![WeatherShop.com Gifts, gadgets, weather stations, software and more...click here!\](http://www.clixtrac.com/banner/31785.jpg "\\"WeatherShop.com")
By Rachel Moran, Saturday, 10 September 2011
Late last month, without much fanfare, scientific titan CERN released new evidence that could dramatically alter the balance of the global warming debate. Potentially vindicating the Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark, new CERN research from their CLOUD project demonstrates that cosmic rays provide a seed for clouds. As a result tiny changes in the earth’s cloud cover could account for the earth’s variations in temperature. Such a revelation throws into question whether anthropogenic global warming is actually happening, or whether cosmic rays and the sun are the dominant controllers of the earth’s climate.
Such an important discovery should surely be big news. However CERN’s Director General has attempted to play down the study and it’s potential conclusions in order to avoid “the highly political arena of the climate change debate.” So, instead of what should be a debate concerning the causes of global warming we are struck by an entirely different debate, the autonomy of scientists who receive government funding. CERN receives millions of euros in funding from it’s member states, the top three being Germany, France and UK, a list which is ever growing as more countries clamour to join the well-respected establishment. However such government funding undermines the very credibility that makes CERN the scientific goliath it claims to be. Nigel Calder makes a similar point, arguing that:
“CERN has joined a long line of lesser institutions obliged to remain politically correct about the man-made global warming hypothesis. It’s OK to enter “the highly political arena of the climate change debate” provided your results endorse man-made warming, but not if they support Svensmark’s heresy that the Sun alters the climate by influencing the cosmic ray influx and cloud formation. The once illustrious CERN laboratory ceases to be a truly scientific institute when its Director General forbids its physicists and visiting experimenters to draw the obvious scientific conclusions from their results.”
The scientists behind the CLOUD experiment have been in a battle for over a decade to continue and publish the results of the project due to their state-funded position.
Jasper Kirby, a CERN scientist, postulated back in 1998 that the cosmic ray theory would “probably be able to account for somewhere between a half and the whole of the increase in the Earth’s temperature that we have seen in the last century.” This admittance of a hypothetical alternative to anthropogenic theories was apparently a step too far for global warming activists who pressured the Western governments that control CERN’s funding to suspend the project. It is only after a decade of negotiation that the project was allowed to continue, and even now it’s results are being stifled by a need to placate political influences. As a result last week’s CLOUD paper perhaps reveals more about the distortion of science by government intervention than it highlights any real scientific breakthrough.
-----------
COMMENTS:
Bridgett Hollowell
It is all quite silly isn’t it. The point is we are causing most of the problems, by the way in which we have disrespected the earth and its resources. Eventually, the earth is going to strike back. Call it what you will, the song remains the same.
On the road to hell
So we did not break the ‘Establishment’s’ control of science, post Galileo, after all. The road to ruin beckons without impediment now.
Alister McFarquhar
This is a vital blog not just because economic recovery will be even more prolonged because of the Carbon Scam which I have been promulgating here for a decade if not since last century.
The evidence, dodgy as manipulated temperature is, shows no support for the notion that man is influencing measurably climate, or that climate change is abnormal. Many including Caldwell know of the evidence that Sun affects climate. It didnt require extravagant CERN to demonstrate this.
What this shows is that Science if not dead as a Python Parrot is rapidily dying as it depends increasingly on Government for funds. So the results of science are increasingly political fodder. Galileo showed this politicision of science is not unique. But the post WW2 enlightenment associated with Popperian falsifications seems past. Sociology and philosophy have made science relative like morality and so irrelevant-just a branch of politics.
In deference to the masochistic Malthusiasm of the first comment, reality on climate does not mean mans damage to the environment should escape constant scrutiny. Falsifying evidence as in Carbon Scam will make this scrutiny less likely as folk take science with a fistful of salt.
Alister McFarquhar, M.A.,Ph.D.[Downing], Cambridge.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Contact: Paul Chesser, Executive Director, paul.chesser@atinstitute.org
Dr. Michael Mann, lead author of the discredited “hockey stick” graph that was once hailed by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as the “smoking gun” of the catastrophic man-made global warming theory, has asked to intervene in American Tradition Institute’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that seeks certain records produced by Mann and others while he was at the University of Virginia, for the purpose of keeping them hidden from the taxpayer.
Specifically over the weekend ATI’s Environmental Law Center received service from two Pennsylvania attorneys who seek the court’s permission to argue for Dr. Mann to intervene in ATI’s case. The attorneys also filed a motion to stay production of documents still withheld by UVA, which are to be provided to ATI’s lawyers in roughly two weeks under a protective order that UVA voluntarily agreed to in May. Dr. Mann’s lawyers also desire a hearing in mid-September, in an effort to further delay UVA’s scheduled production of records under the order.
Dr. Mann’s argument, distilled, is that the court must bend the rules to allow him to block implementation of a transparency law, so as to shield his sensibilities from offense once the taxpayer - on whose dime he subsists - sees the methods he employed to advance the global warming theory and related policies. ATI’s Environmental Law Center is not sympathetic.
“Dr. Mann’s late-hour tactics offer the spectacle of someone who relies on the media’s repeats of his untrue claims of having been ‘investigated’ and ‘exonerated’ - that is, when he’s not sputtering ad hominem and conspiracy theories to change the subject,” said Christopher Horner, director of litigation for ATI’s Environmental Law Center. “Mann has tried whatever means possible to ensure he remains free of any serious scrutiny, and this just appears to be his last gasp.”
Dr. Mann’s move is therefore gratifying, and ATI will agree to his out-of-state lawyers’ motion to appear. But ATI will ask the court to uphold Virginia’s abundantly clear law, that Dr. Mann has no interest in records that are purely the property of the taxpayer.
ATI will present to the court how Dr. Mann understood, as an unambiguous and agreed-upon condition of his employment, that he had no expectation of privacy when he used UVA’s public email system. ATI therefore looks forward to seeing if, given the opportunity, UVA will defend the idea that any of its own policies be upheld in court. Since Dr. Mann has no property interest in the taxpayer-owned records sought by ATI, he has no standing and therefore should not be entered in the case. Dr. Mann wants, after the fact, for UVA to throw out policies he accepted as a condition of living off of taxpayer dollars, in order to cover up public information and to evade scrutiny.
To the extent Dr. Mann, the university, or their obstructionist backers like Union of Concerned Scientists continue to argue he has been “cleared” or “exonerated,” or that any substantive investigation has taken place, those pleadings are undermined by their persistent efforts to squelch inquiry. As a result, all the public sees is an effort to sweep Climategate revelations under the rug in order to preserve the biggest taxpayer-financed gravy train for science and academia in decades. Hence we see the Rasmussen Reports poll last month that showed a strong majority of the public believes scientists who study climate change have falsified research data in order to support their own theories and beliefs.
“Virginia’s courts do not brook conspiracy theories as the basis for intervention in run-of-the-mill Freedom of Information Act litigation,” said Dr. David Schnare, director of ATI’s Environmental Law Center. “Dr. Mann - having failed to prevail in the court of public opinion - cannot now strut into court, soap box in hand, and expect a warm welcome.”
See case documents, press releases, media coverage, commentary, broadcast interviews, etc. pertaining to ATI v. University of Virginia by clicking here.
By Paul Mulshine, The Star Ledger The Star-Ledger
Question: What could a climate scientist bring to the debate among physicists over the interaction of cosmic rays with the Earth’s atmosphere?
Answer: the coffee.
Physicists have long maintained that the question of climate change was properly within the realm of physics rather than that of those glorified weathermen who call themselves “climatologists.” Last week we got confirmation of that. It came in the form of a study by physicists in Switzerland.
The study, which was published in the prestigious peer-reviewed science publication Nature, gave support to an alternative theory of climate change first proposed in the late 1990s by a Danish physicist named Henrik Svensmark.
Svensmark proposed that the wild swings in climate over the eons could not be attributed to a cause as minor as slight increases in gases such as carbon dioxide. Instead, he theorized, those swings could be caused by solar activity. Cosmic rays from the sun might play a key role in cloud formation in the Earth’s atmosphere. Clouds can trap heat.
That was the theory. But like all theories, it had to be tested in the lab. The lab in question was the CERN particle accelerator in Geneva. And sure enough, the study showed that ionization increases the nucleation rate of condensation nuclei.
In other words, cosmic rays can have an effect on climate. Meanwhile, atmospheric gases don’t seem to play that big a role in cloud formation, the study concluded.
Physicists have suspected this is the case ever since Svensmark advanced the theory. One such physicist with whom I’ve discussed it at length is William Happer, who runs a physics lab that is named after him at Princeton University. The primary source of confusion for the layman, said Happer, is the supposed consensus among scientists that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide raise the temperature of the planet.
There is indeed such a consensus, he said, but it goes only as far as the effect of the CO₂ itself. And the recent rise in CO₂ could account for an increase of, at most, a 10th of degree, he believes.
To get to the massive temperature spikes predicted by Al Gore et al., you need what’s known as “forcing.” That’s the theory that a relatively small increase in man-made greenhouse gases, such as CO₂, will have a large effect on water vapor, which is by far the most prevalent greenhouse gas.
When I e-mailed Happer asking if we could chat about this, he informed me he was about to take a trip on the Trans-Siberian Railway and would be out of touch for a week. That’s why physicists are fun to talk to, by the way. They do lots of cool stuff. If you doubt that, read “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynmann,” in which the late Richard Feynmann describes applying his talents to safe-cracking and gambling.
Anyway, I called another scientist skeptical of the climatology crowd, Don Easterbrook. Easterbrook is a professor of geology at Western Washington University who is an expert on the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a wind-flow system over the Pacific Ocean that has a huge influence on the Earth’s climate.
It’s back to the drawing board for the climatologists, he told me. Their models need to change to incorporate the new data.
“They couldn’t even predict 10 years ahead,” said Easterbrook. “The bottom line is their modeling results have been a dismal failure.”
The reason is not far to seek, he said. When it comes to the sun, those models took into account only the amount of heat being directed toward the Earth. They didn’t take into account the effect solar activity has on cloud formation. That’s where the physics comes in.
“Unfortunately, you do have to be a rocket scientist to understand this,” said Easterbrook. “But those climate scientists are virtually all computer modelers.”
They’ve now got something new to put into their models, he said. The CERN study doesn’t necessarily show, as some have claimed, that we’ll soon be entering an ice age or that greenhouse gases have no influence whatsoever. But it does show that computer models are only as good as the data they’re based on.
And when it comes to what could be the key piece of data needed to model the climate, the climatologists are now at the mercy of the physicists. That area of research is far above the climatologists’ heads - literally and figuratively.
ALSO: Who’s in denial now? In this piece, Svensmark makes a compelling argument that climate scientists need to rework their models to include the effect of solar activity:
Ever since we put forward our theory in 1996, it has been subjected to very sharp criticism, which is normal in science.
First it was said that a link between clouds and solar activity could not be correct, because no physical mechanism was known. But in 2006, after many years of work, we completed experiments at DTU Space that demonstrated the existence of a physical mechanism. The cosmic rays help to form aerosols, which are the seeds for cloud formation.
Then came the criticism that the mechanism we found in the laboratory could not work in the real atmosphere, and therefore had no practical significance. We have just rejected that criticism emphatically.
It turns out that the Sun itself performs what might be called natural experiments. Giant solar eruptions can cause the cosmic ray intensity on earth to dive suddenly over a few days. In the days following an eruption, cloud cover can fall by about 4 per cent. And the amount of liquid water in cloud droplets is reduced by almost 7 per cent. Here is a very large effect - indeed so great that in popular terms the Earth’s clouds originate in space.
Roy Spencer has penned some further thoughts on the campaign being waged by the Team and he is worried:
We simply cannot compete with a good-ole-boy, group think, circle-the-wagons peer review process which has been rewarded with billions of research dollars to support certain policy outcomes.
It is obvious to many people what is going on behind the scenes. The next IPCC report (AR5) is now in preparation, and there is a bust-gut effort going on to make sure that either (1) no scientific papers get published which could get in the way of the IPCC’s politically-motivated goals, or (2) any critical papers that DO get published are discredited with any and all means available.
And it’s hard to disagree with these ideas; the stench of corruption from climatology is quite overpowering. However, the conclusion that the battle is in danger of being lost, I’m not so sure about. I still wonder if the Team haven’t gone too far this time.
I suggested on Twitter over the weekend that the Remote Sensing affair demonstrated that the peer review process in climatology is now so corrupt that even if the IPCC was staffed by angels there would be no chance of a balanced assessment of the science: even-handed reviews can’t create balanced assessments of the sham that is climate science. Richard Betts begged to differ, saying that there was only a perception of bias, and one that didn’t reflect reality.
It’s a possibility I suppose. We might assume that:
- when the Team said they would get rid of von Storch and he subsequently resigned this was just a coincidence
- when the Team discussed getting rid of Saiers and he was subsequently removed from responsibility for the McIntyre/McKitrick paper, this was just a coincidence too
- the non-appearance of McKitrick and Michaels’ paper in AR4 drafts was not connected to Jones’ suggestion that he would keep it out of the review
- Wagner’s resignation was a reasonable response to a blog post at Real Climate etc.
But, you know, I’m just not sure how many coincidences like this we can be expected to bear.
The thing is that even if Richard is right and there isn’t much of a problem in the peer reviewed literature, there is still the problem that peer review and the IPCC not only need to be even-handed, but they need to be seen to be even-handed. With the Remote Sensing affair, that possibility is now long gone. Who is going to believe a word of AR5 now?
By Steve Goddard
Paying the price for climate change
By Andrew Dessler
Texas Gov. Rick Perry stirred up controversy on the campaign trail recently when he dismissed the problem of climate change and accused scientists of basically making up the problem.
As a born-and-bred Texan, it’s especially disturbing to hear this now, when our state is getting absolutely hammered by heat and drought. I’ve got to wonder how any resident of Texas - and particularly the governor who not so long ago was asking us to pray for rain - can be so cavalier about climate change.
As a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, I can also tell you from the data that the current heat wave and drought in Texas is so bad that calling it “extreme weather” does not do it justice. July was the single hottest month in the observational record, and the 12 months that ended in July were drier than any corresponding period in the record.
I know that climate change does not cause any specific weather event. But I also know that humans have warmed the climate over the past century, and that this warming has almost certainly made the heat wave and drought more extreme than it would otherwise have been.
I am not alone in these views. There are dozens of atmospheric scientists at Texas institutions such as Rice, the University of Texas and Texas A&M, and none of them dispute the mainstream scientific view of climate change.
-------------------
I did grad school at Rice, and (apparently unlike some Aggies) I know how to search the Internet. Horrific droughts and heatwaves have been hitting Texas for as long as there has been a Texas. See the post which includes many examples.
The mid 1950s multi year drought - animates on real Science.
There has been no trend in Texas temperatures since records began in 1895. Dessler has no factual basis for his claim of warming. One hot summer is not climate - it is just weather.
Friday, 02 September 2011 14:54 Dr. David Whitehouse
Dr Henrik Svensmark of the Danish National Space Centre in Copenhagen has pioneered the study of the effects of cosmic rays on cloud formation. The GWPF put a series of questions to him concerning the recent results from CERN’s CLOUD experiment.
How significant are the CERN results?
I welcome the CLOUD results. They basically confirm our own experimental results since 2006, and does so within a larger variation of parameters. It seems to say that ions are fundamental for the nucleation of new aerosols.
Some in the media have said that the fact that CERN’s produced clusters that were too small spells the demise of the cosmic ray-cloud theory. What is your reaction?
Our group has closely studied the effect of cosmic rays on cloud formation, e.g. in our 2009 paper. Here the obvious question is what the implications are for clouds and the Earth’s clouds and radiative balance, which is indirectly posed at the end of the CLOUD paper, when it wonders what fraction of the small aerosols grow to cloud-seeding size.
This was also the question we asked following our own experiments. It turns out that this question can be answered with what one can call “natural experiments” where solar explosions (Coronal Mass Ejections) send out plasma clouds that shield the Earth and cause the cosmic ray flux to decrease within half a day. The largest events cause the cosmic ray ionization to decrease by about 10-15 %.
So obviously one should look for an impact on the Earth’s aerosols and cloud cover. Our results published in GRL 2009 (reference below) show clear effects in the aerosols and in various cloud parameters. In essence the whole chain from solar activity to cosmic rays ionization to aerosol production to cloud properties can be seen. The effect is quite large—nearly 6% loss in cloud liquid water averaged over the 5 strongest events.
There have been a few papers on this subject which disagrees with our results, but they are in fact in agreement when looking more closely in accordance with our results.
There is plenty of sulphur from the phytoplankton. Over the oceans, cloud formation is limited by the cosmic ray influx, not by the sulphur supply. As for ammonia, the huge effect discovered by CLOUD is very interesting. But as they need only one ammonia molecule in 30 billion in the air, and as emissions from the oceans include an estimated at 8 Gigatonnes of ammonia, I see no constraint there. (Ammonia emissions from the land are much higher.)
(PS. The clusters made by CLOUD will in nearly all cases grow to CCN (Cloud Condensation Nucleation) size, see for example Proceedings of IPAC’10, Kyota, Japan (pages 4474-4478) where particles in the CLOUD chamber are grown to 70 nm which are CCN size. Our experiment could grow particles to 40 nm which is very close to CCN ~50 nm)
What is the changing flux of CR’s at the Earth correlated with?
The correlations that have been found so far are on long time scales star formation rates (million of years). On shorter time scales solar modulation of cosmic rays. Numerous proxies of climate seems to be correlated with changes in cosmic rays (14C or 10Be for example) - stalagmites, ice-rafted debris, tree-rings, corals etc.
What does the present low level of solar activity mean?
When the Sun became quiet, after its intensification of activity during the 20th Century, global warming stopped/paused about 10-15 years ago, and sub-surface ocean temperatures seem to be declining. In some sense the Sun will show by itself how important lack of high solar activity is in the near future.
What is the next step forward?
The above all in all implies that ions are of fundamental importance in the formation of new aerosols and for cloud properties in the Earth’s atmosphere. Of course there are many things to explore, but I think the cosmic-ray/cloud seeding hypothesis is converging with reality.
For example more experiments involving larger parameter range. Study satellite observations of cloud properties. Search for additional impact of a cosmic rays/climate link.
References
“Natural experiment” reference:
H. Svensmark, T. Bondo and J. Svensmark, ‘Cosmic Ray Decreases Affect Atmospheric Aerosols and Clouds’, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol: 36, pp. L15101 ff., 2009
Our lab experiment references:
H. Svensmark, J. O. Pepke Pedersen, N. Marsh, M. Enghoff and U. Uggerhøj, ‘Experimental Evidence for the Role of Ions in Particle Nucleation under Atmospheric Conditions’, Proceedings of the Royal Society A, Vol. 463, pp. 385-396, 2007 (online release 2006)
M. A. B. Enghoff; J. O. Pepke Pedersen; T. Bondo, M. S. Johnson, S. Paling and H. Svensmark, ‘Evidence for the Role of Ions in Aerosol Nucleation’, Journal of Physical Chemistry A, Vol: 112, pp. 10305-10309, 2008
M.B. Enghoff, J. O. Pepke Pedersen, U. I. Uggerhøj, S. M. Paling, and H. Svensmark, ‘Aerosol nucleation induced by a high energy particle beam,’ Geophysical Research Letters, 38, L09805, 2011
By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, AMS Fellow
Back in June I commented:
Several people have asked whether there seems to be a concerted effort to restart the public’s wise, rapidly dwindling concern about man-made global warming. The answer is a big yes. This behavior was predicted by Leon Festinger in his book about cultism “When Prophecies Fail” back in the 1950s. Expect the level of rhetoric and anger and a stream of garbage reports along with attacks on skeptics to increase. The public should rise up against the co-conspirators in the media, academia and government who attempting to increase their power and control over all our lives through the BIG LIE.
As further proof of their guilt, see how the board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has issued a statement demanding that all attacks on global warming advocates cease. Sorry boys, we are just warming up (no pun intended). Joe Romm was voted a fellow of the AAAS which should speak volumes.
Climate Change Skeptics United at the annual Heartland Conference. Heartland Institute communications director Jim Lakely said it’s a “myth” that only skeptics are invited to the conference. President of the Pacific Institute, Peter Gleick, who supports the findings behind man-induced climate change, said he wouldn’t consider attending.
“I go to many meetings as it is, and the interesting science is being done elsewhere,” he said on a “pre-buttal” conference call hosted by the Center For American Progress. “This is not a science conference, it’s a political conference. It’s a way for a small community - and I would argue a diminishing community - to get together in a self-support kind of way. There is no science that’s going to be discussed there that’s new or that’s interesting ... it’s just not worth a real scientist’s time.”
So Peter then you had no reason not to attend. The Center for American Progress with lefty extremists Joe Romm and John Podesta and funded by George Soros is not a politically driven organization? Pleeeze.
Then Al Gore went on a rant about skeptics… calling all alternative natural factors ‘bullshit’. He may not know much at all about climate, but he is a bullshit expert as the UK court found. He went on a follow up interview comparing skepticism to racism.
Al Gore, John Podesta and Joe Romm have been playing the extreme weather game. With one after another inconvenient fact keeps invalidating their theory amnd models like global temperatures declining for a decade, US winter cooling at an alarming 4.13F/decade rate, sea levels actually falling instead of accelerating, and ocean heat content in the tropics where the climate models say the heat is being stored show no trend for 32 years, they divert your attention on the extreme weather - the record cold, record snow, tornadoes, floods and droughts and even hurricanes as proof that CO2 was causing climate disruption. Each of which are signs of a cooling earth.
And another George Soros mouthpiece, pseudo climatologist Heidi Cullen of Soros supported Climate Central says the billion dollar storms this year are certain proof of a warming world (even if the earth is really cooling). See also Seth Borentsein claim all the extremes are proof of global warrming and Steve Goddard’s response here.
A real climatologist would know super La Ninas and a slumbering sun lead to rapid global cooling result in bitter winter cold, heavy winter snows, spring snowmelt and storm flooding, drought in the southern plains, tornadoes in the Ohio Valley and south in spring, summer heat waves and late summer and fall hurricanes. In fact we used these natural drivers to predict every one of the extreme threats. No CO2 need apply.
And importantly to drive another nail in the AGW coffin as the Washington Times reported: “It turns out the sun’s cosmic rays play a commanding role in atmospheric cloud formation and thus surface temperatures. This is according to research in the Aug. 25 edition of the journal Nature by scientists at the prestigious CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. In a CLOUD (Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets) experiment, specialists fired a beam of energy from the lab’s Proton Synchrotron accelerator into a chamber filled with gases that approximated the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere.
The findings are a strong indication that cosmic rays striking the planet have a similar effect on atmospheric chemicals and stimulate the creation of clouds. For dogmatists who believe humans are heating the earth by allowing so-called “greenhouse gases” to billow into the atmosphere, countervailing evidence indicating the sun plays a primary role in climate change is a faith-shaker. This is akin to saying “God is dead”. Don’t expect Gore, Romm or Podesta or Cullen to acknowledge what the honest scientists have found except perhaps with their typical ad hominem attacks.
Watch the level of rhetoric rise further as the alarmists try and protect their lottery winnings and the greens push harder to get their agenda through before the public gives up on hope and change and opts for the right change and sensible economic and energy policy alternatives.
You see Al Gore, the NGOs, the world’s governments and corporations that hoped to benefot from the green agenda and the well meaning idealists who want to ‘save the planet’ unwittingly have spread great misery through unemployment and skyrocketing energy costs that have resulted from their efforts to subsidize so called renewable energy sources that are not cost effective like ethanol, wind and solar. Countries like Spain that went hog wild after solar and wind, drove away industry - with 2.2 jobs lost for every green job created made worse by the reality that only 1 in 10 green job was permanant. Unemployement skyrocketed to over 20%. Not a single fossil fuel plant has been closed in Spain, Denmark, Italy (where 3.4 real jobs were lost for every green job) or Great Britain because the wind doesn’t always blow and sun shines at best part time. Fossil fuel was neeed as back up. In the less efficient back up modes, the amount of C02 increased 33-50%. In the UK, where wind farmes were supposed to deliver up to 19% of the electricity needs, 0.4% was the actual contribution during the second coldest December since the Little Ice Age in 1659 last year. 26% of the population in Wales are in energy poverty and many penshiners in the UK are being forced to choose between heating and eating, a number which will increase further as the UK energy minister Huhne is still pushing for drastic reduction in CO2, a benefical gas that promises perhaps a doubling of energy costs the next decade. This kind of nonsense will be coming to your country or state if you let the enviro agenda succeed.
I was an environmentalist (still am) when there were real issues with air and water pollution. Now they have moved onto a Ponzi scheme with the aid of greedy politicians, scientists and corporations to target an essential and benefical gas that has no measureable impact on climate or health. We need clean air and water, but the EPA should be defanged. Their proposed agenda will cost millions of jobs and a loss of 10% of our current electricity sources when we need mroe electivity to grow our economy and create jobs and productivity. I will continue to fight real pollution of our air and water but speak out against the CO2 control agenda. See this growing effort to show CO2’s non critical role in climate change. See here how there is a backlash against the green energy policies beginning in the UK.
The authors of the new report go on to say “the net effect of continued warming and rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere is most likely to be beneficial to humans, plants, and wildlife.”
Both conclusions contradict the findings of the widely cited reports of the IPCC.
Click here for an executive summary of the book.
Click here to review the book chapter-by-chapter.
The report was produced by The Heartland Institute,Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, and Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP), three national nonprofit organizations based in Chicago, Illinois, Tempe, Arizona, and Arlington, Virginia, respectively.
The 430-page report was coauthored and edited by three climate science researchers: Craig D. Idso, Ph.D., editor of the online magazine CO2 Science and author of several books and scholarly articles on the effects of carbon dioxide on plant and animal life; Robert M. Carter, Ph.D., a marine geologist and research professor at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia; and S. Fred Singer, Ph.D., a distinguished atmospheric physicist and first director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service. Seven additional scientists and one policy expert on sustainable growth made contributions to the volume.
The book is titled Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report because it precedes a comprehensive volume that is expected to be released in 2013. It focuses on scientific research released since publication of Climate Change Reconsidered: The 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).
Key findings, as outlined in the interim report¡¦s executive summary, include:
1. We find evidence that the models over-estimate the amount of warming that occurred during the twentieth century and fail to incorporate chemical and biological processes that may be as important as the physical processes employed in the models.¡¨
2. More CO2 promotes more plant growth both on land and throughout the surface waters ofthe world’s oceans, and this vast assemblage of plant life has the ability to affect Earth’s climate in several ways, almost all of them tending to counteract the heating
effects of CO2¡’s thermal radiative forcing.”
3. The latest research on paleoclimatology and recent temperatures [finds] new evidence that the Medieval Warm Period of approximately 1,000 years ago, when there was about 28 percent less CO2 in the atmosphere than there is currently, was both global andwarmer than today’s world.”
4. New research finds less melting of ice in the Arctic, Antarctic, and on mountaintops than previously feared, no sign of acceleration of sea-level rise in recent decades, no trend over the past 50 years in changes to the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (MOC), and no changes in precipitation patterns or river flows that could be attributed to rising CO2 levels.”
5. Amphibians, birds, butterflies, other insects, lizards, mammals, and even worms benefit from global warming and its myriad ecological effects.”
6. Rising temperatures and atmospheric CO2 concentrations, by increasing crop yields, will play a major role in averting hunger and ecological destruction in the future.”
7. The latest research suggests corals and other forms of aquatic life have effective adaptive responses to climate change enabling them to flourish despite or even because of climate change.”
8. Global warming is more likely to improve rather than harm human health because rising temperatures lead to a greater reduction in winter deaths than the increase they cause in summer deaths.”
9. Even in worst-case scenarios, mankind will be much better off in the year 2100 than it is today, and therefore able to adapt to whatever challenges climate change presents.”
To schedule an interview with the authors and editors of Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report, contact Jim Lakely, director of communications at The Heartland Institute, at jlakely@heartland.org or 312/377-4000.
The Heartland Institute is a 27-year-old national nonprofit organization with offices in Chicago, Illinois; Washington, DC; Austin, Texas; Tallahassee, Florida; and Columbus, Ohio. Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. For more information, visit our Web site or call 312/377-4000.
Zhao and Running’s plant productivity claim rebuked in Science: modeling errors, use of corrupted satellite data and statistically insignificant trends cited
Posted on August 25, 2011 by Anthony Watts
Heres the press release from Boston University:
NASA study refutes claims of drought-driven declines in plant productivity, global food security
BU researchers find that modeling errors produced exaggerated claims
A new, comprehensive study by an international team of scientists, including scientists at Boston University in the US and the Universities of Viçosa and Campinas in Brazil, has been published in the current issue of Science (August 26, 2011) refuting earlier alarmist claims that drought has induced a decline in global plant productivity during the past decade and posed a threat to global food security.
Those earlier findings published by Zhao and Running in the August 2010 issue of Science (Vol. 329, p. 940) also warned of potentially serious consequences for biofuel production and the global carbon cycle. The two new technical comments in Science contest these claims on the basis of new evidence from NASA satellite data, which indicates that Zhao and Running’s findings resulted from several modeling errors, use of corrupted satellite data and statistically insignificant trends.
The main premise of Zhao and Running’s model-based study was an expectation of increased global plant productivity during the 2000s based on previously observed increases during the 1980s and 1990s under supposedly similar, favorable climatic conditions. Instead, Zhao and Running were surprised to see a decline, which they attributed it to large-scale droughts in the Southern Hemisphere.
“Their model has been tuned to predict lower productivity even for very small increases in temperature. Not surprisingly, their results were preordained,” said Arindam Samanta, the study’s lead author. (Samanta, now at Atmospheric and Environmental Research Inc., Lexington, MA, worked on the study as a graduate student at Boston University’s Department of Geography and Environment.)
Zhao and Running’s predictions of trends and year-to-year variability were largely based on simulated changes in the productivity of tropical forests, especially the Amazonian rainforests. However, according to the new study, their model failed miserably when tested against comparable ground measurements collected in these forests.
‘The large (28%) disagreement between the model’s predictions and ground truth imbues very little confidence in Zhao and Running’s results,” said Marcos Costa, coauthor, Professor of Agricultural Engineering at the Federal University of Viçosa and Coordinator of Global Change Research at the Ministry of Science and Technology, Brazil.
This new study also found that the model actually predicted increased productivity during droughts, compared to field measurements, and decreased productivity in non-drought years 2006 and 2007 in the Amazon, in contradiction to the main finding of the previous report. “Such erratic behavior is typical of their poorly formulated model, which lacks explicit soil moisture dynamics,” said Edson Nunes, coauthor and researcher at the Federal University of Viçosa, Brazil.
The new study indicates that Zhao and Running used NASA’s MODIS satellite data products, such as vegetation leaf area, without paying caution to data corruption by clouds and aerosols. “Analyzing the same satellite data products after carefully filtering out cloud and aerosol-corrupted data, we could not reproduce the patterns published by Zhao and Running. Moreover, none of their reported productivity trends are statistically significant,” said Liang Xu, coauthor and graduate student at Boston University.
In any case, the trends in plant productivity reported by Zhao and Running are miniscule - a 0.34% reduction in the Southern Hemisphere offset by a 0.24% gain in the Northern Hemisphere for a net decline of 0.1% over a ten-year period from 2000 to 2009. “This is the proverbial needle in a haystack,” said Simone Vieira, coauthor and researcher at the State University of Campinas, Brazil. “There is no model accurate enough to predict such minute changes over such short time intervals, even at hemispheric scales.”
Any investigation of trends in plant growth requires not only consistent and accurate climate and satellite data but also a model suitable for such purposes. “The Zhao and Running study does not even come close,” said Ranga Myneni, senior author and Professor of Geography, Boston University. “Their analysis of satellite data is flawed because they included poor quality data and do not bother to test trends for statistically significance. Our analyses of four different higher-quality MODIS satellite vegetation products that have been carefully filtered for data corruption show no statistically significant trends over 85% of the global vegetated lands.”
This study was funded through a research grant by the NASA MODIS project to Prof. Myneni for investigation on the use of MODIS satellite data to study vegetation on our planet.
Read much more here.
While the country is recovering from the earthquake, more trouble is on the way. Thanks to Alan S.
By Joseph D’Aleo and Joe Bastardi, Weatherbell Analytics
Before the spring, we warned out readers on Weatherbell and Icecap that the spring would feature major drought, record floods, major tornado outbreaks - including places outside tornado alley in the south and Ohio Valley. We also warned that the late summer and fall would see very impactful with respect to hurricanes, with a special focus on the east coast.
This was not based on hype or self promotion but a serious concern based on over 70 years experience. You see we just came out of one of the strongest La Ninas on record, the Pacific has turned cold (negative PDO), the Atlantic still warm (positive AMO). La Nina we expected would slowly weaken but then reprise. In the past, when these conditions existed (like from the 1940s to early 1960s), we had more, stronger, longer La Ninas, and more snow and cold in winter, flooding and drought in spring, more tornado outbreaks and east coast hurricanes.
See on this plot how the cold PDO (bottom graph blue) and warm AMO was similar from 1944 to 1962 (during which 7 major hurricanes hit the east coast). The hurricane of ‘38 actually popped in a year with a briefly cold PDO and warm AMO.
Irene is a major hurricane. It will become a storm that will produce biillions, very possibly tens of billions of dollars of damage to the east coast. Areas from the Carolinas north to the Delmarva, New Jersey, Long Island and New England could see storm surges that flood coastal areas. If the storm were to head to New York City as some of the models suggest, flooding would occur even in the city in areas depending at storm strength category. Millions are likely to be left without power for days all through the east.
Come to Weatherbell.com and sign up for access to our stream of blogs and forecasts on Irene and other storms that may follow this year and will follow for years to come. By the way, winter is coming and it looks like another wild one. In addition to blogging for weather enthusiasts, we provide reasonably priced specialized forecasts for energy, agriculture and industry. Though we cover events in the near term, we use our knowledge of global teleconnections to provide skillful medium and long range forecasts. You see these natural factors which by the way determine the multi-decadal cycles that AGWers used to claim CO2 was driving climate, give us a many month lead time on seasonal patterns and extremes.
Bloomberg
Michael Mann, a Pennsylvania climate-change researcher caught in the flap surrounding e-mails hacked from a U.K. university server, was cleared of wrongdoing by a U.S. agency that promotes science.
Finding no “evidence of research misconduct,” the Arlington, Virginia-based National Science Foundation closed its inquiry into Mann, according to an Aug. 15 report from its inspector general. In February, Pennsylvania State University, where Mann is a professor of meteorology, exonerated him of suppressing or falsifying data, deleting e-mails and misusing privileged information,
Skeptics of climate change pointed to the stolen U.K. e- mails, which surfaced in blogs in 2009, as proof that researchers conspired to suppress studies questioning the link between warming and human activity. Last week, Texas Governor Rick Perry, who is seeking the Republican nomination for president, repeated the charge that scientists have “manipulated” data on climate change.
“It was a pretty definitive finding” that the charges “swirling around for over a year” were baseless, Mann said in an interview. “I was very pleased.”
The report confirms findings from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s inspector general and a separate panel of seven scientists based at universities in the U.K., U.S. and Switzerland. The University of East Anglia announced the committee and Ron Oxburgh, former head of Shell Transport & Trading Plc and a member of the U.K. House of Lords, was chairman.
‘Closes the Books’
“It certainly closes the books on Michael Mann and the e- mails,” Joe Romm, a blogger for the Center for American Progress, an advocacy group with ties to President Barack Obama’s administration, said in an interview. “They found nothing wrong with the science, or any evidence that there was anything wrong with how the scientists went about their work.”
The inquiries focused on the University of East Anglia’s climate-research unit, which stored the poached e-mails on its computer server. The university’s work contributed to some of the key findings of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has issued reports that blame rising temperatures on human activity.
E-mails to and from Mann were in the pilfered cache. One message discussing his work spoke of a “trick” to “hide the decline” and others suggested deleting correspondence.
NOAA’s report, released in February, was requested by U.S. Senator James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican who called the theory of manmade climate change a hoax. The report found no evidence of “manipulation of data.”
Lead Author
Mann was lead author of the first reconstruction of North American warming going back 1,000 years, which showed recent temperatures increasing sharply. The 1998 findings have been confirmed by several studies, Mann said.
“The way you get ahead in science is by proving the other guys wrong,” Mann said. “There is literally no study in the peer-reviewed scientific literature that contradicts our original conclusion.”
Climate change has emerged as an issue in the race for the Republican presidential nomination.
“There are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects,” Perry said last week. “I think we’re seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists that are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change.”
Another Republican candidate, former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman has said he believes that human activity is causing climate change.
Huntsman is clueless, Perry is right though may not know why, Bloomberg is clueless. The NSF is a disgrace. Recall the story two years ago about the NSF accused of watching porn in their offices. I suppose that is why Mann’s climate porn doesn’t phase them. What else would you expect. Another worthless whitewash from another agency that should be defunded.
-----------
All of the so-called “investigations” which have cleared the Climategate researchers of any wrongdoing have been conducted by organizations which themselves bore some responsibility in approving, funding, overseeing or hosting the research involved. By clearing the researchers of any misconduct they were simply finding themselves innocent.
That the Climategate emails are genuine has never been denied by any of those involved. These messages clearly and unequivocally present evidence of a conspiracy to:
Prevent any independent examination of important scientific evidence obtained with public funding
Manipulate data in a manner calculated to mislead the public and government
Dishonestly prevent the publication or consideration of research not supporting their own agenda
Willfully corrupt the peer review process
Employ coercion and threats to intimidate journal editors
Illegally destroy or withhold evidence subject to FOI legislation
In addition to all this, the comments by their own computer programmer regarding the modeling revealed programming deficiencies of such magnitude as to raise serious doubts about both results from the model as well as the scientific competence of those responsible for it. Walter Starck
By Peter Bonk
This is the invite to the Over the Internet Symposium organized for the American Chemical Society meeting in Denver Colorado. The symposium will be held on Sunday, August 28th, 2011 from 12:50 pm to 5:45 pm Mountain Daylight Time, 3pm-7pm EDT. Click the link and follow the directions to register. There is no charge to register.
I hope you will find this symposium an educational and informative adventure. Our speakers are:
William Stewart, Ross McKitrick (U Guelph), Judith Curry (Georgia Tech), Nir Shaviv (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Bob Carter (James Cook University), and Richard Lindzen (MIT).
PLEASE forward this to any others that may be interested. If I get to 100 people registered by Thursday evening I can expand the number of folks who can hear this from 100 to 500 people- So spread the word.
Thanks
Pete
Critical Look at Global Warming Data: Wickedly Complex System Called Climate
This is the real deal symposium for the ACS meeting
Register for a Go TO MEETING session now by clicking a date below:
Sun, Aug 28, 2011 12:01 PM - 5:45 PM MDT
Once registered you will receive an email confirming your registration with information you need to join the Webinar.
System Requirements:
PC-based attendees
Required: Windows® 7, Vista, XP or 2003 Server
Macintosh®-based attendees
Required: Mac OS® X 10.5 or newer
By Dr. Larry Bell
Anyone who says they can confidently predict global climate changes or effects is either a fool or a fraud. No one can even forecast global, national or regional weather conditions that will occur months or years into the future, much less climate shifts that will be realized over decadal, centennial and longer periods.
Nevertheless, this broadly recognized limitation has not dissuaded doomsday prognostications that have prompted incalculably costly global energy and environmental policies. Such postulations attach great credence to computer models and speculative interpretations that have no demonstrated accuracy.
The primary source of scary climate change alarmism routinely trumpeted in the media originates from politically cherry-picked summary report items issued by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Yet even the IPCC’s 2001 report chapter titled “Model Evaluation” contains this confession: “We fully recognize that many of the evaluation statements we make contain a degree of subjective scientific perception and may contain much ‘community’ or ‘personal’ knowledge. For example, the very choice of model variables and model processes that are investigated are often based upon subjective judgment and experience of the modeling community.”
In that same report the IPCC further admits, “In climate research and modeling, we should realize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.” Here, the IPCC openly acknowledges that its models should not be trusted. Still, the IPCC obviously needs to apply them to justify its budget and influence. Without contrived, frightening forecasts, they would soon be out of business.
So in the IPCC’s most recent 2007 report the story changed significantly, placing “great confidence”: in the ability of General Circulation Models (GCMs) to responsibly attribute observed climate change to anthropogenic (man-made) greenhouse gas emissions. It states that “…climate models are based on well-established physical principles and have been demonstrated to reproduce observed features of recent climate…and past changes.”
Yet even Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of 2001 and 2007 IPCC report chapters, has admitted that the IPCC models have failed to duplicate realities. Writing in a 2007 “Predictions of Climate” blog appearing in the science journal Nature.com he stated, “None of the models used by the IPCC are initialized to the observed state and none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed state.”
Syun-Ichi Akasofu, the former director of the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, has determined that IPCC computer models have not even been able to duplicate observed temperatures in Arctic regions. While the atmospheric CO2 forecasts indicated warm Arctic conditions, they were lower than actually reported, and colder areas were absent. Akasofu stated , “If fourteen GCMs cannot reproduce prominent warming in the continental Arctic, perhaps much of this warming is not produced by greenhouse effect at all.”
Graeme Stephens at the Colorado State University’s Department of Atmospheric Science warned in a 2008 paper published in the Journal of Climate, that computer models involve simplistic cloud feedback descriptions: “Much more detail on the system and its assumptions [is] needed to judge the value of any study. Thus, we are led to conclude that the diagnostic tools currently in use by the climate community to study feedback, at least as implemented, are problematic and immature and generally cannot be verified using observations.”
The prominent, late scientist Joanne Simpson developed some of the first mathematical models of clouds in an attempt to better understand how hurricanes draw power from warm seas. Ranked as one of the world’s top meteorologists, she believed that global warming theorists place entirely too much emphasis upon faulty climate models, observing, “We all know the frailty of models concerning the air-surface system…We only need to watch the weather forecasts [to prove this].”
A recent study reported in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing concludes that NASA satellite data between the years 2000-2001 indicate that GCMs have grossly exaggerated warming retained in the Earth’s atmosphere. The study’s co-author, Dr. Roy Spencer, observes: “There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans. Not only does the atmosphere release more energy than previously thought, it starts releasing it earlier in the warming cycle.”
Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama-Huntsville and former senior scientist for climate studies at NASA, has also observed that results of the one or two dozen climate modeling groups around the world often reflect a common bias. One reason is that many of these modeling programs are based upon the same “parameterization” assumptions; consequently, common errors are likely to be systematic, often missing important processes. Such problems arise because basic components and dynamics of the climate system aren’t understood well enough on either theoretical or observational grounds to even put into the models. Instead, the models focus upon those factors and relationships that are most familiar, ignoring others altogether. As Spencer notes in his book Climate Confusion, “Scientists don’t like to talk about that because we can’t study things we don’t know about.”
A peer-reviewed climate study that appeared in the July 23, 2009 edition of Geophysical Research Letters went even farther in its characterization of faulty climate modeling practices. The paper noted IPCC modeling tendencies to fudge climate projections by exaggerating CO2 influences and underestimating the importance of shifts in ocean conditions. The research indicated that influences in solar changes and intermittent volcanic activity have accounted for at least 80% of observed climate variation over the past half century. Study coauthor John McLean observed: “When climate models failed to retrospectively produce the temperatures since 1950, the modelers added some estimated influences of carbon dioxide to make up the shortfall.” He also highlighted inability of computer models to predict El Nino ocean events which can periodically dominate regional climate conditions, hence further reducing model meaningfulness.
J. Scott Armstrong, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and a leading expert in the field of professional forecasting, believes that prediction attempts are virtually doomed when scientists don’t understand or follow basic forecasting rules. He and colleague Kesten Green of Monash University conducted a “forecasting audit” of the 2007 IPCC report and “found no references…to the primary sources of information on forecasting methods” and that “the forecasting procedures that were described [in sufficient detail to be evaluated] violated 72 principles. Many of the violations were, by themselves, critical”.
A fundamental principle that IPCC violated was to “make sure forecasts are independent of politics”. Armstrong and Green observed that “the IPCC process is directed by non-scientists who have policy objectives and who believe that anthropogenic global warming is real and a danger.” They concluded that: “The forecasts in the report were not the outcome of scientific procedures. In effect, they were the opinions of scientists transformed by mathematics and obscured by complex writing…We have not been able to identify any scientific forecasts of global warming. Claims that the Earth will get warmer have no more credence than saying it will get colder”.
Trenberth argued in his 2007 Nature blog that “the IPCC does not make forecasts”, but “instead proffers ‘what if’ projections that correspond to certain emission scenarios”; and then hopes these “projections… will guide policy and decision makers.” He went on to say: “there are no such predictions [in the IPCC reports] although the projections given by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are often treated as such. The distinction is important”.
Armstrong and Green challenge that semantic defense, pointing out that “the word ‘forecast’ and its derivatives occurred 37 times, and ‘predict’ and its derivatives occurred 90 times in the body of Chapter 8 of [the IPCC’s 2007] the Working Group I report.”
Of course there would be very little interest in model forecasts at all if it were not for hysterical hype about a purported man-made climate crisis caused by carbon dioxide fossil fuel emissions. Without CO2 greenhouse gas demonization there is no basis for cap-and-tax schemes, unwarranted “green” fuel subsidies, expansion of government regulatory authority over energy production and construction industries through unintended misapplications of the Clean Air Act, claims of polar bear endangerment to prevent drilling in ANWR, or justifications for massive climate research budgets including…guess what? Yup! Lots of money to produce more climate model forecasts that perpetuate these agendas.
Reprinted from Forbes with author permission.
By Russell Cook
Ordinary ponzi schemes pretending to be worthwhile investments collapse if they aren’t constantly infused with new money, and when anyone starts asking tough accounting questions. The theory of man-caused global warming is kept afloat only because a sizable portion of the public believes the issue is settled, and that our efforts to reduce greenhouse gases will stabilize the climate. Faith in the issue is continually propped up with new stories that no ‘legitimate’ critics exist. But what happens when the IPCC / Al Gore side can’t answer questions any better than Bernie Madoff?
Near the end of my first RedState piece on the smear of skeptic scientists, I noted how a Society of Environmental Journalists board director couldn’t be bothered to tell me which other journalists corroborated book author Ross Gelbspan’s accusation that skeptic climate scientists were being paid to deliberately mislead the public.
I’m still searching the internet to find anyone who independently corroborates that lone accusation. Hard scrutiny reveals the different accusations virtually all spiral right back to a small group of people associated with the enviro-activist group Ozone Action and Ross Gelbspan, circa early 1996. A scant few point back to a period of time in 1991, and I first detailed the enormous problems with those at Marc Morano’s Climate Depot, then here at RedState. Long story short: Gore praised Gelbspan for discovering 1991-era coal industry PR campaign memos supposedly proving the corruption accusation, but Gore had the memos in his Senate office years before Gelbspan. Houston, we have a problem….
Last week, the New Scientist magazine coughed up the same old accusation when it reviewed Orrin Pilkey’s new book Global Climate Change (backup link here in case their link goes behind a pay wall later). In the magazine review’s third paragraph, the book’s quotes are the same words from the 1991 coal industry PR memos - “older, less educated males” and “younger, lower-income women” - that were seen in Ross Gelbspan’s 1997 book The Heat is On, and in Gore’s 1992 Earth in the Balance. The insinuation is that the PR campaign knew its message was false and had to target gullible people.
The plot gets thicker. Google Books has a preview of Pilkey’s book, and in a page prior to the above quotes, he regurgitates the infamous “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” accusation phrase, saying it was one of seven strategy points of PR documents put online by Naomi Oreskes, and that the PR campaign took place in four cities, Chattanooga, Tennessee, Champagne, Illinois, Flagstaff, Arizona, and Fargo, North Dakota.
Wrong on both counts. There were nine strategy points, and regarding the claim that Oreskes put the documents online, that comes from George Monbiot’s Dec 2009 blog, where it turns out his link was just to Oreskes’ oft-repeated 2007 PowerPoint presentation which only quoted the memos. Seems unlikely that Pilkey would make a typo of the point number total if he actually saw the complete-context memos. As we can see at the page 10 scan enlargement here, there is no mistaking the number count, or that Bowling Green, Kentucky was also part of the PR campaign tour, as seen at the page 14 scan.
Astute readers rummaging through the rest of the 1991 coal industry PR campaign memos there are able to see that the whole collection is not the sinister top-down industry directive it’s portrayed to be, but is instead just an interoffice set of memos to guide a little five-town information campaign designed to point out contradictions between Al Gore’s side of the story and existing - not fabricated - opposition to it. Ross Gelbspan made the claim that “we got a copy of the strategy papers for that campaign. And it said that the purpose of the campaign was to reposition global warming as theory rather than fact…They sent these scientists all over the country to do media interviews.”
Right. Wouldn’t ‘all over the county’ mean major population centers like L.A. Philadelphia, Seattle, Boston, Miami? But first, who gave him copies of the strategy papers? Al Gore? And if nobody disproves these scientists’ science assessments outright, what was so sinister about this campaign?
I could go on for another couple thousand words. Oreskes has her own circuitous problems with citing Gelbspan, and then we have the problem just recently where Gore profanely accused skeptic scientists of corruption and cited Oreskes instead of Gelbspan. There is also the problem with a 1991 article by Mary O’Driscoll in The Energy Daily titled, “Greenhouse Ads Target ‘Low-Income’ Women, ‘Less-Educated Men’ .” It was written prior to the July 8, 1991 NY Times article Gore indirectly cited in just the 12th paragraph of his 7000 word Rolling Stone magazine diatribe a couple of months ago. Not a word of praise going to O’Driscoll from Gore, Oreskes or Pilkey.
I’m no investigative reporter, though, just someone with an accumulation of computer notes on this whole mess that’s probably over 66,000 words, and my plea is for professional journalists to take this beyond my limited means. I’ve unearthed more than enough red flags, it’s time for others with more resources to see how deep all these problems go.
There appears to be only one source for the accusation against skeptic scientists. It is unsupportable, and a rather small cast of characters spirals around it. This is especially ironic considering the way Pilkey says at the opening of his Chapter 4, “…the hoax is being perpetuated by public relations efforts by the fossil fuels industry.”
When enviro-activists offer no more than a worn out, 20-year old, paper-thin, guilt-by-association accusation saying skeptic climate scientists are paid by oil and coal executives to deliberately stall action to mitigate global warming, then we probably have the opposite problem: A ponzi scheme of incessant media story infusions designed to steer the public away from seeing skeptic scientists as whistleblowers on an idea that can’t support its own science assessments.
As I write this, heavy snow showers are falling in Dunedin.
So far, it is a picture postcard sight - trees looking sugar coated, the ground covered in glistening white and snow flakes as big as anything adding to this picture all the time.
But go outside and it’s a different story. I went out this afternoon to get my regular Sunday newspapers and my fingers became numb to the bone and my jacket and trousers literally got covered in the stuff. Also, it was difficult to wheel along the road in almost blizzard like conditions but I made it to the shop and safely back!
According to forecasters (such as WeatherWatch’s Philip Duncan), these conditions are set to remain with us for up to four days. I can remember snow events across multiple days occurring many times within my lifetime and indeed the lifetimes of most of us. What makes this storm more significant than even the July event (and of any in recent times) is its forecast scale. This event is so significant that Wellington - I can’t believe it - is even forecast to receive snow dumps to sea level! Even Auckland has a chance of seeing the white stuff for the first time since 1939!
And it is the 1939 event that we should compare this storm to. This week could see the most severe winter weather in New Zealand since that year. Many people aged 75 years and over in Dunedin remember the massive snow event of July that year which brought snow drifts of up to 10 centimeters (and above) in the city. The same system that battered Dunedin produced the first recorded snowstorm to have struck Auckland.
This week we stand to see those records broken, perhaps even shattered. We could be living in an historic weather moment that will cause disruption the length and breadth of the country. The pictures that we see on television every southern summer of our northern counterparts facing massive disruption due to snow could be played out here. While weather events like snow storms do make the news in this country, this one will be the grandaddy of them all from a New Zealand perspective.
So, hunker down New Zealand! The Great Snow Storm of 2011 (as it will come to be called) is here. If it hasn’t arrived on your doorstep yet, it soon will! And you will then be able to know what it’s like to live in Dunedin!
See also Roger Pielke Sr.’s post on this event and Australia’s Steven Sherwood’s claim there would be no more snow due to climate change.