that the IPCC models that predicted significant ‘global warming’ in fact largely disagreed with the observational data.

“We will let the reader judge whether this team effort, revealed in dozens of emails and taking nearly a year, involves inappropriate behavior including (a) unusual cooperation between authors and editor, (b) misstatement of known facts, (c) character assassination, (d) avoidance of traditional scientific give-and-take, (e) using confidential information, (f) misrepresentation (or misunderstanding) of the scientific question posed by DCPS, (g) withholding data, and more.”

George S. Taylor
Los Altos, Calif.

Prof. Mann’s rebuke of Patrick Michaels’s claim that his work was not published in peer reviewed scientific journals made me chuckle. Before being discredited, Prof. Mann’s infamous and misleading “hockey stick” graph of a thousand years of climate change was widely published and included in an IPPC report. It was Prof. Michaels and others who provided the statistical evidence demonstrating that Prof. Mann’s graph omitted both the Medieval Warming Period (where it was as warm or warmer than today) and the Little Ice Age.

Dean C. Coddington
Greenwood Village, Colo.

COMPARE THE TWO MAPS

Enlarged here.

Enlarged here.

South America: The vast majority of the continent is near average or below average in the NEO map, but according to GISS only the southern tip of the region is colder. The most striking difference is Northeast Brazil: colder in the NEO map and warmer at the GISS.

Africa: Most of the continent is colder than average in the NEO map, but in the GISS most of Africa is warmer than average.

Australia: The Western part of the country is colder than average in the NEO map, but the entire country is warmer in the GISS map.

Russia: Most of the country is colder than average in the NEO map, a much larger area of colder anomalies that presented in the GISS map.

India: Colder than average at NASA’s NEO website and warmer at NASA’s GISS map.

Middle East: Huge areas of the region (Israel, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq, Syria) are colder than average in the NEO map and average/warmer in the GISS map.

Europe: Near average or slightly above average in the NEO map and much above average in the GISS map.

Greenland: Entire region colder than average at NEO and much of the area warmer at GISS.

Same source (NASA), but very different maps !!!

Why:

At NEO, land surface maps show where Earth’s surface was warmer or cooler in the daytime than the average temperatures for the same week or month from 2000-2008. So, a land surface temperature anomaly map for November 2009 shows how that month’s average temperature was different from the average temperature for all Novembers between 2000 and 2008.

Conclusion

Despite being very warm compared to the long term averages (GISS, UAH, etc), November 2009 was colder in large areas of the planet if compared to this decade average.

See PDF here. December should be very interesting in the northern hemisphere.

Anthony Watts posted the high res view of the NASA NEO MODIS satellite imager depiction of the mid December cold in Eurasia.

See the supersized version here.

Aside from ideologues, hydrocarbon haters, Gaia worshipers, profiteers and power-grabbing politicians, most of the sentient world is beginning to realize that the hysteria over global warming disasters is based on dubious to fraudulent temperature data, analyses, models, reports and peer reviews.

Climate Research Unit emails, HARRY_READ_ME.txt computer memos, and blatant tampering with Australian, Russian, UK and US temperature data make the scandal impossible to ignore or explain away. They also helped ensure that Copenhagen descended into an expensive, carbon-emitting gabfest - and that China and India rejected any deal that would force them to curtail their energy generation, economic growth and poverty reduction programs.

Senator Barbara Boxer is an exception. She is ignoring the obvious and doing her best to divert attention from the scandal, circle the alarmist wagons, cover up the fraud, obstruct justice - and ram through another legislative power grab.

“This isn’t Climategate,” the California Democrat insists. “It’s email theft gate.” The problem isn’t the fraud; it’s that a hacker or whistleblower revealed the fraud.

She needs to wake up and smell the cesspool. It’s not theft gate. It’s Taxpayer Robbery Gate.

We, the taxpayers, We the people - paid for this bogus “research.” We paid billions of dollars for it - and providing the data, computer codes and analytical methods is a condition of the employment and research grants for these scientists. The work belongs to us. We own it.

We the People, our elected representatives and our climate realist scientists have a right to examine this supposed evidence of planetary disaster, to ensure that it’s driven by science, and not ideology. That it’s complete, accurate - and honest. That it backs up the alarmist scientists’ call for draconian, life-altering restrictions on energy use. That the CRU cabal did not alter, lose, ignore, toss or destroy “inconvenient” data and evidence that might get in the way of their agendas and predetermined results.

Not only were we stonewalled for years, while these UK and US scientists refused to divulge their data, computer codes and methodologies. Not only did the scientists who wrote these emails and did this phony research refuse to let taxpayers, other scientists, and even members of Congress and Parliament see their raw data and analyses. Not only did they prevent debate and replace peer review with a perverted system that allowed only a small network of like-minded colleagues to examine - and applaud - their work. They also excluded, denounced and vilified anyone who asked hard questions or challenged their actions.

In short, they robbed us! They took our money, and defrauded us.

Even worse, the Taxpayer Robbery Gate scientists are working hand-in-glove to pressure the United States, Great Britain and world into spending trillions of dollars fighting “catastrophic manmade climate change”...slashing our energy use, living standards and employment base...enacting unaccountable global government...redistributing wealth and technology...restricting our liberties and civil rights...and keeping millions of families deprived of energy and in permanent destitution.

This is the same California Senator who berated an Air Force general for calling her Ma’am. Who treated scientist, physician and author Michael Crichton like a child molester, for daring to disagree with her on global warming and suggest that double-blind climate studies would guard against errors and fraud. Who displays an un-American intolerance for any witnesses who question her views.

The Boxer-White House effort makes the Watergate cover-up and obstruction of justice look like a juvenile prank. It’s paving the way for cap-tax-and-trade laws that would nationalize the entire US economy - by the same divisive, dictatorial elements that are nationalizing our banking and healthcare systems. They understand, even if the general populace still does not, that by controlling carbon they will control our lives.

Just imagine the Boxer, White House and media outcry and denunciations if these emails and fraudulent actions had involved oil companies and climate disaster “deniers.” But of course, if Boxer & Co. didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have any standards.

“We’re honest. We have nothing to hide,” the accused scientists keep saying. That’s wonderful. But then they need to back up their protestations with action.

They need to come clean. Stop manipulating data and hiding documents and emails. Cooperate with investigators. Honor FOIA requests. Share data and computer codes. Stop attacking scientists who disagree with them. Make all climate studies, for and against manmade global warming disaster claims, subject to real peer review and open to public examination. They need to engage in full-blown public debates with climate change realists and skeptics.

The profiteering scientists, their highly suspect work and the institutions that sponsor them need to be investigated - thoroughly, by an independent, incorruptible team of knowledgeable scientists, modelers, statisticians and law enforcement officials. If they are convicted, they need to be penalized for defrauding and robbing us. They deserve jail time, dismissal and permanent bans from any future federal grants to them, their research labs and their universities or government offices.

The hacker or whistleblower should get a Congressional Medal of Freedom or Nobel Peace Prize - not a congressional investigation. At the very least, he has revealed how petty, shameful and corrupt the four-alarm climate “research” establishment is, and how the hypothesis of manmade climate chaos is a house of cards built on a foundation of sand. In so doing, he may have prevented further unjust enrichment of the perpetrators of this billion-dollar funding and science scam. 

This bogus science is behind every US, EU and UN proposal to restrict and control our energy, economy, living standards and fundamental liberties - in the name of preventing computer-conjured global warming disasters. By inaugurating Climategate, the whistleblower may have forestalled or prevented wars over increasingly scarce energy and resources caused by this phony science.

We need to start over on the global warming science - with honest scientists who do everything in the open. Or just scrap the entire process, accept that climate change is mostly natural and cyclical, and adapt to it the same way our ancestors did, using the wealth and technology that hydrocarbon fuels have given us. 

Paul Driessen is senior policy adviser for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), which sponsors the All Pain No Gain education campaign and petition against job-killing global warming policies, and the ClimateDepot website for the latest news and views on climate change. He is also a senior policy adviser to the Congress of Racial Equality and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power - Black Death.

One of the Climategate texts that has attracted considerable commentary is:

“The other paper by MM is just garbage. I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !”

The “community“‘s response to this has been: move along, there’s nothing to see. A typical defence is that of Ronald Prinn of MIT (e.g. here around minute 48) and others) that improper peer review activities by CRU and their associates didn’t “matter” because McIntyre and McKitrick were discussed by IPCC after all:

“Five papers by McIntyre and McKitrick were published and then referenced and discussed in the IPCC.”

In yesterday’s post here, I showed that the Climategate letters showed gatekeeping incidents that had nothing to do with McIntyre and McKitrick - even preceding our entry onto the scene. In this post, I’m going to place the money quote in context, showing that Jones and Trenberth did in fact live up to their threats, breaching other IPCC rules along the way.

First of all, contrary to the statement by Prinn (and others), the paper being threatened was not a McIntyre and McKitrick paper; it was McKitrick and Michaels (Climate Research 2004). Citation of McIntyre and McKitrick papers in the paleoclimate chapter obviously had nothing whatever to do with Jones’ threats about the handling of the McKitrick and Michaels paper in the observation chapter edited by Kevin Trenberth and himself ("Kevin and I").

[Dec 18 Amended timeline h/t Chip Knappenberg] The paper in question (McKitrick and Michaels Clim Res 2004) online here was submitted in July 2003 and accepted on Apr 20, 2004. McKitrick and Michaels submitted what Jones later calls and “expanded” version of this paper to International Journal of Climatology in May 2004, which was then assigned to Andrew Comrie of the University of Arizona. Comrie sought a review from the omnipresent Phil Jones (and apparently two others). The submission was rejected. See these emails here and here.

Contrary to the spin of Prinn and others, it is a matter of fact that Trenberth and Jones kept Michaels and McKitrick (2004) out of the AR4 First Draft. (I searched and confirmed this.) As an IPCC peer reviewer, McKitrick and another reviewer (Vincent Grey) vigorously objected to the exclusion.

Trenberth and Jones flatly rejected their comments. The following is one example. Consult the AR4 First Order Draft Review Comments for others.

“References are plentiful. Those of value are cited Rejected. The locations of socioeconomic development happen to have coincided with maximum warming, not for the reason given by McKitrick and Michaels (2004) but because of the strengthening of the Arctic Oscillation and the greater sensitivity of land than ocean to greenhouse forcing owing to the smaller thermal capacity of land.”

Ross tells me that there was no peer reviewed literature at the time (or to this day) specifically supporting the Trenberth and Jones attribution of the effect to the “strengthening of the Arctic Oscillation”.

In the Second Order Draft, Trenberth and Jones were once again successful in keeping Michaels and McKitrick (2004) out of the IPCC Draft. Once again, as IPCC peer reviewers, McKitrick and Grey objected and once again, the Trenberth and Jones Author Responses were dismissive. For example:

Rejected. McKitrick and Michaels (2004) is full of errors. There are many more papers in support of the statement than against it.”
Or again:

“The locations of socioeconomic development happen to have coincided with maximum warming, not for the reason given by McKitrick and Michaels (2004) but because of the strengthening of the Arctic Oscillation and the greater sensitivity of land than ocean to greenhouse forcing owing to the smaller thermal capacity of land.

Readers who wish to canvass all the comments can search the Review Comments at the above links.

However, there was a complication for Jones and Trenberth, who had thus far been successful in carrying out their threat. This time, there was a second article (de Laat and Maurelis. IJC 2006) making very similar arguments to McKitrick and Michaels. Not only is there another article, this time, Trenberth and Jones say that they actually read the “full” article, punctuating this herculean effort with an exclamation mark:

Trenberth and Jones say in one Author Response:

“Noted. We have also read the full de Laat and Maurellis, International Journal of Climatology, 26, 897-913(2006) paper!”

The sacrifices that climate scientists are prepared to make on behalf of the rest of the society. Such exemplary due diligence - reading the “full” article.

This time, Trenberth and Jones grudgingly agreed to mention the two articles in the IPCC report. However, they accompanied the mention with an extremely dismissive characterization - a characterization which (1) was made without any citation to peer reviewed literature and (2) that had not itself been submitted to external IPCC peer reviewers; and (3) to which McKitrick and Michaels had no previous opportunity to reply. (The Review Comments were not placed online until after AR4 publication and then only because of a concerted Climate Audit effort.) AR4:

“McKitrick and Michaels (2004) and De Laat and Maurellis (2006) attempted to demonstrate that geographical patterns of warming trends over land are strongly correlated with geographical patterns of industrial and socioeconomic development, implying that urbanisation and related land surface changes have caused much of the observed warming. However, the locations of greatest socioeconomic development are also those that have been most warmed by atmospheric circulation changes (Sections 3.2.2.7 and 3.6.4), which exhibit large-scale coherence. Hence, the correlation of warming with industrial and socioeconomic development ceases to be statistically significant. In addition, observed warming has been, and transient greenhouse-induced warming is expected to be, greater over land than over the oceans (Chapter 10), owing to the smaller thermal capacity of the land.”

Despite the IPCC (Jones and Trenberth) claim that the results “cease to be statistically significant”, Ross tells me that this is not the case and that there is no peer reviewed literature supporting this claim. Ross has attempted to respond to the IPCC (Jones and Trenberth) claims, but that’s a story for another day.

Summary

This episode raises a couple of issues, aside from the unhelpful preparedness of climate scientists like Prinn to spin bits of information without troubling to investigate the facts. Jones and Trenberth clearly lived up to the threat to keep McKitrick and Michaels 2004 out of the IPCC AR4 First and Second Drafts, and when that effort foundered somewhat with the addition of de Laat and Maurelis 2006, they inserted a dismissive editorial comment that was not supported by any reference to peer reviewed literature and which had not been itself subjected to the formal IPCC process.

While there are other cases of comments being added in the Final Draft to deal with review comments to the Second Draft, there was no reason for the distortion of the IPCC procedure in this particular case, other than the prior deliberate effort to keep the McKitrick and Michaels article out of the IPCC report.

Move along, nothing to see? I don’t think so.

Sidebar

There’s a curious sidebar to this affair. It is my understanding that reviewers for a journal have a duty of confidentiality to both the journal and to the original author. (Not all duties of confidentiality are reciprocal; I’m not convinced that authors have a duty to the journals to maintain the confidentiality, but that’s a different and interesting issue that we can discuss on another occasion.)

As noted above, Jones acted as a reviewer of the first McKitrick and Michaels submission to IJC. Watch Jones and Mann in August 2004.

When the lights are brightened on Aug 13, 2004, Jones has just sent Mann a copy of the McKitrick and Michaels IJC submission (that Jones had received on a confidential basis for the purposes of review) and is looking for his review of the IJC submission:

Mike,
The paper ! Now to find my review. I did suggest to Andrew to find 3 reviewers.
Phil

Mann writes back wondering whether he could use this information (confidential to others) to further his career at the University of Virginia by “bolstering the case against MM”.

Thanks a bunch Phil,

thanks,
mike

I presume that, in this case, “MM” would seem to be the McIntyre and McKitrick submission to Nature that had been rejected only one week earlier and that Mann wants to use the rejection of the Michaels and McKitrick article on a totally unrelated topic to buttress his defence against the McIntyre and McKitrick criticism of MBH. (At the Team often tried to conflate McKitrick and Michaels with McIntyre and McKitrick, but that’s another story.)

In any event, Jones writes back apparently suggesting that Mann only provide his committee chair with an excerpt of Comrie’s editor comments (provided to Jones in confidence for a different purpose).

Mike,

Cheers
Phil

At this point, the lights go down again.

We’ve all pretty much had it up to our keesters with the brusque and dismissive treatment that commenters who don’t agree with the RC world view get over there. This is why many of us have simply given up trying, there’s no point in attempting to have a relevant and open discussion there anymore.

It should be foremost on the minds of many that the RealClimate.org webserver domain is funded by Fenton Communications, an eco media group. Further, our tax dollars pay the salaries of people like Dr. Gavin Schmidt of NASA GISS who has been (according to several post and comment times noted) using his taxpayer paid time at work to participate in that blog.

One of the missions of RC (Actually most of the mission, as it was setup as a response to the McIntyre and McKitrick paper in E&E, ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT VOLUME 14 NUMBER 6, November 1st 2003) is to counter skeptical arguments. One of the ways they do this in to provide a list of people they disagree with, with links to rebuttals.

Long before RC went online, we have this 10/31/2003 email from Michael Mann, excerpt:

Lets let our supporters in higher places use our scientific response to push the broader case against MM. So I look forward to peoples attempts to revise the first part in particular.

Steve McIntyre started ClimateAudit on 10/26/2004. Here is his very first blog post. RealClimate.org was registered November 19th, 2004 - see the WHOIS screencap.

Today, while searching for something else, I found myself looking at this list. It reads like a who’s who of climate skeptics, but for one telling and glaring omission.

Here’s the list at RCWiki done as a screencap below and to a PDF file , so that Gavin or Mike or some other team member can’t fix it fast and then claim I ‘simply didn’t see it”.

Note who is missing from this section of the list. Steve McIntyre is missing. Ross McKitrick is missing.

Why?

Because Gavin and Mike and the other Team members know that M&M is right, and they don’t want to draw any attention to it themselves, particularly now. They don’t want RC to have a discussion on the faulty dendro and dubious statistical issues that are fairly presented in peer review by M&M, even though there has been a concerted effort by Team members and associates to stifle publication of dissenting views.

RC and in particular Mann, don’t want to focus on the data, statistical failures, or process, but instead on the “stolen emails” and how they “don’t change the conclusion”. It’s spin cycle science.

A way RC might try to spin this omission would be to say that they don’t consider the argument of M&M valid or prominent, but that won’t fly because they have dismissals listed there of arguments many lesser known skeptics, who have not published a peer reviewed paper, such as Lucy Skywalker. That’s nothing against you Lucy, just an example.

Inarguably, McIntyre and McKitrick are now the two most well known skeptics on the planet, and they are about to become even more well known with a Fox News special tonight (Sunday 9pm EST) and again Wednesday.

Yet RC’s world view of Climategate and M&M’s vindication in the emails revealed is to say “it doesn’t matter”, it doesn’t change the conclusions of climate science.” Yeah right, just keep singing that tune.

What Climategate shows more than anything is that the climate science process has been corrupted by a few people with influence, and RC is the centerpiece for showcasing the Team consensus of that corruption. See post and comments here.

It’s clear that the world was warmer during medieval times. Marked on the map are study after study (all peer-reviewed) from all around the world with results of temperatures from the medieval time compared to today. These use ice cores, stalagmites, sediments, and isotopes. They agree with 6,144 boreholes around the world which found that temperatures were about 0.5C warmer worldwide (below, enlarged here).

What follows is a sordid tale of a graph that overthrew decades of work, conveniently fitted the climate models, and was lauded triumphantly in glossy publication after publication. But then it was crushed when an unpaid analyst stripped it bare. It had been published in the highest most prestigious journal, Nature, but no one had checked it before or after it was spread far and wide. Not Nature, not the IPCC, not any other climate researcher.

In 1995 everyone agreed the world was warmer in medieval times, but CO2 was low then and that didn’t fit with climate models. In 1998, suddenly Michael Mann ignored the other studies and produced a graph that scared the world - tree rings show the “1990s was the hottest decade for a thousand years”. Now temperatures exactly “fit” the rise in carbon! The IPCC used the graph all over their 2001 report. Government departments copied it. The media told everyone.

But Steven McIntyre was suspicious. He wanted to verify it, yet Mann repeatedly refused to provide his data or methods - normally a basic requirement of any scientific paper. It took legal action to get the information that should have been freely available. Within days McIntyre showed that the statistics were so flawed that you could feed in random data, like stock prices, and still make the same hockey stick shape nine times out of ten. Mann had left out some tree rings he said he’d included. If someone did a graph like this in a stock prospectus, they would be jailed (below, enlarged here).

Astonishingly, Nature refused to publish the correction. The correction was published elsewhere, and backed up by the Wegman Report, an independent committee of statistical experts.

In 2009 McIntyre did it again with Briffa’s Hockey Stick. After asking and waiting three years for the data, it took just three days to expose it too as baseless. For nine years Briffa had concealed that he only had 12 trees in the sample from 1990 onwards, and that one freakish tree virtually transformed the graph. When McIntyre graphed another 34 trees from the same region of Russia, there was no Hockey Stick (below, enlarged here).

The sharp upward swing of the graph was due to one single tree in Yamal. Epic cherry-picking! Skeptical scientists have literally hundreds of samples. Unskeptical scientists have one tree in Yamal, and a few flawed bristlecones. It was an audacious fraud.

CLIMATE MODELS DON’T KNOW WHY IT WAS WARMER 800 YEARS AGO.

THE MODELS ARE WRONG.

The so-called “expert review” is meaningless. The IPCC say 2,500 experts review their reports, but those same “experts” made the baseless Hockey Stick graph their logo in 2001.

Craig Loehle used 18 other non-tree-ring proxies (above, enlarged here). Temperatures were higher 1000 years ago, and cooler 300 years ago. We started warming long before cars and powerstations were invented. There’s little correlation with CO2 levels.

Read more here. See note to PSU from state senator about Michael Mann here.

Al Gore has made bold claims that climate change is aiding the spread of insect-borne diseases. The science does not support him, says Paul Reiter.

I am a scientist, not a climatologist, so I don’t dabble in climatology. My speciality is the epidemiology of mosquito-borne diseases. As the film began, I knew Mr Gore would get to mosquitoes: they’re a favourite with climate-change activists. When he got to them, it was all I feared.

In his serious voice, Mr Gore presented a nifty animation, a band of little mosquitoes fluttering their way up the slopes of a snow-capped mountain, and he repeated the old line: Nairobi used to be ‘above the mosquito line, the limit at which mosquitoes can survive, but now...’Those little mosquitoes kept climbing.’

The truth? Nairobi means ‘the place of cool waters’ in the Masai language. The town grew up around a camp, set up in 1899 during the construction of a railway, the famous ‘Lunatic Express’. There certainly was water there - and mosquitoes. From the start, the place was plagued with malaria, so much so that a few years later doctors tried to have the whole town moved to a healthier place. By 1927, the disease had become such a plague in the ‘White Highlands’ that 40,000 pounds (equivalent to about 350,000 today) was earmarked for malaria control. The authorities understood the root of the problem: forest clearance had created the perfect breeding places for mosquitoes. The disease was present as high as 2,500m above sea level; the mosquitoes were observed at 3,000m. And Nairobi? 1,680m.

These details are not science. They require no study. They are history. But for activists, they are an inconvenient truth, so they ignore them. Even if Mr Gore is innocent, his advisers are not. They have been spouting the same nonsense for more than a decade. As scientists, we have repeatedly challenged them in the scientific press, at meetings and in news articles, and we have been ignored.

In 2004, nine of us published an appeal in the Lancet: ‘Malaria and climate change: a call for accuracy’. Clearly, Mr Gore didn’t read it. In 2000, I protested when Scientific American published a major article loaded with the usual misrepresentations. And when I watched his animated mosquitoes, his snow-capped mountain was oddly familiar. It took a few moments to click: the images were virtually identical to those in the magazine. The author of the article, Dr Paul Epstein, features high in Gore’s credits.

Dr Epstein is a member of a small band dedicated to a cause. And their work gains legitimacy, not by scholarship, but by repetition. While they publish their work in highly regarded journals, they don’t write research papers but opinion pieces and reviews, with little or no reference to the mainstream of science. The same claims, the same names; only the order of authors change. I have counted 48 separate pieces by just eight activists. They are myth-makers. And all have been lead authors and/or contributory authors of the prestigious IPCC assessment reports.

Take their contention, for example, that as a result of climate change, tropical diseases will move to temperate regions and malaria will come to Britain. If they bothered to learn about the subject, they would know that in a period climatologists call the Little Ice Age, when Charles II held ice parties on the Thames, malaria - ‘the ague’ - was rampant in the Essex marshes, on a par even with regions in Africa today. In the 18th century, the great systematist Linnaeus wrote his doctorate on malaria in central Sweden. In 1922-23 a massive epidemic swept the Soviet Union as far north as Archangel, on the Arctic circle, killing an estimated 600,000 people. And malaria was only eliminated from the Soviet Union and large areas of Europe in the 1950s, after the advent of DDT. So it’s hardly a tropical disease. And yet when we put this information under the noses of the activists it is ignored: ours is the inconvenient truth.

The activists also claim that malaria is already increasing in sub-Saharan Africa because of climate change, and that the people who are attacked by our climatic transgressions are those least able to defend themselves.

Science has a different angle. In the first place, malaria in most of sub-Saharan Africa is ‘stable’: everyone gets bitten by infective mosquitoes every year, sometimes as many as 300 times. So it is absurd to claim that climate change will increase the rate of infection; you cannot add water to a glass that’s already full.

On the other hand, in regions where malaria is newly arrived, or has emerged after a period of remission, a plethora of interacting factors are at play, including forest clearance, irrigation, the mobility of people, urbanisation, resistance to insecticides and antimalarial drugs, the Aids epidemic, population increase, the degradation of public health infrastructures, and war and civil strife. Most of all: poverty. Poverty and malaria go hand in hand. There is no evidence or need to implicate temperature. Read more here.