Frozen in Time
Jun 05, 2010
A Preliminary Response to John Abraham - the extremists join the climate debate at last!

by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

ONE of the numerous artifices deployed by the now-retreating climate-extremist movement has been the careful avoidance of any debate with anyone on the skeptical side of the case who happens to know anything about climate science or economics.

As the extremists lose the argument and become more desperate, that is changing. John Abraham, a lecturer in fluid mechanics at a bible-college in Minnesota has recently issued - and widely disseminated - a hilariously mendacious 83-minute attempted rebuttal of a speech by me about the climate last October in St. Paul, Minn.

So unusual is this attempt actually to meet us in argument, and so venomously ad-hominem are Abraham’s artful puerilities, that climate-extremist bloggers everywhere have circulated them and praised them to the warming skies.

As usual, though, none of these silly bloggers makes any attempt actually to verify whether what poor Abraham is saying actually has the slightest contact with reality. One such is George Monbiot, a scribbler for the British Marxist daily propaganda sheet, The Guardian. What is Monbiot’s qualification to write about climate science? Well, like Abraham, he a “scientist”. Trouble is, he’s a fourteenth-rate zoologist, so his specialism has even less to do with climate science than that of Abraham, who nevertheless presents himself as having scientific knowledge relevant “in the area”.

Here’s the thing. All of the sciences are becoming increasingly specialized. So most scientists [ like Abraham and, a fortiori, the accident-prone Monbiot among them - have no more expertise in predicting or even understanding the strange behavior of the complex, non-linear, chaotic object that is the Earth’s climate than the man on the Clapham omnibus.

They pretend otherwise, of course. Almost four years ago, when I wrote a 2500-word article in the Sunday Telegraph pointing out that the notion of a very large climate warming attributable to future increases in CO2 concentration was scientifically ill-founded, Monbiot wrote a scathing 1800-word response in the Guardian, in which he made a dozen laughably elementary scientific errors. Monbiot made the mistake of pretending that he understood the fundamental equation of radiative transfer, of which he had plainly not previously heard.

Here it was I who had the advantage: before writing the article in the Telegraph I had spent three months tracking the equation down, because - though it converts changes in the flow of radiation at a planetary surface to changes in temperature, and is therefore essential to discovering how much warming a given increase in CO2 concentration will deliver - the IPCC’s 2001 and 2007 climate assessment reports do not mention it once.

And why not? Well, put simply, the equation shows that at the temperatures prevailing on Earth you need a very large increase in radiative flux to achieve a pathetically small increase in temperature. That’s not the sort of thing the climate-extremists want known, so they carefully don’t mention it, which is one reason why Monbiot hadn’t heard of it.

Ever since I compelled the Guardian to publish a letter from me correcting Monbiot’s invincible ignorance of elementary planetary physics and undergrad math, Monbiot has seized every chance to have a go at me whenever one of his climate-extremist Comrades asserted that I’d gotten something wrong. And how he crows at the news of Abraham’s “evisceration” of my Minnesota speech.

Abraham’s approach is novel. He’s saying not that I got one thing wrong but that I got just about everything wrong. And how plausible is that? A couple of pointers. First, it’s now June 2010, and I spoke in October 2009, almost eight months ago. I’ve made a lot of speeches since. Why has it taken Abraham so long to cobble together his ramblings?

The answer - and, as I shall show, it is the right one - is that his deliberately dishonest personal attack on my integrity and reputation is an ingenious fiction, he knows it, and he has therefore had to go to some elaborate and time-consuming lengths to do his inept and socially-inadequate best to conceal the steps he has taken to hide the truth and make his nonsense look plausible.

Secondly, during the eight months of “investigation” (Abraham’s word) that he carried out, at no single point did he ever contact me to ask me to clarify one of the numerous references which, he said over and over again, were not clear in my slides.

That failure on his part to check with me when he could not find the sources of my data was clearly deliberate. He didn’t want to give me any advance notice that he was planning to launch a widely-disseminated attack on me, because otherwise I might have pointed out his errors to him in advance, and that would have made it a great deal more difficult for him to get away with publishing them.

In a short space I won’t have time to cover more than a representative selection of Abraham’s errors. Let’s begin, though, with the question of sources.

“Monckton’s data don’t even agree with themselves”

Abraham says I displayed two graphs, both citing NOAA as the source, showing the downward global mean surface temperature trend since 2001, but ‘ by an elaborate point-by-point comparison - he shows that the two graphs are slightly different from one another. Why, he asks, can’t I even make sure that my own data agree with themselves? His implication is that presenting temperature data is something that laymen really can’t be expected to get right.

What Abraham has done, here as elsewhere, is to wrench my data deliberately out of the context in which I actually (and accurately) presented them, and then to lie about it. The truth is that the first graph, plainly labeled “scienceandpublicpolicy.org”, is the SPPI’s well-known global-temperature index, compiled monthly from four separate global-temperature datasets, as Abraham well knew because I explained in my talk. It was not a NOAA graph, and was not labeled as such. Naturally, therefore, it differed at some points from the NOAA graph.

Abraham went on and on about how a graph shouldn’t have been labeled with the name of an institution such as “scienceandpublicpolicy.org” unless it was that institution that had compiled the graph. That, of course, as he could have discovered if he had bothered - or, rather, dared - to check, was indeed the institution that had compiled the graph, taking the arithmetic mean of the global-temperature anomalies from the HadCRUt, NCDC, RSS, and UAH datasets.

But - and this was the point I made, though Abraham was remarkably careful not to say so - I had showed the SPPI’s four-sources graph in testimony before Congress, to show that there had been global cooling for seven or eight years, and Tom Karl, the director of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, who had been present, had failed to admit after questioning from a leading Congressman that global temperatures had indeed been falling for the best part of a decade. He had wriggled and waffled.

So the Congressman had asked me to write proving my result, and I had done so by preparing the second graph, from Tom Karl’s own NCDC (it was labeled as such), which had also showed a pronounced downtrend in global temperatures. Abraham knew this, because I had said so in my talk. But he also knew that practically no one watching his 83-minute presentation would go to the lengths of looking up what I had actually said. He believed that he could get away with flagrant and deliberate misrepresentations - provided that at all points he was careful never to consult me while planning and circulating his attack.

“Monckton’s data are not properly sourced”

Even when the source is in fact plainly stated on my slides, Abraham is prone to say I have not provided the source. I had shown a graph, which I had said was compiled by satellite, of temperatures at the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, where there has been no warming for 30 years. The graph was plainly labeled “UAH”, which - as a mere Bible-College lecturer in fluid mechanics might not know, but anyone with any real knowledge of climate science would of course know - is the University of Alabama at Huntsville, one of only two organizations producing regularly-published satellite-based global temperature records.

Another instance: Abraham said I had done a search because I was bored, and had found that between the beginning of 2004 and the beginning of 2007 just 539 papers containing the search phrase “global climate change” had been published, and that not one of them had provided any evidence for any catastrophic consequence of any anthropogenic warming anywhere. However, he had searched Google Scholar and had found 628,000 references, a few of which, he said, showed catastrophic consequences of “global warming”.

The truth is entirely different. First, I am never bored when I am present. What I actually said in my talk - and Abraham knows this, because he spent eight months trying to take it apart - was that “I’m boring that way - I check things”. And I had checked the climate-extremists’ claims of catastrophe by consulting a paper by Klaus-Martin Schulte, published in 2008. The extract from the paper was labeled “Schulte, 2008” on my slide, in quite large letters.

It was not I but Schulte who had done the search, as I had said in my talk. It was not Google Scholar (most of whose sources are not peer-reviewed papers) but the ISI Web of Science database of peer-reviewed, learned journals that Schulte searched, as I had said in my talk. It was not the “containing all of the words” search option that Schulte had used, though that is the option Abraham used, but the “exact-phrase” option, which returned only 539 papers.

If Abraham had had the courtesy to check either with me or by looking up Mr. Schulte’s paper on the Web of Science database, to which his Bible College subscribes, he would have found that Mr. Schulte used this phrase because Naomi Oreskes, a science historian, had previously used the same phrase in researching climate papers up to the end of 2003. Schulte had carried her research forward to mid-February 2007, and his paper had been published in 2008.

Abraham then trots out various papers he found in his Google Scholar search, one of which says that the world is warming because of human activities: but that was not the point made in my slide. My point was that not a single one of the 539 papers searched by Schulte had provided evidence for catastrophe. Abraham also mentions a paper he found that talks about extinctions that are predicted as a result of “global warming”. But though he may perhaps not have understood this, for many of his political stamp do not - prediction is not the same thing as evidence. The fact is that most of the predictions of the climate-extremists and their overworked X-Box 360s and Playstation Vs have proven to be spectacular exaggerations.

Gore was right and Monckton wrong about sea level

The first slide of mine that Abraham criticizes is one in which I show the table of contributions to observed sea-level rise from various sources as published in the IPCC’s 2007 report, and draw from it the conclusion that the measured contribution of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets to “global warming” is 6 cm/century, while Al Gore’s film predicts 610 cm (20 feet) of imminent sea-level rise.

Abraham again artfully distorts or carefully omits what I actually said. First, he says that the IPCC predicts 20-50 cm of sea-level rise this century, not 6 cm. Well, yes it does, but the reason for the difference is that the IPCC’s figure (which still amounts to below 2 feet, not 20, and it’s actually rising at just 1 ft/century at present, if that) is for sea-level rise from all sources, chiefly thermosteric expansion, not just from ice-melt.

But Gore’s prediction of a 20 ft sea-level rise is, as his movie makes quite clear, based on ice-melt alone. Abraham says Gore was right to worry about a very large rise in sea level because the IPCC specifically excludes ice-melt from its calculations, saying it cannot yet be quantified. No, the IPCC specifically includes ice-melt in its calculations, as the table on my slide showed, but it does add that “dynamic” effects of unpredictable but theoretically-possible large-scale failure on the ice sheets are not taken into account.

Abraham says that if either Greenland or the West Antartic ice sheet were to melt sea level would indeed rise by around 20 feet, and that, he says, is where Gore got his figure.

Just two problems with that. First, the IPCC also says, on the very page quoted by Abraham, that even if there were a major collapse of the ice the Greenland ice sheet would not entirely disintegrate for millennia, a phrase that was also used in the IPCC’s 2001 report, where it was made plain that surface temperatures at least 2 Celsius degrees higher than today’s would have to persist for several millennia before either the Greenland or the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could melt away. True, the British Antarctic Survey disagrees with the IPCC and maintains that the WAIS is in imminent danger of collapse, but so far even the IPCC has not bought that alarmist story.

Secondly, as I said in my talk, but as Abraham very carefully failed to point out in his, both sides of this particular argument have been carefully heard in the impartial forum of the British High Court. The British Government, unsuccessfully attempting to defend Gore on this point, had eventually been compelled - when confronted with what the IPCC actually says about several millennia - to concede that Gore’s 20 feet of sea-level rise was a flagrant exaggeration.

And the judge’s finding could not have been blunter: “The Armageddon scenario that he [Gore] depicts is not based on any scientific view.” And that quotation, too, was on one of my slides, but Abraham carefully failed to mention it, or to check with me to find out how it was that the judge had come to that conclusion.

Nor, of course, did Abraham mention the slide in which I showed a picture of the St. Regis Tower, San Francisco, with a map showing it to be just feet from the allegedly-rising ocean at Fisherman’s Wharf, and a statement that in 2005, the very year in which Gore was making up his alarmist movie, he had spent $4 million buying a condo there. Would he have bought that condo if he had seriously thought sea level would imminently rise by 20 feet? That, as my Latin Grammar would put it, is “a question expecting the answer ‘No’”.

Well, I could go on. And on and on. And on and on and on. Just about every one of the 115 slides presented by Abraham contains serious, serial, material errors, exaggerations, or downright lies. All I have been able to do here is to give you some flavor of how unscientific, inaccurate, and deliberately mendacious Abraham is.

Keep an eye out at www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org. There, in due course, will appear the letter I am now drafting to Abraham, asking him several hundred pertinent questions designed to make him and anyone who may think of relying upon him understand that academic dishonesty and deliberate lying on this scale and with this amount of public circulation is just not acceptable, and will not be tolerated.

If Abraham wishes to present himself as “a scientist” - as he does throughout his talk - then it is as a scientist that he will be judged, found lamentably wanting, and dismissed. He may like to get an apology and retraction in early: for I am a Christian too, and will respond kindly to timely repentance. See blog here.

Jun 02, 2010
Weather Channel vs. Dish Network: Storm Warning for Viewers

by Gary Susman

Icecap Note:See new book Warnings, by Mike Smith, Chief Meteorologist with Weather Data and now Accuweather available in the Icecap bookstore here.

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Last week’s dispute between the Weather Channel and Dish Network seems to have been resolved (note link from that announcement leads nowhere), with the Weather Channel getting most of what it wanted from the satellite service provider.

But the underlying issues—whether the Weather Channel’s new entertainment programming is doing a dangerous disservice to viewers when major storms loom, and the increasing pressure from cable channels for greater fee concessions from service providers—are far from resolved and are only going to get worse in the months ahead.

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Viewers at home should brace themselves for rough winds.

Some 14 million Dish subscribers nearly lost the Weather Channel last week when Dish threatened to drop the channel from its lineup. The stated reason: the channel’s switch from its all-forecasts-all-the-time format to showing Friday night movies (some clearly weather-themed, like ‘The Perfect Storm’ or ‘The Avengers,’ some only tangentially weather-related, like ‘Misery,’ which opens with a blizzard).

Dish—and some viewers—argued that the channel was no longer providing a needed service, and Dish even threatened to create its own competing weather channel and add it to the lineup.

But the conflict was also about money, reports the Los Angeles Times, with the Weather Channel seeking an extra penny per month per subscriber in carriage fees, according to industry analyst firm SNL Kagan. That adds up to about $1.7 million per year, which Dish will presumably pass on to its customers. The demand for increased fees—and the corresponding threat that the channel would go dark—is a scenario that has already recurred several times this year between other channels and other cable operators, and is one that is likely to keep happening, with subscribers ultimately paying the price in the form of a bigger cable or satellite bill.

According to the New York Times, Dish Network wasn’t the only source of complaints about the channel’s entertainment programming; so had some viewers, and so had the network’s star anchor, Jim Cantore. When viewer Patricia Vollmer voiced her anger via Twitter about the airing of a movie on April 23 instead of breaking storm news, Cantore tweeted back, “You’re not alone.”

The channel told the New York Times that its policy is to interrupt the movie with breaking severe weather coverage, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that policy always. On April 30, during a tornado outbreak, Cantore told his Twitter followers that the movie would be canceled, but later, he apologized to viewers, tweeting that management had misled him by telling him “we were bagging the ‘movie’ to do what this network was created for.” The Times reports that the channel did air an alternate live feed in areas directly affected.

The Weather Channel is hardly alone in diluting its brand by adding questionable entertainment programming in order to boost ratings. Cable channels from MTV (the “M” once stood for music, you young’uns) to TLC (once The Learning Channel, now better known as home to the likes of Jon & Kate) to AMC (once upon a time, “American Movie Classics,” now just general movies and original drama series like ‘Mad Men’wink, A&E (which once stood for “Arts & Entertainment” but is now largely reality shows) to Bravo (ditto) to the History Channel (what’s historical about ‘Pawn Stars’?) have been trending that way for years. Still, no viewer’s life or property is at risk because Bravo decides to air a ‘Real Housewives’ marathon instead of ‘Inside the Actors Studio.’

So the Weather Channel’s movement toward movies over meteorology was the pretext for Dish’s threat to yank the channel and replace it with its own weathercast as of last Friday. But the hour came and went, and negotiations continued. In the end, the channel agreed to provide Dish subscribers with a second channel of just local forecasts, but it also got Dish to agree to drop the threat of a rival weather network. Perhaps more important, it got Dish to cough up that extra penny. (Dish subscribers currently pay about 11 cents per month for the channel.)

The settlement marks at least the fourth time in 2010 that a channel has gone dark, or nearly gone dark, because it’s been pushing for a higher fee. There was a tussle between the Fox broadcast network and Time Warner Cable at the beginning of the year, one between Cablevision and Scripps that briefly darkened Food Network and HGTV, and one between Cablevision and ABC that was resolved moments before the Oscars, ABC’s biggest program of the year, was to air. Terms of those settlements haven’t been disclosed, but it seems clear that channels have been emboldened to challenge service providers and demand carriage fee increases. The Weather Channel may be adding just a penny a month to Dish subscribers’ bills, but in a 500-channel universe, all those pennies can really add up.

It would be nice if, for the extra cash cable and satellite viewers will likely be paying, we’d get the unique (and sometimes, vitally useful) programming these channels were once known for, instead of just more reality shows and movie reruns.

Check out Jim Cantrone in action during a storm last year.

May 30, 2010
‘Merchants of Doubt’ delves into contrarian scientists

By Seth Brown Special for, USA TODAY

No matter how overwhelmingly the scientific community may back a research study, naysayers can always find a scientist to support the opposing view on issues ranging from tobacco smoke to global warming.

According to science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, the same contrarian scientists keep popping up no matter the topic: Fred Seitz, Fred Singer and Bill Nierenberg, to name three. All physicists, Seitz and Nierenberg worked on the atomic bomb, while Singer, a rocket scientist, worked on observation satellites.

Oreskes and Conway have co-authored a history of these Merchants of Doubt. Their subjects have stood against the scientific consensus on a number of issues. They gained traction because a media concerned with fairness gave them equal time.

In 1953, a scientific study demonstrated that mice painted with cigarette tar developed fatal cancers. In December of that year, tobacco companies created the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC) to cast doubt on the link between tobacco and cancer. It worked. Between 1954 and the late 1970s, more than 100 lawsuits were filed against tobacco companies and not one plaintiff received money, the authors say.

In 1979, tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds hired Seitz, former president of the National Academy of Sciences, as a consultant. His credibility helped TIRC counter research linking smoking with health problems. As one tobacco industry executive put it in an infamous memo, “Doubt is our product.”

In 1993, the tobacco industry published Bad Science: A Resource Book, a handbook containing ideas for messages that could be used in sound bites to weaken scientific claims. Examples:

•Too often science is manipulated to fulfill a political agenda.

•Government agencies betray the public trust by violating principles of good science to achieve political goals.

•The Environmental Protection Agency adjusts science to support preconceived public policy prescriptions.

•Decisions based on bad science cost society heavily.

•EPA’s tobacco reports allow political goals to guide research.

•Proposals that target tobacco smoke are an excuse for new laws to take individual liberties.

Writing about secondhand smoke, Singer once said, “If we do not carefully delineate the government’s role in regulating (danger) ... there is essentially no limit to how much government can ultimately control our lives.”

What Singer and Seitz did for tobacco, Nierenberg did for global warming. In 1995, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that human-caused climate change was a reality. By 2004, global warming was becoming the scientific consensus. The National Academy of Sciences commissioned a study, naming to the panel economists and scientists including Nierenberg. A committee Nierenberg chaired could not get the economists and scientists to agree, so the synthesis supported Nierenberg’s economic argument.

The scientists had argued that a “wait-and-see” attitude was untenable, but Nierenberg discounted distant costs and ascribed the rise in temperature to the sun. Nierenberg’s message carried, even though other scientists such as Bert Bolin called Nierenberg “simply wrong.”

Eventually, most of the scientific community stopped working with Nierenberg, according to Oreskes and Conway.

Though a veteran of tobacco wars, Singer also joined the global warming fray. In an article on the topic, he said, “The scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time.” He had voiced similar reservations about acid rain and ozone depletion.

The authors give examples of conservative think tanks supporting the status quo:

•The George C. Marshall Institute opposes the views of the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group for environmental solutions that included late astronomer Carl Sagan.

•The Competitive Enterprise Institute, which promotes free-market economics and minimal business regulation, dismisses research of Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, a book decrying overuse of the pesticide DDT.

•The Advancement of Sound Science Center promotes the idea that environmental science on issues such as smoking, pesticides and global warming is “junk science.”

The center is operated by Steven Milloy, a self-described libertarian and columnist at FoxNews.com. Milloy once wrote an article blasting the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, a report of the Union of Concern Scientists that explores the impact of a warming Arctic. At the time, it was not revealed that Milloy got money from ExxonMobil.

All in all, Oreskes and Conway paint an unflattering picture of why some scientists continue to stand against the overwhelming scientific consensus on issues at the center of public discussion.

Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, By Erik Conway and Naomi Oreskes, Bloomsbury Press, 368 pages, $27

ICECAP Note: Naomi Oreskes has been totally discredited in her findings relative to the unanimity of AGW supporting peer review. She is very likely the most dishonest science historian in the country.

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Are Climate Alarmists losing the Mainstream Media?
By Marc Sheppard

In the past week, two mainstream media giants have apparently recognized that the debate over manmade global warming is far from over.

On Monday, the NY Times broke with years of blatant warmist bias in reporting that Climate Fears Turn to Doubts Among Britons.  The article cited a February BBC survey which “found that only 26 percent of Britons believed that ‘climate change is happening and is now established as largely manmade,’ down from 41 percent in November 2009.” The Times attributed the public opinion swing in Great Britain and similar shifts in Germany and the US to what it referred to as “a series of climate science controversies unearthed and highlighted by skeptics since November.” In other words, the climate fraud uncovered at the University of East Anglia (aka Climategate) and the multitude of errors uncovered in the latest IPCC (AR4) report. 

Of course, the Times abhor the new public awareness as it “will make it harder to pass legislation like a fuel tax increase and to persuade people to make sacrifices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” But shouldn’t facts drive policy?  Not according to Greenpeace spokesman Ben Stewart, quoted by the Times complaining that “[l]egitimacy has shifted to the side of the climate skeptics, and that is a big, big problem.”

Really?

Now Newsweek has joined the newly aware, but with a dash more honesty.  In a piece titled Uncertain Science, the normally climate alarm sounding magazine has also acknowledged the turning tide: Blame economic worries, another freezing winter, or the cascade of scandals emerging from the world’s leading climate-research body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But concern over global warming has cooled down dramatically. In uber-green Germany, only 42 percent of citizens worry about global warming now, down from 62 percent in 2006. In Britain, just 26 percent believe climate change is man-made, down from 41 percent as recently as November 2009. And Americans rank global warming dead last in a list of 21 problems that concern them, according to a January Pew poll.

Now, such news from the MSM would normally be followed by a lengthy sermon about the effects of a well-funded “denial” machine and simple-minded fools confusing weather with climate.  Or, as witnessed by the Times piece, how easily misled are the public by “denier” tricks.  But Newsweek’s Stefan Theil instead broke with the usual alarmist ad-hominem and declared that “[t]his is no dispute between objective scientists and crazed flat-earthers.”

Writes Theil: The lines cut through the profession itself. Very few scientists dispute a link between man-made CO2 and global warming. Where it gets fuzzy is the extent and time frame of the effect. One crucial point of contention is climate “sensitivity” - the mathematical formula that translates changes in CO2 production to changes in temperature. In addition, scientists are not sure how to explain a slowdown in the rise of global temperatures that began about a decade ago.

While not entirely accurate (more than a few scientists reject the notion of CO2-influenced warming outright), by publishing those words Newsweek has gone where few (if any) left-leaning newsmagazines have gone before - admitting that there’s a problem with the “science is settled” mantra.

Needless to say, Theil’s take-away from a continuing climate debate isn’t likely to please the Cap-and-Tax-and-Control crowd: There are excellent reasons to limit emissions and switch to cleaner fuels - including an estimated 750,000 annual pollution deaths in China, the potential to create jobs at home instead of enriching nasty regimes sitting on oil wells, the need to provide cheap sources of power to the world’s poorest regions, and the still-probable threat that global warming is underway. At the moment, however, certainty about how fast - and how much - global warming changes the earth’s climate does not appear to be one of those reasons.

Okay, so he can’t help clinging to a “still-probable threat that global warming is underway,” which I suppose implies an anthropogenic cause, but at least he acknowledges that further unbiased investigation must precede any policy decisions.

Of greater note—the same powerhouse publication that in its August 2007 cover story—The Truth about Denial—described climate skepticism as “an undermining of the science” now challenges the same AGW orthodoxy it once preached.  No wonder Ben Stewart is worried. Read more here.

May 28, 2010
El Nino 2009/10 Over - La Nina, Warm Summer and Global Cooling Coming

By Joseph D’Aleo CCM

The El Nino of 2009/10 is over. Temperatures in region NINO34, the key region used for official El Nino assessment are now negative (-0.2C).

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The warming peaked in the central tropical Pacific in December / January. Cooler water has surfaced in the east central Tropical Pacific (below, enlarged here).

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LA NINA - SISTER OF THE EL NINO COMING ON

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You can see the colder water emerging here in the recent weekly (above, enlarged here).

Also the warmer water is seen mixing out quickly as upwelling of cold water increased in this animation.

Ocean heat content in the tropical Pacific is shown to dive, similar to what happened in 1998 and 2007. (below, enlarged here).

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The cross section along the equatorial Pacific shows the warm water gone with a large plume of sub-surface water ready to be tapped by upwelling - the onset of La Nina (below, enlarged here). Note the similarity to May in 1998 and 2007 when El Ninos gave way to La Nina in the summer/fall (below, enlarged here).
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Most ENSO models indicate La Nina is likely. All dynamical models show negative anomalies. Some statistical models show La Nada (neutral) conditions (below, enlarged here).

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EL NINOS TRANSITIONING TO LA NINAS TEND TO LEAD TO WARM, DROUGHTY SUMMERS IN CORN BELT AND YET GLOBAL COOLING

These maps are for the Corn Belt. (below, enlarged here and here).

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Rapidly falling ENSO indices have led to lowered corn production in 1983, 1988, 1995. 1998 did not see such a decline. Warm water lingered in the eastern TROPAC that year (below enlarged here).

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In 2007, slow movement west of the cold water led to late season issues, affecting mainly beans.

The best analogs suggest a warm summer though cooler than normal and wet conditions in the southern plains (below, enlarged here and here).

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Soil moisture models have been coming around to this thinking (below enlarged here).

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See how dry it has been in Michigan year to date in this excellent report from the NWS.
WILDCARDS - SOLAR SLUMBER AND VOLCANIC RUMBLINGS

One of the wildcards is the sun, which returned to a quiet state in late April and early May with two extended strings of spotless days and a return of solar flux to solar minimum levels. We continue to track close to the cycle 5 in the Dalton Minimum 200+ years ago. Unprecedented solar levels and long period of quiet solar may enhance the global cooling effect as La Nina comes on. Note the rapid global temperature (MSU satellite lower atmospheric temperatures shown) declines in prior La Nina episodes post strong El Ninos (red arrows) (below, enlarged here). You can also see clearly the effects of volcanic aerosols and El Nino (warming) and La Nina (cooling).

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Note similarity of sunspot activity to cycle 5 at the start of the Dalton Minimum. Cycle 14 a century ago is also shown and has been regarded by some as another possible analog/ Note the more rapid recovery that cycle. That was also a cold period though not as cold as the Dalton (below, enlarged here).

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Also Eyjafjallajokull continues to erupt. Though most days the ash and aerosols remain below the stratosphere, occasional eruptions are more explosive. Much more dangerous Katla historically has been triggered by Eyjafjallajokull eruption periods which often last for long periods. A major eruption would change the weather picture globally quickly by affecting the AO and ash and aerosols could affect crops in Europe. Redoubt and Sarychev affected the hemisphere’s climate last two summers and last winter.

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See full PDF with enlarged images here.

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Snow day in May
ctvcalgary.ca

It’s another snow day in Calgary and we’re all wondering when winter will loosen its grip. The city hasn’t seen this much snow on May 29th since 1942. Central Alberta saw about 10 centimetres of the white stuff overnight which made for some slippery driving.

While some are fed up with the white stuff, others are trying to take it all in stride. Even though enough heavy wet snow fell overnight to bend trees into awkward angles, children were able to toss snowballs.

But not everyone thinks this is fun. “Yah, it’s typical, but kind of getting tired of it,” said Russ Martin. The snowy spring morning didn’t stop people like Tina Bay from hitting up a garage sale. “We just kind of started, something to do on the weekend,” said Bay. Iris Curd took advantage of the snowy situation by strategically placing items she had up for sale, like a Santa Claus statue and a couple of sleighs. “We have a theme, we have the Santa Claus and the sleighs and the coffee and Baileys in the back so we’re set,” commented Curd.

Springtime in Alberta typically means snow, but not this much or so late in the season. Even weather experts like meteorologist Steve Rothfels say this is unusual. “We’re pushing the limits here, we’re pushing the limits. The only thing that makes it seem a little less unusual is that we did have some snow last June. That was very unusual. But towards the end of May, we don’t usually see it this late in the year,” commented Rothfels.

For people itching to dig into a flowerbed, like Laurie-Lynn Brookwell, this weather is hard to take. “You think you’re going to get used to it after living in Calgary for 22 years, but it’s hard to be a gardener here,” said Brookwell.

Warmer weather is in the forecast for mid-week. Calgarians can only hope that’s when spring will arrive, and stay, in southern Alberta.

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Smoke from Quebec forest fires make for smoky Memorial day in Northeast

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Enlarged here.

May 26, 2010
Climategate and the Scientific Elite

By Iain Murray

Climategate starkly revealed to the public how many global-warming scientists speak and act like politicians. 

The news that Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who popularized the idea of a link between the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine and autism, has been struck off the register of general practitioners in the United Kingdom testifies to the fact that, in many scientific fields, objectivity still reigns. Britain’s General Medical Council found that Wakefield had used unethical and dishonest research methods and that when his conclusions became common knowledge, the result was that far more children were exposed to the risk of those diseases than would have been the case otherwise. Unfortunately, in other areas, some scientists have been getting away with blatant disregard for the scientific method.

The most prominent example, “Climategate,” highlights how dangerous the politicization of science can be. The public reaction to Climategate should motivate politicians to curb such abuses in the future. Yet it was politicians who facilitated this politicization of science in the first place.

The economic historians Terence Kealey (The Economic Laws of Scientific Research) and Joel Mokyr (The Gifts of Athena) help us understand just how science progresses. Their central insight involves the recursive nature of the scientific process. In Mokyr’s terms, propositional knowledge (what politicians term “basic” science) can inform prescriptive knowledge ("applied" science). However, the reverse happens just as often.

This understanding contradicts the linear model of scientific research, which became prevalent in America in the 1940s and ‘50s, following the model of the great scientist Vannevar Bush. Under this model, we must invest in propositional knowledge as a public good, because that’s where our prescriptive knowledge comes from. Yet even as Bush’ model was taking hold, President Eisenhower warned against it. In his farewell address, just after the famous remarks about the military-industrial complex, he said:

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present - and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

What Ike warned about has now come to pass. The scientific elite, with the help of its allies in Congress, increasingly dictates public policy and thereby secures the continued flow of research funding. Time and again, scientists have told me how they have to tie their work to global warming in order to obtain funding, and time and again - bar a few brave souls, who are immediately tagged as “deniers” - they tell me it would be career suicide to speak out openly about this.

Moreover, by consciously reinforcing the link between politics and science, the scientific elite is diminishing the role of private innovation, where prescriptive knowledge informed by market demand drives propositional knowledge. Thus, they are driving the market out of the marketplace of ideas.

For that reason, we must challenge the linear model of science. One way to do this is to break the link between political patronage and scientific funding. For example, we could fund basic science by awarding prizes for excellent research results instead of grants before the event. With their patronage powers curtailed, politicians might become less interested in scientific funding, allowing private money to fill the void.

That’s the good news about Climategate. It starkly revealed to the public how many global-warming scientists speak and act like politicians. To those scientists, the message trumped the science. Few members of the public have accepted the findings of the inquiries exonerating the scientists; most dismiss them as whitewashes. This is to the good, for it reinforces awareness of the scientific elite President Eisenhower warned about.

If politicians realize that the public regards them as corrupting science rather than encouraging it, they might become less inclined to continue funding the scientific-political complex. Then scientists would be free to deal with the Andrew Wakefields among them as needed, rather than worry about their funding.

Iain Murray is vice president for strategy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

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