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Sep 06, 2010
Misinformation on the Website Skeptical Science - Getting Skeptical About Global Warming Skepticism
By Roger Pielke Sr.
There is a weblog called “Skeptical Science - Getting Skeptical About Global Warming Skepticism” that has a misleading post on ocean heat content titled
Ocean cooling: skeptic arguments drowned by data
The post starts with
In 2008, climate change sceptic Roger Pielke Sr said this: “Global warming, as diagnosed by upper ocean heat content has not been occurring since 2004”. It is a fine example of denialist spin, making several extraordinary leaps:
•that one symptom is indicative of the state of an entire malaise (e.g. not being short of breath one day means your lung cancer is cured).
•that one can claim significance about a four year period when it’s too short to draw any kind of conclusion
•that global warming has not been occurring on the basis of ocean temperatures alone
So much for the hype. What does the science say about the temperature of the oceans - which, after all, constitute about 70% of the Earth’s surface? The oceans store approximately 80% of all the energy in the Earth’s climate, so ocean temperatures are a key indicator for global warming.
No straight lines
Claims that the ocean has been cooling are correct. Claims that global warming has stopped are not. It is an illogical position: the climate is subject to a lot of natural variability, so the premise that changes should be ‘monotonic’ - temperatures rising in straight lines - ignores the fact that nature doesn’t work like that. This is why scientists normally discuss trends - 30 years or more - so that short term fluctuations can be seen as part of a greater pattern. (Other well-known cyclic phenomena like El Nino and La Nina play a part in these complex interactions).
The post starts by mislabeling me as a “climate change sceptic” and a “denialist”. Not only is this completely incorrect (as can be easily confirmed by reading our article
Pielke Sr., R., K. Beven, G. Brasseur, J. Calvert, M. Chahine, R. Dickerson, D. Entekhabi, E. Foufoula-Georgiou, H. Gupta, V. Gupta, W. Krajewski, E. Philip Krider, W. K.M. Lau, J. McDonnell, W. Rossow, J. Schaake, J. Smith, S. Sorooshian, and E. Wood, 2009: Climate change: The need to consider human forcings besides greenhouse gases. Eos, Vol. 90, No. 45, 10 November 2009, 413. Copyright (2009) American Geophysical Union),
but it sets the tone of their post as an ad hominem attack, rather than a discussion of the issue.
The author of this post documents in the figures that they present, that upper ocean heat, in terms of its annual average, did not accumulate during the period ~2004 through 2009. This means that global warming halted on this time period. There is no other way to spin this data.
The claim in the post (apparently written by Graham Wayne) Does ocean cooling prove global warming has ended? that “The most recent ocean measurements show consistent warming” is false (unless the author of this post has new data since 2009 which may show warming). The recent lack of warming (the data do not support a cooling, despite what the Skeptical Science weblog reports) does not prove or disprove whether global warming over a longer term has ended.
However, the ocean heat content provides the most appropriate metric to diagnosis global warming in recent (since ~2004 when the Argo network became sufficiently dense) and upcoming years, as recommended, of example, in Pielke Sr., R.A., 2008: A broader view of the role of humans in the climate system. Physics Today, 61, Vol. 11, 54-55.
The author of the post on Skeptical Science continues to present misinformation in their Intermediate level post where it is stated: “Early estimates of ocean heat from the Argo showed a cooling bias due to pressure sensor issues. Recent estimates of ocean heat that take this bias into account show continued warming of the upper ocean. This is confirmed by independent estimates of ocean heat as well as more comprehensive measurements of ocean heat down to 2000 metres deep.”
This is an erroneous statement. There was not continued warming for the time period 2004 to 2009, as confirmed by Josh Willis in Pielke Sr., R.A., 2008: A broader view of the role of humans in the climate system. Physics Today, 61, Vol. 11, 54-55. Recently, Josh Willis reported that an updated analysis will be available this Fall.
What the Skeptical Science fails to recognize is that with respect to the diagnosis of global warming using Joules of heat accumulation in the oceans, snapshots of heat content at different times are all that is needed. There is no time lag in heating or cooling. The Joules are either there or they are not. The assessment of a long-term linear trend is not needed.
For example, if the ocean lost its heat in one or two years (such as from a major volcanic eruption), the global warming “clock” would be reset. The Skeptical Science statements that “Claims that the ocean has been cooling are correct. Claims that global warming has stopped are not” illustrates their lack of understanding of the physics. If ocean cooling does occur, it DOES mean global warming as stopped during that time period.
What would be useful is for the weblog Skeptical Science authors to discuss the value of using (and issues with using) the accumulation of Joules in the climate system as the primary metric to monitor global warming. See post here.
ICECAP NOTE: Note how whenever data doesn’t support the models or theory, somehow something must be wrong with it - here they wrongly ascribe the cooling to sensor problems. However, they ignore the many issues with the surface data set like urbanization unaccounted for, bad siting, inappropriate instrumentation, land use changes, changing ocean measurement methods which have much larger errors, inconveniently warm biases.
Enlarged here.
This difference has been growing with time. See the difference of the NOAA global land temperatures and the satellite derived (UAH) temperatures here. They started out about the same in 1979 but now land station data according to NOAA is 0.5C warmer than the satellite when the climate models predict that the satellites which measure the lower troposphere should be warmer than the land because that is where the heat is supposedly trapped by greenhouse gases.
Enlarged here.
While Skeptical Science tries to respond to Roger, maybe they want to explain this additional inconvenient truth.
Also Graham Wayne brings up the need to look at longer periods like 30 years to find trends - decadal trends may be misleading. However, Wayne neglects to note that the PDO and AMO ocean factors both have 30-40 year long regimes with alternating trends. The warm trend from the late 1970s to early 2000s was a warm regime like the 1910s to 1940s. The trend change that started in 2002 that will resume shortly is likely to be a cold trend period like the 1940s to 1970s or if your consider solar more like the early 20th or early 19th century.
Sep 06, 2010
Greenland Temperatures of the Past Millennium Based on Nitrogen and Argon Isotopic Ratios
By Dr. Craig Idso, NIPCC
Reference: Kobashi, T., Severinghaus, J.P., Barnola, J.-M., Kawamura, K., Carter, T. and Nakaegawa, T. 2010.
Persistent multi-decadal Greenland temperature fluctuation through the last millennium. Climatic Change 100: 733-756. According to Kobashi et al. (2010) “in Greenland, oxygen isotopes of ice (Stuiver et al., 1995) have been extensively used as a temperature proxy, but the data are noisy and do not clearly show multi-centennial trends for the last 1,000 years in contrast to borehole temperature records that show a clear ‘Little Ice Age’ and ‘Medieval Warm Period’ (Dahl-Jensen et al., 1998).” However, they note that nitrogen (N) and argon (Ar) isotopic ratios—15N/14N and 40Ar/36Ar, respectively—can be used to construct a temperature record that “is not seasonally biased, and does not require any calibration to instrumental records, and resolves decadal to centennial temperature fluctuations.” Kobashi et al. further describe the development of such an approach, after which they use it to construct a history of the last thousand years of central Greenland surface air temperature, based on values of isotopic ratios of nitrogen and argon previously derived by Kobashi et al. (2008) from air bubbles trapped in the GISP2 ice core that had been extracted from central Greenland (72 degrees 36 minutes N, 38 degrees 30 minutes W).
The figure below depicts the central Greenland surface temperature reconstruction produced by the six scientists; and as best as can be determined from this representation, the peak temperature of the latter part of the Medieval Warm Period—which actually began some time prior to the start of their record, as demonstrated by the work of Dansgaard et al. (1975), Jennings and Weiner (1996), Johnsen et al. (2001) and Vinther et al. (2010)—was approximately 0.33C greater than the peak temperature of the Current Warm Period, and about 1.67C greater than the temperature of the last decades of the 20th century. In addition, it is worthy to note that between about 1400 and 1460 there was also a period of notable warmth in Kobashi et al.’s temperature reconstruction, which aligns well with the “Little” Medieval Warm Period, the peak temperature of which was about 0.9C greater than the temperature of the last decades of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century.
Central Greenland surface temperature reconstruction for the last millennium. Adapted from Kobashi et al. (2010). Enlarged here.
These findings, the authors say, “show clear evidence of the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age in agreement with documentary evidence,” and those data clearly show that the Medieval Warm Period was at times considerably warmer than the Current Warm Period has been to date, and that even the Little Medieval Warm Period was considerably warmer than it was over the last decades of the twentieth century, as well as the first decade of the 21st century. Thus, there is no compelling reason to believe that the 20th-century increase in the air’s CO2 content (a 100-ppm rise above what it was during the warmer Medieval Warm Period) was the cause of 20th-century global warming, especially when climate alarmists claim that such warming, when it occurs, should be most evident and earliest expressed in high northern latitudes, and even more so in light of the fact that there is a millennial-scale climatic cycle that alternately brings the earth relatively warmer and cooler century-scale conditions throughout both glacial and interglacial periods alike.
Additional References
Dahl-Jensen, D., Mosegaard, K, Gundestrup, N., Clew, G.D., Johnsen, S.J., Hansen, A.W. and Balling, N. 1998. Past temperatures directly from the Greenland ice sheet. Science 282: 268-271.
Dansgaard, W., Johnsen, S.J., Reech, N., Gundestrup, N., Clausen, H.B. and Hammer, C.U. 1975. Climatic changes, Norsemen and modern man. Nature 255: 24-28.
Jennings, A.E. and Weiner, N.J. 1996. Environmental change in eastern Greenland during the last 1300 years: evidence from foraminifera and lithofacies in Nansen Fjord, 68N. The Holocene 6: 179-191.
Johnsen, S.J., Dahl-Jensen, D., Gundestrup, N., Steffensen, J.P., Clausen, H.B., Miller, H., Masson-Delmotte, V., Sveinbjörnsdottir, A.E. and White, J. 2001. Oxygen isotope and palaeotemperature records from six Greenland ice-core stations: Camp Century, Dye-3, GRIP, GISP2, Renland and NorthGRIP. Journal of Quaternary Science 16: 299-307.
Kobashi, T., Severinghaus, J.P. and Kawamura, K. 2008. Argon and nitrogen isotopes of trapped air in the GISP2 ice core during the Holocene epoch (0-11,600 B.P.): methodology and implications for gas loss processes. Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 72: 4675-4686.
Stuiver, M., Grootes, P.M. and Brazunias, T.F. 1995. The GISP2 δ18O climate record of the past 16,500 years and the role of the sun, ocean, and volcanoes. Quaternary Research 44: 341-354.
Vinther, B.M., Jones, P.D., Briffa, K.R., Clausen, H.B., Andersen, K.K., Dahl-Jensen, D. and Johnsen, S.J. 2010. Climatic signals in multiple highly resolved stable isotope records from Greenland. Quaternary Science Reviews 29: 522-538.
See post here. H/T SEPP
Icecap Note: In this story , Steve Bloom, of the SFO Sierra club who used to haunt the Climate Science blog of Roger Pielke Sr. when he allowed comments, asked in a comment on this alarmist friendly blog if there was any credible recon on the existence of the Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age as depicted in the image there (below, enlarged here).
The latter (LIA) is well covered in the literature and the art of the time. The MWP is supported by this post and also in the CO2Science blog where they have compiled and documented peer review studies by 869 individual scientists from 516 separate research institutions in 43 different countries supporting the existence of a global MWP. Of course since Bloom only looks at blogs sites like on the right side of that story’s site, he, like most other true believers, would never learn the inconvenient truths.
This chart (below, enlarged here) by Richard Alley of Penn State, no skeptic, shows Greenland temperatures are unusually cold in recent decades with each successive warm period diminishing.
Sep 06, 2010
Why We Blink In Face Of Eco-Terror
Investors Business Daily
Extremism: An environmental activist inspired by Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” takes hostages at the Discovery Channel headquarters. This isn’t the latest example of eco-terrorism, just the latest to be ignored.
It got wide play when union boss Richard Trumka accused Sarah Palin of inciting violence every time she speaks. President Obama recently accused Fox News host Glenn Beck of “stirring up” a “certain portion” of the American people with his “Restore Honor” rally. Gender orientation and “sexual identity” were recently added to the hate crimes list.
Yet those who say man is a plague upon the earth, ravaging its resources, exterminating its endangered species and heating it into oblivion are never accused of inciting anything when those who hear their words respond by marching into an office building to save the earth at gunpoint.
The gunman who entered the Discovery Channel headquarters was killed after he entered with a handgun and what were believed to be explosive devices, took three hostages and pointed his gun at one of them. He identified himself as James J. Lee and said, “I have a gun and I have a bomb. ... I have several bombs strapped to my body ready to go off.”
In a rambling manifesto, Lee echoes the writings of President Obama’s science adviser, John Holdren, railing against “disgusting human babies” and “parasitic infants” and insisting people should “disassemble civilization.” His manifesto demanded that the Discovery Channel cease all programming about war, weapons or giving birth.
Court records show that Lee had been arrested on Feb. 21, 2008, on the sixth day of a protest at the Discovery building. Lee said at the time that he experienced an “awakening” when he watched former Vice President Al Gore’s environmental documentary ‘’An Inconvenient Truth.” Lee has said he was also inspired by “Ishmael,” a novel by environmentalist Daniel Quinn. “Nothing is more important than saving ... the Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears and, of course, the Squirrels. The humans? The planet does not need humans,” he wrote.
As scary as this sounds, it is scarier to consider that this sentiment can be found in various forms in the bibliography of what is considered mainstream environmentalism.
In a recently rediscovered book, “Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment,” co-authored with Malthus fans Paul and Anne Ehrlich, Holdren, who holds the post of presidential assistant for science technology, revealed his similar pessimistic and apocalyptic views on all three topics. They are disturbing.
Like Lee, Holdren hates people and views them as the root of all planetary evil. Big families are a target of Holdren and the Ehrlichs, who write that they “contribute to general social deterioration by overproducing children” and “can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility.”
Eco-terror groups such as the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front have long advocated violence, including arson and bombings, to save the earth and critters on it from the plague known as mankind. From firebombing ski resorts to torching medical labs, these environmental terrorists have been very active.
ELF’s Web site at one point offered pointers on “Setting Fires With Electric Timers.” The ALF posted commentary boasting that its “attacks on medical research continue today” and are aimed at producing “millions of dollars worth of damages and delays in the development of new treatments and cures.”
People must die, in their view, to save Bambi.
Of course, no one will blame Al Gore for inciting hate and violence. No one will worry about a vast left-wing conspiracy to save the planet at all costs or that James Lee’s extremist views are almost identical to those of the president’s science adviser.
Hate comes only from the right, and when you’re saving the earth, the end justifies the means. Neither human lives nor human freedom can stand in their way. H/T Climate Depot
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Time for Rajendra Pachauri to go
New Scientist Opinion
THE Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is in need of fundamental reform. Its organisation is outdated, and it has failed to follow many of its own procedures, a high-level review of the panel’s activities reported this week (see “Climate panel must ‘fundamentally reform’ to survive").
A central recommendation is that to encourage new thinking, senior management should only be allowed to serve for a single term. That amounts to a call for the panel’s chair, Rajendra Pachauri, to step down.
He should go soon. Pachauri has spent too much effort defending the indefensible, in particular when it emerged that the IPCC’s last report contained serious mistakes.
Those who strive to cast doubt on the reality of climate change will doubtless be delighted by his departure. But keeping Pachauri in place would undermine efforts to rebuild the panel’s authority, even if other recommended reforms are implemented.
When the IPCC’s governing body meets in South Korea next month, it should seek a new chair - preferably a scientist of stature from outside the climate research establishment. That will give it the best chance of re-establishing the credibility it must have. See post here.
Sep 05, 2010
A cunning bid to shore up the ruins of the IPCC
By Christopher Booker, UK Telegraph
Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Photo: EPA
A report on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, on behalf of the world’s leading scientific academies, last week provoked even some of the more committed believers in man-made global warming to demand the resignation of Dr Rajendra Pachauri as chairman of the IPCC. But is the report all that it seems?
Last winter, the progress of this belief - that the world faces catastrophe unless we spend trillions of dollars to halt global warming - suffered an unprecedented reverse. In Copenhagen, the world’s leaders failed to agree a treaty designed to reshape the future of civilisation. This coincided with a series of scandals that blew up around the IPCC’s 2007 report.
Budget 2009: Labour is desperate, and fighting to the endSince then several inquiries, including three into the leaked “Climategate” emails, have tried to hold the official line, all following a consistent pattern. Each has made a few peripheral criticisms, for plausibility, while deliberately avoiding the main issue. Each has then gone on to put over the required message: that the science of global warming remains unchallenged.
At first sight, last week’s Inter-Academy report on the “processes and procedures of the IPCC” seems to have played it more cleverly. It criticises the IPCC’s abuse of its own procedures in very trenchant terms, and suggests some radical reforms to them. Passages on “conflict of interest”, and a recommendation that top officials should serve only one term, seem to hint that Dr Pachauri, reappointed to serve until 2014 after presiding over the IPCC’s last controversial report, should step down. But, as with the reports that preceded it, this one also tiptoes round a mighty elephant in the room, in order to put over the familiar message: the IPCC has generally “served society well”, the science remains unchallenged. It is as one might expect of a report produced on behalf of bodies such as Britain’s Royal Society and the US National Academy of Sciences, which have long been leading advocates for the belief in global waming.
When, some years ago, I began the research for my book The Real Global Warming Disaster, nothing surprised me more than discovering how widely the nature of the IPCC is misunderstood. It is invariably portrayed as a body representing the top scientists in the world, objectively weighing the complex forces that shape Earth’s climate. In reality, it’s nothing of the kind.
The men who set up the panel - led by its first chairman Bert Bolin, a Swedish meteorologist, and John Houghton, then head of the UK Met Office and first chairman of the IPCC’s scientific working group - were already believers in what they called “human-induced climate change”. The IPCC was, from the start, essentially a political pressure group, producing evidence to support the view that global warming was the most serious crisis facing the planet. This guided the selection of all the key scientists chosen to compile the IPCC’s findings (such as those involved in the Climategate affair). And this explains all the searching questions that have built up around its hugely influential reports ever since.
The first major row over the IPCC came when it was revealed that the most widely publicised and alarmist claim in its second report, in 1995, was inserted after the text had been signed off by the other scientists involved - while 15 passages which countered alarm over climate change had been excised. This famously provoked Professor Fred Seitz, former president of the US National Academy of Sciences, to say that in 60 years as a scientist he had never seen a “more disturbing corruption” of scientific procedure.
Perhaps the most telling controversy arose over the notorious “hockey stick” graph, the centrepiece of the IPCC’s third report in 2001. It rewrote climate history to show a world that was now dramatically hotter than it had been for at least 1,000 years. Promoted by Houghton and others as the ultimate emblem of the cause, it was eventually shown to have been no more than the result of trickery with a computer programme. But even after it been exposed, the IPCC establishment made the most tortuous efforts to defend it for their fourth report in 2007.
This became the most comprehensively discredited IPCC report of all. It was the first produced under the chairmanship of Dr Pachauri, who was appointed in 2002. One after another, its scariest and most widely publicised predictions - such as that Himalayan glaciers would largely have vanished by 2035, that climate change would kill off 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest, that African crop-yields would be halved by 2050 - were found to have been based not on science at all, but on the reckless claims of environmental activists.
Not the least indictment of the IPCC’s 2007 report was the revelation that, in clear breach of its own rules, more than 5,000 of its supposedly scientific claims were not peer-reviewed but came from advocacy groups, press releases, newspaper articles, even student theses. Yet Dr Pachauri himself has repeatedly insisted that everything in his report was based on “peer-reviewed” science.
Again and again the 2007 report has been found to be in flagrant breach of the IPCC’s own rules. For instance, it cited no fewer than 16 articles from a single issue of one climate journal - which had been published after the IPCC’s official cut-off date and should therefore have been disallowed. In each of the thousands of instances where the IPCC broke its rules, the claims it made were all in one direction: to hype up alarm over the extent and effects of climate change beyond anything science could justify. The most shameless instance was the claim about Himalayan glaciers, which two of the IPCC’s own expert reviewers had pointed out was ridiculous even before it was published. Dr Pachauri dismissed this criticism as “voodoo science” (having employed the author of the claim at his own Delhi research institute).
Through all this the IPCC has been exposed for what it truly is: not a proper scientific body but an advocacy group, ready to stop at nothing in hijacking the prestige of science for its cause. But little of this might be guessed from the Inter-Academy report (jointly commissioned by Dr Pachauri himself and Ban Ki-Moon, the UN’s Secretary General). Even if Dr Pachauri is forced to resign at a UN meeting in Korea next month, as seems possible, he will merely have been thrown off the sledge so that the all-important cause can survive.
Yet the IPCC is the body on whose authority our Parliament voted for the Climate Change Act, passed all but unanimously two years ago. This will land us, on the Government’s own figures, with by far the biggest bill we have ever faced: up to 18 billion pounds every year for the next 40 years - 734 billion pounds in all - in order to cut our CO2 emissions by 80 per cent, something impossible to achieve except by closing down virtually all our industrial economy.
On the same authority, the rest of the world is being told that it must take similar steps, to avert a catastrophe dreamed up and promoted by no one more than those joint winners of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, Al Gore and the IPCC. Does this not all add up to the most bizarre and outrageous scandal in the history of the world? Read post here.
Sep 04, 2010
Two Different Approaches to Academic Monkey Business
By Charles Battig, M.D., Virginia Scientists and Engineers for Energy and Environment
Regarding Eric Felten’s “Morality Check: When Fad Science Is Bad Science” (Taste, Aug. 27): Apparent differences in how “scientific misconduct” at Harvard University is handled, and how it has been handled at the University of Virginia in the matter of climatologist Michael Mann are illustrative.
Harvard professor of psychology Marc Hauser was found “solely responsible for eight instances of scientific misconduct” involving the “data acquisition, data analysis, data retention and the reporting of research methodologies and results” in the Aug. 20, statement by Harvard Dean Michael Smith. Three published papers by Mr. Hauser now need to be corrected or retracted, according to Mr. Smith. This finding was based on a faculty investigating commission study in response to “allegations of scientific misconduct” (and, I’d say, suspicions of monkey business in his research on monkey cognition).
An “inquiry phase,” similar to the Harvard protocol, was initiated by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli into the possible misuse of public funds by Michael Mann in his pursuit of employment and his use of such funds in his research activities when he was at the University of Virginia. The university and its supporters met this request with claims of impingement on sacred academic freedom and chilling the environment for academic research. Rather than welcome the chance to dispel the suspicion of scientific misconduct and protect its academic reputation, the university enlisted a high-powered Washington, D.C. legal team to fight the AG’s request in court.
While this legal process proceeds, the court of public opinion wonders why the openness and direct dealing with such allegations exhibited by Harvard is not the Virginia way. Harvard demonstrated a scientifically open and self-policing protocol; Virginia offers claims of academic freedom and erects legal barricades. Whose research will the public more likely trust?
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