The prophets of global warming continue to lament as their carefully crafted yarn unravels before their eyes. Ross McKitrick, an intrepid economics professor from the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, has tugged apart the thin mathematical threads that once held together the story of climate change.

Recent attempts to silence Mr. McKitrick illuminate the extent to which the alarmists have abandoned proper scientific method in their pursuit of political goals.

Mr. McKitrick has spent the past two years attempting to publish a scientific paper that documents a fundamental error in the 2007 United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. This U.N. document serves as the sole authority upon which the Environmental Protection Agency based its December “endangerment finding” that will allow unelected bureaucrats to impose cap-and-trade-style regulations without a vote of Congress. The cost to the public in higher gas and energy prices will run in the billions.

One might think that the scientific community would be extra diligent in double-checking the conclusions of a report carrying such weighty real-world consequences. In fact, the opposite happened. Seven scientific journals circled the wagons to block publication of Mr. McKitrick’s explosive findings.

The IPCC report argued that temperatures rose one degree Celsius over the course of a century as a direct result of man-made carbon-dioxide emissions. This tiny change in temperature was calculated through the use of an “adjusted” set of global surface-temperature readings. Mr. McKitrick found that factors unrelated to global climate contaminated this data set, resulting in a higher temperature reading. He showed a statistically significant correlation between the change in temperature readings and socioeconomic indicators. It makes sense, for example, that replacing trees and forests with concrete and glass skyscrapers might contribute to the .01 degree annual increase in local temperature readings. This “urban heat island” effect would not be present in readings taken outside the asphalt jungle.

Scientific journals evaluate arguments of this sort using a peer-review process by which purportedly impartial experts in the relevant field verify the paper’s accuracy and suitability for publication. By addressing issues raised by reviewers, researchers are able to present an improved and refined final product. In Mr. McKitrick’s case, the process appears to have been abused to stifle dissent.

The leading journals Science and Nature both rejected the paper as too specialized and lacking in novelty. The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society did not respond. Reasons given for refusing the paper in other outlets frequently contradicted one another.

One of the famous leaked e-mails from the former head of the Climatic Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia sheds light on what really happens behind the scenes. “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report,” professor Phil Jones wrote in reference to a 2004 journal article by Mr. McKitrick. “Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

Mr. McKitrick’s views were indeed excluded from the IPCC report, but his paper will now be published in a forthcoming edition of Statistics, Politics and Policy. One of that journal’s editors told The Washington Times that the submission was treated as “fairly routine.” That is to say, they treated it as scientists should.

The soundness of a statistical analysis does not change simply because the numbers point to a truth inconvenient for those seeking to manipulate science to advance political policy. Thanks to the exposure of East Anglia’s unscientific method, the public can peer behind the curtains and see that the emperors of warming have no clothes. See story here.

See the SPPI expanded version here.
See today’s excellent post on The Perils of Peer Review by the Scientific Alliance here. See a recent post on The Polluted Peer Review Process by Pat Michaels here.

Godfather of the global warming hoax, James Hansen has received a $100,000 “environmental prize for decades of work trying to alert politicians to what he called an unsolved emergency of global warming.”

Climate scientist James Hansen wins Sophie Prize : The “Sophie Prize” is awarded for disrupting free-market capitalism and pushing the world toward centralized control. In its mission statement, the organization behind the prize states:

Today’s economic system is at odds with the limits set by nature. Too many decisions are based on short-term profit for a few select groups rather than a moral and fair distribution of the world’s resources.

For as long as the means allow, The Sophie Prize will be awarded to an individual or an organization that, in a pioneering or a particularly creative way, has pointed to alternatives to the present development and put such alternatives into practice.

Hansen never hides his overpowering leftist political views and agenda, having traveled the world to declare that successful capitalists should be jailed. His prattle seems never to be more sophisticated that the target audience demands, with unexamined low-left statements like:

“It’s been of parallel interest watching testimony in Congressional hearings about the greedy bastards who caused this Great Recession we’re laboring to overcome. The most frequent criticism was of their short-sighted, short-term view of cause-and-effect relationships. The fossil fuel militia aren’t even that advanced.”

See in this Master Resource story by Marlo Lewis, a response to Hansen vision for a grandiose presidency and a change of cap-and-trade (which he thinks is a scam) to fee and dividend.

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Bonn or bust - The UN’s last, desperate bid for unelected world government
From The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley in Bonn

There are not many empty seats in the dismal, echoing conference chamber in the ghastly concrete box that is the Hotel Maritim here in Bonn, where the UN’s latest attempt to maneuver the 194 States Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change gets underway today.

The “international community”, as it is now called, is here in full force, in the shape of expensively-suited, shiny-shod bureaucrats with an urbane manner and absolutely no knowledge of climate science whatsoever.

However, one empty chair is a pointer of things to come. The Holy See - a tiny nation in its own right, with a billion citizens around the world - has left its chair empty. And that is significant. If “global warming” still mattered, the Vatican would make sure that its representatives were present throughout this gloomy gathering of world-government wannabes.

This emergency conference, called by the UN’s bureaucrats because they were terrified that Cancun this December might fail as spectacularly as Copenhagen did last year, is a much quieter affair than Copenhagen. Not only has the air of triumphalism gone, after the scandals of Climategate, Himalayagate, Amazongate and so forth, but the belief that “global warming” is a global crisis has largely gone too.

There are a few true-believers left among the national delegates, but more of them than before are open to discussion of the previously-forbidden question - what if the climate extremists have made the whole thing up?

The Chinese Xinhua News Agency, for instance, came up to the table manned by the environmental campaigners of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, which takes a hard-boiled, cynical view of the notion that a tiny increase in the atmospheric concentration of a trace gas is likely to cause a thousand international disasters.

The reporters were genuinely interested to hear that there is another side to the story. Huan Gongdi, the Agency’s senior correspondent in Germany, asked me what I thought of the Copenhagen accord (a waste of time), what was happening in Bonn (a desperate attempt to ram through a binding Treaty that can be put in front of the US Senate before the mid-term elections make Senate acceptance of any such treaty unthinkable), and whether or not there was a climate crisis anyway (there isn’t).

I explained to Mr. Huan that even if the UN had not exaggerated the warming effect of CO2 many times over there was still nothing we could do about the supposed “crisis”, because we were emitting so little of the stuff in the first place.

For the record, I did the sum in front of him. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 today is about 388 parts per million by volume. However, we are adding just 2 ppmv a year to the air. So the warming we cause each year, even if one believes the UN’s wild exaggerations of CO2’s warming effect, is just 4.7 times the natural logarithm of the proportionate increase in CO2 concentration from 388 to 390 ppmv.

Thus, 4.7 ln(390/388) = 0.043 Fahrenheit degrees - less than a twentieth of a Fahrenheit degree of “global warming” every year. That is all. Putting it another way, it would take almost a quarter of a century with no carbon-emitting activity at all - not a single train, plane, automobile, or fossil-fueled power station - to forestall just 1 Fahrenheit degree of “global warming”.

That is why no Treaty based on controlling the amount of carbon dioxide the world emits can possibly work. And that is why there is no hurry anyway. The only reason for the UN’s sense of urgency - a panic no longer felt by the majority of the delegates here - is that the bureaucrats know the game is up. Opinion polls throughout the free world show that no one now believes a word of the climate extremists’ nonsense any more. If they can’t get a binding treaty this year, they won’t get one at all, and they know it.

I shall be reporting frequently from the conference as events unfold. See blog post here. Check back often at www.sppiblog.org.

The Washington Nationals will win 74 games this year. The Democrats will lose five Senate seats in November. The high Tuesday will be 86 degrees, but it will feel like 84.

And, depending on how much greenhouse gas emissions increase, the world’s average temperature will rise between 2 and 11.5 degrees by 2100. The computer models used to predict climate change are far more sophisticated than the ones that forecast the weather, elections or sporting results. They are multilayered programs in which scientists try to replicate the physics behind things such as rainfall, ocean currents and the melting of sea ice. Then, they try to estimate how emissions from smokestacks and auto tailpipes might alter those patterns in the future, as the effects of warmer temperatures echo through these complex and interrelated systems.

To check these programs’ accuracy, scientists plug in data from previous years to see if the model’s predictions match what really happened. But these models still have the same caveat as other computer-generated futures. They are man-made, so their results are shaped by human judgment.

This year, critics have harped on that fact, attacking models of climate change that have been used to illustrate what will happen if the United States and other countries do nothing to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Climate scientists have responded that their models are imperfect, but still provide invaluable glimpses of change to come. They have found themselves trying to persuade the public—now surrounded by computerized predictions of the future—to believe in these.

If policymakers don’t heed the models, “you’re throwing away information. And if you throw away information, then you know less about the future than we actually do,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “You can say, ‘You know what, I don’t trust the climate models, so I’m going to walk into the middle of the road with a blindfold on,’ “ Schmidt said. “But you know what, that’s not smart.” Climate scientists admit that some models overestimated how much the Earth would warm in the past decade. But they say this might just be natural variation in weather, not a disproof of their methods.

As computers have become faster and cheaper, models both simple and sophisticated have proliferated across government, business and sports, appearing to offer precise answers to questions that used to be rhetorical. How many games will the Redskins win next season? The Web site Footballoutsiders.com, which uses computers to show fans hidden dimensions of pro football, uses a model with about 80 variables. It looks at a team’s third-down conversions, the experience of its coaches, even the age of its defensive backs. No crystal balls

How much cleaner would the Chesapeake Bay be if it had twice as many oysters? The Environmental Protection Agency uses a model that divides the bay into 55,000 slices, and maps how pollution progresses through them, from upstream tributaries into the deeper waters of the Chesapeake. It could imagine thousands more oysters—which filter water as they feed—and watch cleaner water spread out via currents and tides.

But, some of the time, these electronic futures haven’t come true. The Footballoutsiders site predicted the Redskins would win 7.8 games in 2009. The real-world team won four. The EPA’s Chesapeake Bay model has been criticized repeatedly for over-optimism, for creating a virtual bay that looked cleaner than the real one. Last month, another model’s prediction was busted: a Georgia Tech professor’s computer said Kansas would win the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. The Jayhawks lost in the second round. These and other models are only as smart as the scientists who build them—they rely on data that scientists have gathered about the real world, and the accuracy of estimates about how all the factors fit together (Is an experienced coach more or less important than young defensive backs?).

They also depend on the computers running them. To accurately depict how individual clouds form and disappear, for instance, the computers that model climate change would need to be a million times faster. For now, the effects of clouds have to be estimated.

But scientists say complexity doesn’t guarantee accuracy. The best test of a model is to check it against reality. “We’re never going to perfectly model reality. We would need a system as complicated as the world around us,” said Ken Fleischmann, a professor of information studies at the University of Maryland. He said scientists needed to make the uncertainties inherent in models clear: “You let people know: It’s a model. It’s not reality. We haven’t invented a crystal ball.” Scientists say they don’t need models to know that the world is warming: There is plenty of real-world evidence, gathered since the mid-1800s, to suggest that. “There’s no climate model in that conclusion,” said Christopher Field, of the Carnegie Institution for Science in California. There are more than a dozen such models running around the world: mega-computers whose job is creating a virtual Earth. These usually combine a weather simulation with other programs that mimic effects of rain and sun on the land, currents in the ocean, and emissions of greenhouse gases. First, these models imagine all the factors interacting within a “grid box”—an imaginary cube of land, water and sky that might be 60 miles long and 60 miles wide.

Then, the computer imagines effects in one box spilling into the next, and so on. As the model runs, imaginary cold fronts sweep over virtual oceans, simulating weather at rates such as five years per day. In some cases, the models are re-run with different weather conditions, until a pattern emerges in global temperatures.

The pattern is the point. It is man’s signature, a guide to what could happen in the real world. All the major climate models seem to show that greenhouse gases are causing warming, climate scientists say, although they don’t agree about how much. A 2007 United Nations report cited a range of estimates from 2 to 11.5 degrees over the next century. “It’s an educated, scientifically based guess,” said Michael Winton, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “But it’s a guess nonetheless.”

Raining on their parade

But Warren Meyer, a mechanical and aerospace engineer by training who blogs at www.climate-skeptic.com, said that climate models are highly flawed. He said the scientists who build them don’t know enough about solar cycles, ocean temperatures and other things that can nudge the earth’s temperature up or down. He said that because models produce results that sound impressively exact, they can give off an air of infallibility. But, Meyer said—if the model isn’t built correctly—its results can be both precise-sounding and wrong. “The hubris that can be associated with a model is amazing, because suddenly you take this sketchy understanding of a process, and you embody it in a model,” and it appears more trustworthy, Meyer said. “It’s almost like money laundering.”

Last month, a Gallup poll provided the latest evidence of a public U-turn on climate change. Asked if the threat of global warming was “generally exaggerated,” 48 percent said yes. That was up 13 points from 2008, the highest level of skepticism since Gallup started asking the question in 1997.

But scientists say that, during this time, they have only become more certain that their models work. Put in the conditions on Earth more than 20,000 years ago: they produce an Ice Age, NASA’s Schmidt said. Put in the conditions from 1991, when a volcanic eruption filled the earth’s atmosphere with a sun-shade of dust. The models produce cooling temperatures and shifts in wind patterns, Schmidt said, just like the real world did. If the models are as flawed as critics say, Schmidt said, “You have to ask yourself, ‘How come they work?’ “ See post here.

You didn’t need a climate model to predict that Pinatubo and Cerro Hudson in 1991 would produce global cooling. We can use volcanism and factors like the ENSO, PDO, and solar to predict weather and climate weeks, months, years even decades into the future without dynamical models. Using statistical approaches we have forecast most seasons with skill well in advance the last decade. For example, the last two years, we correctly forecast a cold summer and cold winter in the US and Eurasia this year.  We see a warm summer then another cold winter coming (see more here).

The Multidecadal cycles in the oceans and the sun suggest cooling decades ahead. The 213 solar cycle suggests a Dalton like minimum the next few decades augmenting the cooling. Enjoy this brief El Nino warmth while you can. Oh and ignore the tinkertoy climate models even those run on supercomputers. All they provide is false precision and are another way your government wastes your money.

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ClimateGate Goes Back to 1980
By Duncan Davidson in Wall Street Pit

Those of you who still believe that the ClimateGate scandal was just a bunch of emails in England should read this article. James Hansen of GISS appears to have systematically adjusted the historical temperature record to remove a cold patch in the ‘70s in order to exaggerate the rise since. The amount of change of 0.6 degrees is for one decade is close to the measured change for the whole century. This is vividly seen in these three snapshots of his data being modified (below, enlarged here):

Watch how the cooling trend of the 1960’s to 1970’s is steadily adjusted up so that 0.3 degrees cooler gradually becomes 0.03 warmer (notice the red and blue horizontal lines in the graphs above).

Mathews Graph 1976: 1955 - 1965 was around 0.3C warmer than 1970’s

Hansen/GISS 1980: 1955 - 1965 was around 0.1C warmer than 1970’s

Hansen/GISS 1987: 1955 - 1965 was around 0.05C warmer than 1970’s

Hansen/GISS 2007: 1955 - 1965 was around 0.03C cooler than 1970’s

Here is what we had thought was the historic temperature, back in the mid-1970s before the deception began. Note how much warmer the ‘30s and ‘40s looked then, and how in the charts above it shrinks in significance (below, enlarged here):

The article goes on to explain how weather balloon data created the prior temperature record, and is considered very accurate. It also matches very closely to satellite data, which started in 1979. Significantly, satellite data has diverged from the surface temperature data, showing less warming, pointing to the deception.

The whole AGW edifice is built on surface temperature from three sources: Hansen's GISS, the UK's HadCRUt and the NOAA. The GISS data is now seen to be manipulated; the HadCRUt data is suspect since it is from the main sources of the ClimateGate emails; and NOAA is even warmer than both of them, suggesting manipulation there too.

Much of the rest of climate science is built on data which is now suspect. What is now seen as Garbage In, Garbage Out had been Garbage In, Gospel Out. See post here.

See an excellent reconstruction of the changes made and also a comparison of the two nearly identical warming trends of the early and late 20th century, one of which is claimed to be easily explained by natural factors but the second of which can not and must be man made here.

Enlarged here.

Those of you who still believe that the ClimateGate scandal was just a bunch of emails in England should read this article. James Hansen of GISS appears to have systematically adjusted the historical temperature record to remove a cold patch in the ‘70s in order to exaggerate the rise since. The amount of change of 0.6 degrees is for one decade is close to the measured change for the whole century. This is vividly seen in these three snapshots of his data being modified (below, enlarged here):

Watch how the cooling trend of the 1960’s to 1970’s is steadily adjusted up so that 0.3 degrees cooler gradually becomes 0.03 warmer (notice the red and blue horizontal lines in the graphs above).

Mathews Graph 1976: 1955 - 1965 was around 0.3C warmer than 1970’s

Hansen/GISS 1980: 1955 - 1965 was around 0.1C warmer than 1970’s

Hansen/GISS 1987: 1955 - 1965 was around 0.05C warmer than 1970’s

Hansen/GISS 2007: 1955 - 1965 was around 0.03C cooler than 1970’s

Here is what we had thought was the historic temperature, back in the mid-1970s before the deception began. Note how much warmer the ‘30s and ‘40s looked then, and how in the charts above it shrinks in significance (below, enlarged here):

The article goes on to explain how weather balloon data created the prior temperature record, and is considered very accurate. It also matches very closely to satellite data, which started in 1979. Significantly, satellite data has diverged from the surface temperature data, showing less warming, pointing to the deception.

The whole AGW edifice is built on surface temperature from three sources: Hansen's GISS, the UK's HadCRUt and the NOAA. The GISS data is now seen to be manipulated; the HadCRUt data is suspect since it is from the main sources of the ClimateGate emails; and NOAA is even warmer than both of them, suggesting manipulation there too.

Much of the rest of climate science is built on data which is now suspect. What is now seen as Garbage In, Garbage Out had been Garbage In, Gospel Out. See post here.

See an excellent reconstruction of the changes made and also a comparison of the two nearly identical warming trends of the early and late 20th century, one of which is claimed to be easily explained by natural factors but the second of which can not and must be man made here.

Enlarged here.

No people on earth are more righteously Green than the Germans. They built the foundations and set the tone of the modern Green movement in, ahem, the 1930s. They invented the phrase Atomkraft Nein Danke. They were the first country to allow nasty, dangerous Sixties eco-radicals to reinvent themselves as respectable politicians. They were the first place to buy, wholesale, into the solar power con, which is why so many of their rooves - especially on churches - shimmer and glow like reflective-coated crusties at a mid-Nineties rave, while the German taxpayer is ruing the day his government ever chose to subsidise (Achtung Herr Cameron!) this fantastically pointless scheme.. (Hat tip: Robert Groezinger, et al)

So when the Germans say “Auf Wiedersehn AGW” it really is time for the rest of the world to sit up and take notice. And that’s exactly what they just have said. See for yourself in this tear-inducing glorious feature in one of their leading newspapers (enlarged here).

Der Spiegel has done a number on AGW - one of the best and most comprehensive I’ve read in any newspaper anywhere - and it could hardly be more damning.

Truly, the experience is akin to having honey (really good stuff, heather probably) licked off one’s body by nubile blonde Nibelungen.

On the recently vindicated Prof Phil Jones:

“I am 100 percent confident that the climate has warmed,” Jones says imploringly. “I did not manipulate or fabricate any data.”

His problem is that the public doesn’t trust him anymore. Since unknown hackers secretly copied 1,073 private emails between members of his research team and published them on the Internet, his credibility has been destroyed - and so has that of an entire profession that had based much of its work on his research until now.

On the politicisation of science:

Reinhard Huttl, head of the German Research Center for Geosciences in Potsdam near Berlin and the president of the German Academy of Science and Engineering, believes that basic values are now under threat. “Scientists should never be as wedded to their theories that they are no longer capable of refuting them in the light of new findings,” he says. Scientific research, Hüttl adds, is all about results, not beliefs. Unfortunately, he says, there are more and more scientists who want to be politicians.

On the Urban Heat Island Effect (complete with nice dig at the aforementioned “exonerated, give him his job back” Prof Jones)

Critics reproach Jones for not taking one factor, in particular, sufficiently into account: the growth of urban areas. Stations that used to be rural are now in cities. And because it is always warmer in cities than outside, the temperatures measured at these stations are bound to rise.

Environmental economist Ross McKitrick, one of McIntyre’s associates, examined all rapidly growing countries, in which this urban heat effect was to be expected, and found a correlation between economic growth and temperature rise. He submitted his study in time for the last IPCC report.

Jones did everything he could to suppress the publication, which was critical of him. It proved advantageous to him that he had been one of the two main authors of the temperature chapter. In one of the hacked emails, he openly admitted that he wanted to keep this interfering publication out of the IPCC report at all costs, “even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

On the myth of monster storms:

The all-clear signal on the hurricane front is another setback for the IPCC. In keeping with lead author Kevin Trenberth’s predictions, the IPCC report warned that there would be more hurricanes in a greenhouse climate. One of the graphs in the IPCC report is particularly mysterious. Without specifying a source, the graph suggestively illustrates how damage caused by extreme weather increases with rising average temperatures.

When hurricane expert Roger Pielke, Jr. of the University of Colorado at Boulder saw the graph, he was appalled. “I would like to discover this sort of relationship myself,” he says, “but it simply isn’t supported by the facts at the moment.”

Pielke tried to find out where the graph had come from. He traced it to the chief scientist at a London firm that performs risk calculations for major insurance companies. The insurance scientist claims that the graph was never meant for publication. How the phantom graph found its way into the IPCC report is still a mystery.

Der Spiegel would never have got away with this article four years ago. But then, in 2006, according to a poll, 62 per cent of Germans surveyed answered “Yes” to the question “Are you personally afraid of climate change.” In 2010 that figure has dropped to 42 per cent, which for those of you who haven’t done the math means that the majority of Germans are now not personally afraid of climate change.

Way to go, Germans! Gott Mitt Uns and all that. Stimmt. Genau.

See Delingpole’s post here.