Frozen in Time
Apr 12, 2010
Who needs a committee report to spot rank deception?

By Joanne Nova

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The issue of the ClimateGate emails leaked or hacked from the East Anglia CRU is not that complicated. The emails are damning because anyone who reads them understands that they show petty, unprofessional, and probably criminal behaviour. We know the guys who wrote them are not people we’d want to buy cars from. They are hiding information. We don’t need a committee to state the obvious.

The emails show some of the leading players in climate science talking about tricks to “hide declines”, they boast about manipulating the peer review process, and “getting” rid of papers they didn’t like from the IPCC reports. It’s clear the data wasn’t going the way they hoped, yet they screwed the results every way they could to milk the “right” conclusion. Above all else, they feared freedom of information requests, and did everything they could to avoid providing their data. ClimateGate shows these people were not practising science, but advocacy and have been doing it for decades.

The House of Commons committee was surely supposed to be protecting the citizens of the UK from being deceived and defrauded, so what did they say when faced with obvious malpractice? Did they draw their swords and declare that honest taxpayers deserve better? Not at all. They whitewashed it.

“On the accusations relating to Professor Jones’s refusal to share raw data and computer codes, the Committee considers that his actions were in line with common practice in the climate science community but that those practices need to change.”

It’s the nice way of saying that Phil Jones really did hide the data, but everyone else in climate science fails the basic tenets of science too (so that’s alright then). Sure. Those practices need to “change”, not now, not tomorrow, but at some indeterminate time in the future. No rush boys. Yes, Jones should have his job back.

This is simple playground politics, not rocket science. Even preschoolers can come up with the Phil Jones defence: “But Mum. Everyone else does it.” The committee tries to defend Jones, and inadvertently damns the whole field of climate “science”.

From the mouth of Jones himself: “no reviewer has ever asked to see the data”. What exactly does the haloed peer review mean if you can just get a friend to “tick the box” without investigating the codes, data, adjustments and reasons? Remember that the next time you are unfortunate enough to read an IPCC report - they may have 2500 scientists on their books, but not one of them checked the original calculations for something as basic as global temperatures.

Indeed even today not one of them (not even Jones himself) could check them if they wanted too, because it’s been “lost”. The Met Centre says they’ll need three years to reassemble the data.

Independently Not Verified

So are the CRU’s graphs right or not? Who can say? Jones and the committee say that the graphs have been confirmed by other independent sources, which all sounds fine until you look closely. One independent source is the satellite records, but there weren’t too many satellites orbiting in 1850, and they don’t verify anything until 1979. And since 1979 there’s been an increasing divergence between the thermometers on the ground and those in the satellites. Those on the ground show more warming, and since it’s documented that they’re near airconditioning exhaust vents, concrete slabs, heated buildings and at airports, it seems likely that they’re in the wrong. Rather than verifying the surface records, satellites are suggesting the surface records exaggerate.

But what about the other “independent” verification? NASA has already admitted its data set is not as good as the flawed, bug ridden, missing one at the CRU in England, so that doesn’t look promising, and in any case, NASA doesn’t agree with NASA: as in, Hansen in 1981 shows a different global graph to Hansen 1987, or Hansen 2007. The twenty year period before satellites arrived has been adjusted and readjusted in nearly every decade since that period ended. Look at the red and blue lines in each of the graphs. These are global temperatures, and the seventies kept getting warmer for decades after the seventies! Again, the smell of advocacy.

This is supposed to be “verification”? Which graph independently confirms the CRU work? (Take your pick.) “Agreement” is not the same as verification. Just because two graphs agree doesn’t make them both right. In any case, these “independent” graphs are created from overlapping data sets, and by people who email each other their “tricks”.

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(Enlarged here. Graph references 2,3,4)

More excuses that don’t wash

Phil Jones is “in charge” of one of the three big global temperature sets, and he admits he’s lost the raw data. All he can offer is “adjusted” data. He admits he wrote those damning emails. He makes excuses that a “trick” is a clever way of doing something, which it might be, but when it’s a clever way to “hide a decline” it’s obviously deceptive. (And deception when money is involved, as it certainly is here on a massive scale, is fraud.)

He claims that the decline they carefully hid was reported in other graphs on other papers, so it wasn’t really “hidden”, but it’s like admitting that the stock prospectus graph was made up of two different company results and the poor ones were “hidden” in the fine print of an annual report 5 years ago.

The truth is that the decline he “hid” was a decline in tree-ring-temperatures that matches what the surface temperature records used to say was real. It’s another clue that the adjustments that have been made are questionable. Or it’s a clue that tree-rings themselves might not be good thermometers. Either way, it’s potentially important.

Weasel Words

To cover up the devastating enormity of the East Anglia CRU’s unscientific failings, the committee report defends them with weasel words. All the data and methods ought to be available, instead, we’re supposed to settle for “most”.

The British Parliament apparently thinks “most” of an audit trail is OK. After all, no one would expect them to provide all their tax receipts come audit time, and no one would mind if “most” of the National Budget for the United Kingdom was online, (but the rest was lost).

Likewise, all the raw data ought to be available, but instead we’re supposed to settle for “adjusted” data. The committee asked for an assurance that none of the data had been destroyed, and seemed happy when the UAE dodged the question and replied: “none of the adjusted station data referred to in the emails that have been published has been destroyed.”

As it happens, before ClimateGate we already knew the raw data was unavailable. Phil Jones told Roger Pielke Jnr it was gone and he could not provide it. “Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites.”

If the committee really wanted to know the full story they would have made sure Steve McIntyre was there for the hearing. He was the man who the CRU team feared the most.

The bottom line

So what it boils down to is that the world is thinking of developing a two trillion dollar market to dramatically change your choices (and those of everyone you know). It will affect the food you buy, the holidays you take, the way you heat your house, the cost of your clothes… and their core reason for this is that climate models run by guys like Jones predict things will get warmer. Right now, we don’t even know if the temperature record fed into those models was accurate, and they’re asking us to go all the way with them, based on “trust” of guys who are essentially untrustworthy.

We’re supposed to “trust” that guys who wish harm on their opponents, who are hell-bent on finding support for their personal favourite hypothesis, who fear and thwart any effort to audit them, we’re supposed to believe these guys care about getting the research right?

If they were directors of a small publicly listed company that refused to give up “receipts” they would have been issued with a summons. But when the global economy hangs on their pronouncements, they don’t have to provide the data, we’ll forgive them, and they get to keep their jobs too. I say put them in front of a jury. You don’t need to be a scientist to spot rampantly suspicious behaviour. The public is not fooled, and that’s why the Big Scare Campaign is running aground, and why pre-ordained whitewash committee reports won’t change anyone’s mind.  See post and add comments here.

Listen to her archived interview on blog radio here.

Apr 11, 2010
Global warming’s unscientific method: Science is undermined by scaremongers’ abuse of peer-review

The Washington Times

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.

Apr 09, 2010
Follow the Money : James Hansen Gets Another Pay-Off

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.

Apr 07, 2010
Scientists’ use of computer models to predict climate change is under attack

By David A. Fahrenthold, Washington Post

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):

image

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):

image

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.

image
Enlarged here.

Apr 06, 2010
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):

image

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):

image

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.

image
Enlarged here.

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