* Data for vital ‘hockey stick graph’ has gone missing!
* There has been no global warming since 1995!
* Warming periods have happened before - but NOT due to man-made changes!
* Data: Professor Phil Jones admitted his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’
The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information. Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.
Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’. The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.
Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now - suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon. And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.
The admissions will be seized on by sceptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely man-made. Professor Jones has been in the spotlight since he stepped down as director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit after the leaking of emails that sceptics claim show scientists were manipulating data.
The raw data, collected from hundreds of weather stations around the world and analysed by his unit, has been used for years to bolster efforts by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to press governments to cut carbon dioxide emissions. Following the leak of the emails, Professor Jones has been accused of ‘scientific fraud’ for allegedly deliberately suppressing information and refusing to share vital data with critics.
Discussing the interview, the BBC’s environmental analyst Roger Harrabin said he had spoken to colleagues of Professor Jones who had told him that his strengths included integrity and doggedness but not record-keeping and office tidying. Mr Harrabin, who conducted the interview for the BBC’s website, said the professor had been collating tens of thousands of pieces of data from around the world to produce a coherent record of temperature change. That material has been used to produce the ‘hockey stick graph’ which is relatively flat for centuries before rising steeply in recent decades.
According to Mr Harrabin, colleagues of Professor Jones said ‘his office is piled high with paper, fragments from over the years, tens of thousands of pieces of paper, and they suspect what happened was he took in the raw data to a central database and then let the pieces of paper go because he never realised that 20 years later he would be held to account over them’.
Asked by Mr Harrabin about these issues, Professor Jones admitted the lack of organisation in the system had contributed to his reluctance to share data with critics, which he regretted.
But he denied he had cheated over the data or unfairly influenced the scientific process, and said he still believed recent temperature rises were predominantly man-made. Asked about whether he lost track of data, Professor Jones said: ‘There is some truth in that. We do have a trail of where the weather stations have come from but it’s probably not as good as it should be. There’s a continual updating of the dataset. Keeping track of everything is difficult. Some countries will do lots of checking on their data then issue improved data, so it can be very difficult. We have improved but we have to improve more.’
He also agreed that there had been two periods which experienced similar warming, from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to 1998, but said these could be explained by natural phenomena whereas more recent warming could not. He further admitted that in the last 15 years there had been no ‘statistically significant’ warming, although he argued this was a blip rather than the long-term trend.
And he said that the debate over whether the world could have been even warmer than now during the medieval period, when there is evidence of high temperatures in northern countries, was far from settled. Sceptics believe there is strong evidence that the world was warmer between about 800 and 1300 AD than now because of evidence of high temperatures in northern countries. But climate change advocates have dismissed this as false or only applying to the northern part of the world.
Professor Jones departed from this consensus when he said: ‘There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia.
‘For it to be global in extent, the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions. Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today, then obviously the late 20th Century warmth would not be unprecedented. On the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less warm than today, then the current warmth would be unprecedented.’ Sceptics said this was the first time a senior scientist working with the IPCC had admitted to the possibility that the Medieval Warming Period could have been global, and therefore the world could have been hotter then than now.
Professor Jones criticised those who complained he had not shared his data with them, saying they could always collate their own from publicly available material in the US. And he said the climate had not cooled ‘until recently - and then barely at all. The trend is a warming trend’. Mr Harrabin told Radio 4’s Today programme that, despite the controversies, there still appeared to be no fundamental flaws in the majority scientific view that climate change was largely man-made.
But Dr Benny Pieser, director of the sceptical Global Warming Policy Foundation, said Professor Jones’s ‘excuses’ for his failure to share data were hollow as he had shared it with colleagues and ‘mates’. He said that until all the data was released, sceptics could not test it to see if it supported the conclusions claimed by climate change advocates.
He added that the professor’s concessions over medieval warming were ‘significant’ because they were his first public admission that the science was not settled. Read more here.
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World may not be warming, say scientists By Jonathan Leake, UK Sunday Times
The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.
In its last assessment the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the evidence that the world was warming was “unequivocal”. It warned that greenhouse gases had already heated the world by 0.7C and that there could be 5C-6C more warming by 2100, with devastating impacts on humanity and wildlife. However, new research, including work by British scientists, is casting doubt on such claims. Some even suggest the world may not be warming much at all.
“he temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC. The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.
These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site. Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama. “The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”
The IPCC faces similar criticisms from Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited by the panel to review its last report. The experience turned him into a strong critic and he has since published a research paper questioning its methods.
“We concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC’s climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialisation and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias,” he said.
Such warnings are supported by a study of US weather stations co-written by Anthony Watts, an American meteorologist and climate change sceptic. His study, which has not been peer reviewed, is illustrated with photographs of weather stations in locations where their readings are distorted by heat-generating equipment. Some are next to air- conditioning units or are on waste treatment plants. One of the most infamous shows a weather station next to a waste incinerator.
Watts has also found examples overseas, such as the weather station at Rome airport, which catches the hot exhaust fumes emitted by taxiing jets. In Britain, a weather station at Manchester airport was built when the surrounding land was mainly fields but is now surrounded by heat-generating buildings.
Terry Mills, professor of applied statistics and econometrics at Loughborough University, looked at the same data as the IPCC. He found that the warming trend it reported over the past 30 years or so was just as likely to be due to random fluctuations as to the impacts of greenhouse gases. Mills’s findings are to be published in Climatic Change, an environmental journal. “The earth has gone through warming spells like these at least twice before in the last 1,000 years,” he said.
Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of the chapter of the IPCC report that deals with the observed temperature changes, said he accepted there were problems with the global thermometer record but these had been accounted for in the final report. “It’s not just temperature rises that tell us the world is warming,” he said. “We also have physical changes like the fact that sea levels have risen around five inches since 1972, the Arctic icecap has declined by 40% and snow cover in the northern hemisphere has declined.” Icecap Note: Why don’t you look before you speak Kevin. January 2008 had a record high NH snowcover and it looks like February 2010 might also.
The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts has recently issued a new set of global temperature readings covering the past 30 years, with thermometer readings augmented by satellite data. Dr Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office, said: “This new set of data confirms the trend towards rising global temperatures and suggest that, if anything, the world is warming even more quickly than we had thought.”
From the Register’s Opinion Page: What to say to a global warming advocate By Mark Landsbaum, Orange County Register
It has been tough to keep up with all the bad news for global warming alarmists. We’re on the edge of our chair, waiting for the next shoe to drop. This has been an Imelda Marcos kind of season for shoe-dropping about global warming.
At your next dinner party, here are some of the latest talking points to bring up when someone reminds you that Al Gore and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won Nobel prizes for their work on global warming.
ClimateGate - This scandal began the latest round of revelations when thousands of leaked documents from Britain’s East Anglia Climate Research Unit showed systematic suppression and discrediting of climate skeptics’ views and discarding of temperature data, suggesting a bias for making the case for warming. Why do such a thing if, as global warming defenders contend, the “science is settled?”
FOIGate - The British government has since determined someone at East Anglia committed a crime by refusing to release global warming documents sought in 95 Freedom of Information Act requests. The CRU is one of three international agencies compiling global temperature data. If their stuff’s so solid, why the secrecy?
ChinaGate - An investigation by the U.K.’s left-leaning Guardian newspaper found evidence that Chinese weather station measurements not only were seriously flawed, but couldn’t be located. “Where exactly are 42 weather monitoring stations in remote parts of rural China?” the paper asked. The paper’s investigation also couldn’t find corroboration of what Chinese scientists turned over to American scientists, leaving unanswered, “how much of the warming seen in recent decades is due to the local effects of spreading cities, rather than global warming?” The Guardian contends that researchers covered up the missing data for years.
HimalayaGate - An Indian climate official admitted in January that, as lead author of the IPCC’s Asian report, he intentionally exaggerated when claiming Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035 in order to prod governments into action. This fraudulent claim was not based on scientific research or peer-reviewed. Instead it was originally advanced by a researcher, since hired by a global warming research organization, who later admitted it was “speculation” lifted from a popular magazine. This political, not scientific, motivation at least got some researcher funded.
PachauriGate - Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman who accepted with Al Gore the Nobel Prize for scaring people witless, at first defended the Himalaya melting scenario. Critics, he said, practiced “voodoo science.” After the melting-scam perpetrator ‘fessed up, Pachauri admitted to making a mistake. But, he insisted, we still should trust him.
PachauriGate II - Pachauri also claimed he didn’t know before the 192-nation climate summit meeting in Copenhagen in December that the bogus Himalayan glacier claim was sheer speculation. But the London Times reported that a prominent science journalist said he had pointed out those errors in several e-mails and discussions to Pachauri, who “decided to overlook it.” Stonewalling? Cover up? Pachauri says he was “preoccupied.” Well, no sense spoiling the Copenhagen party, where countries like Pachauri’s India hoped to wrench billions from countries like the United States to combat global warming’s melting glaciers. Now there are calls for Pachauri’s resignation.
SternGate - One excuse for imposing worldwide climate crackdown has been the U.K.’s 2006 Stern Report, an economic doomsday prediction commissioned by the government. Now the U.K. Telegraph reports that quietly after publication “some of these predictions had been watered down because the scientific evidence on which they were based could not be verified.” Among original claims now deleted were that northwest Australia has had stronger typhoons in recent decades, and that southern Australia lost rainfall because of rising ocean temperatures. Exaggerated claims get headlines. Later, news reporters disclose the truth. Why is that?
SternGate II - A researcher now claims the Stern Report misquoted his work to suggest a firm link between global warming and more-frequent and severe floods and hurricanes. Robert Muir-Wood said his original research showed no such link. He accused Stern of “going far beyond what was an acceptable extrapolation of the evidence.” We’re shocked.
AmazonGate - The London Times exposed another shocker: the IPCC claim that global warming will wipe out rain forests was fraudulent, yet advanced as “peer-reveiwed” science. The Times said the assertion actually “was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise,” “authored by two green activists” and lifted from a report from the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental pressure group. The “research” was based on a popular science magazine report that didn’t bother to assess rainfall. Instead, it looked at the impact of logging and burning. The original report suggested “up to 40 percent” of Brazilian rain forest was extremely sensitive to small reductions in the amount of rainfall, but the IPCC expanded that to cover the entire Amazon, the Times reported.
PeerReviewGate - The U.K. Sunday Telegraph has documented at least 16 nonpeer-reviewed reports (so far) from the advocacy group World Wildlife Fund that were used in the IPCC’s climate change bible, which calls for capping manmade greenhouse gases.
RussiaGate - Even when global warming alarmists base claims on scientific measurements, they’ve often had their finger on the scale. Russian think tank investigators evaluated thousands of documents and e-mails leaked from the East Anglia research center and concluded readings from the coldest regions of their nation had been omitted, driving average temperatures up about half a degree.
Russia-Gate II - Speaking of Russia, a presentation last October to the Geological Society of America showed how tree-ring data from Russia indicated cooling after 1961, but was deceptively truncated and only artfully discussed in IPCC publications. Well, at least the tree-ring data made it into the IPCC report, albeit disguised and misrepresented.
U.S.Gate p If Brits can’t be trusted, are Yanks more reliable? The U.S. National Climate Data Center has been manipulating weather data too, say computer expert E. Michael Smith and meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo. Forty years ago there were 6,000 surface-temperature measuring stations, but only 1,500 by 1990, which coincides with what global warming alarmists say was a record temperature increase. Most of the deleted stations were in colder regions, just as in the Russian case, resulting in misleading higher average temperatures.
IceGate - Hardly a continent has escaped global warming skewing. The IPCC based its findings of reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and in Africa on a feature story of climbers’ anecdotes in a popular mountaineering magazine, and a dissertation by a Switzerland university student, quoting mountain guides. Peer-reviewed? Hype? Worse?
ResearchGate - The global warming camp is reeling so much lately it must have seemed like a major victory when a Penn State University inquiry into climate scientist Michael Mann found no misconduct regarding three accusations of climate research impropriety. But the university did find “further investigation is warranted” to determine whether Mann engaged in actions that “seriously deviated from accepted practices for proposing, conducting or reporting research or other scholarly activities.” Being investigated for only one fraud is a global warming victory these days.
ReefGate - Let’s not forget the alleged link between climate change and coral reef degradation. The IPCC cited not peer-reviewed literature, but advocacy articles by Greenpeace, the publicity-hungry advocacy group, as its sole source for this claim.
AfricaGate - The IPCC claim that rising temperatures could cut in half agricultural yields in African countries turns out to have come from a 2003 paper published by a Canadian environmental think tank – not a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
DutchGate - The IPCC also claimed rising sea levels endanger the 55 percent of the Netherlands it says is below sea level. The portion of the Netherlands below sea level actually is 20 percent. The Dutch environment minister said she will no longer tolerate climate researchers’ errors.
AlaskaGate - Geologists for Space Studies in Geophysics and Oceanography and their U.S. and Canadian colleagues say previous studies largely overestimated by 40 percent Alaskan glacier loss for 40 years. This flawed data are fed into those computers to predict future warming.
Fold this column up and lay it next to your napkin the next time you have Al Gore or his ilk to dine. It should make interesting after-dinner conversation. Find column here.
It is a quiet controversy about global warming. At least one local broadcaster had been hoping to keep it quiet.
But after considerable persuasion last week, the Fox affiliate WDAF reluctantly allowed its chief meteorologist, Mike Thompson, to explain in an e-mail to The Kansas City Star why he breaks from the scholarly worldview of the causes of climate change.
“It has become completely political - it’s not about science at all,” he wrote in an e-mail. “If science were the objective, then we would be seeing an entirely different debate. But there are agendas at play, and it has undermined the credibility of climate science.”
Others in his profession share that view.
“Global warming is the greatest scam in history,” blogged a veteran TV weatherman in San Diego, John Coleman, in late 2007. He then appeared on Glenn Beck’s show.
That hardly stunned University of Texas researcher Kris Wilson, who for years has probed the wide range of attitudes, values and skill sets of those beamed into your living room to chat up the weather.
What did surprise Wilson was that 29 percent of meteorologists in a modest survey he conducted took Coleman’s side - “a scam,” they called the scare.
And a clear majority of 121 weathercasters polled - 62 percent - said they thought climate models were unreliable for predicting temperatures and sea levels to come.
It is important to know that meteorologists are not climatologists.
One group projects snowfall and sometimes blows the call, making doubt and error the weatherman’s constant companions. The other group - more degree-decorated, but sound-bite challenged - studies such things as ice caps, sunlight absorption and carbon-dioxide levels to reach conclusions about planetary conditions decades from now.
The quarrels between the two make the American Meteorological Society uneasy. Through education and “more dialogue,” the AMS and other science groups seek to bring more weathercasters in line with scientists who insist that global warming is a reality most likely aggravated by human actions.
“The climate scientists tend not to appreciate the concerns of broadcasters, and meteorologists tend to underestimate how much work the climate scientists do and care they take,” said AMS Director Keith Seitter. “We’re trying to get these folks to communicate with each other better.”
Nobody knows exactly how many weathercasters are skeptical of the scientific line on climate change and its causes. Wilson, who soon will release results of a poll of more than 500 meteorologists, calls the skeptics “a vocal minority.”
They range from Joseph D’Aleo - who, with Coleman, established the Weather Channel - to a former director of the National Hurricane Center. From WeatherData Inc. executive Mike Smith of Wichita to the 44 TV weathercasters who signed a 2008 petition circulated by U.S. Sen. James Inhofe. An Oklahoma Republican, Inhofe is a fiery critic of climate science.
Plenty of others, including KSHB chief meteorologist Gary Lezak, scoff at the skepticism.
“I absolutely believe it’s politically driven,” he said. “I’m not politically driven...I go with the overwhelming scientific evidence. “The fact is, the Earth is warming up. Far as I know, 90 to 95 percent of scientists believe climate change is real and it has a human influence. Am I able to change my mind in 10 years if the facts show otherwise? Of course.”
ICECAP NOTE: But Gary, the earth has been cooling since 2001. Not anywhere near 90-95% scientists buy into man-made global warming and politics has little to do with it. On the ICECAP board, we have the full spectrum of political leanings from liberal to independent to libertarian to conservative. That is true among all the skeptics I know. Right now, one political party is more open to a balanced view which is why it appears we are politcially driven. I am glad to hear you say you are open to change your mind. Scientists should always feel that way.
With the Midwest facing an unusually harsh winter, the politicized research of “Climategate” still ringing in our ears and the nation’s capital beneath 3 feet of snow, skeptics brandishing the AMS seal are ramping up their arguments that “solar cycles” and other natural events have caused warming patterns since the 1970s.
Sun activity, measured in spots and bursts, is thought to vary over multiyear periods. Some say that in recent years we have entered a calmer cycle that will deliver cold, snowy winters like those of the 1960s. Others say heavy snows may instead be the result of more moisture in the atmosphere due to ice caps melting beneath greenhouse gases.
The AMS and Congress-funded National Environmental Education Foundation work together to provide science news and online courses to weathercasters who rely on the AMS for certification.
Because of documented levels of trust people place in on-air personalities who seem up on their science, “the future of climate-change policy rests to a not insubstantial degree on the well-tailored shoulders of the local weatherman,” a cover story in the Columbia Journalism Review said.
One problem is that not all weathercasters are scientists - many majored in journalism - and unlike the graduate-level pursuits of most climate scientists, meteorology degrees can be earned in four years.
“By no means do I consider myself an expert on long-term forecasting,” said KMBC chief meteorologist Bryan Busby. “At St. Louis University, I took one course in climatology.”
But what he and other certified meteorologists know too well is that computer models used in predicting highs and lows fail all the time. Purporting to be certain of the weather next week, much less climate patterns by century’s end, strikes Busby as a bit arrogant: “I suspect somewhere in the middle of both camps lies the truth.”
True, climatologists use similar computer models. But they do so in different ways and for different purposes.
“The models used for predicting weather are inherently volatile,” said Wilson, a scientist and member of the journalism faculty in Austin. “The climate models are not like that. They’re inherently stable.”
ICECAP NOTE: Yes that is why the Climate Prediction Center moved instead to statistical methods and trends because the stable climate models were showing too little skill
WDAF’s Thompson laid into Al Gore, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and “cap-and-trade” proposals in a KCMO radio interview in December: ‘“Our kids and our kids’ kids are going to be paying for this mess for a long time.”
The rhetoric does get heated. Citing the “gravy train of grants” available to climate “alarmists,” meteorologist D’Aleo said network affiliates pressured some weathercasters to keep their skepticism to themselves “because they might lose advertising. There’s a lot of green money out there.”
D’Aleo also accused the AMS of trying to get weathercasters “to evangelize” the worst fears of climatologists to the 99 percent of Americans who own TVs.
While the society did draft a fought-over statement citing “adequate evidence… that humans have significantly contributed” to Earth heating up, Seitter of the AMS said nobody was urging skeptics to quiet down - but just to “know the scientific background and read the articles.”
To reach weathercasters in 125 U.S. media markets, the National Environmental Education Foundation puts out a weekly Earth Gauge newsletter with “climate facts” pointing out, for example, the retreat of glaciers and the northward movement of bird species.
ICECAP NOTE: This story was a fair and balanced piece. I should point out NEEF is politically driven (chartered by Congress in 1990 to advance environmental knowledge and action) and so is the AMS which has as its third organizational goal, policy advocacy. If I were executive director, I would advocate only good science.
By Kirk Myers, Seminole County Environmental Examiner
Enlarged here. The black line is the annual variation in atmospheric “absorbing power” over a 61-year period. The red trend line shows the greenhouse aborbing power remaining constant (in equilibrium) during that period. Greenhouse absorption increases (blue trend line) only when H20 levels are kept constant.
Editor’s note: In response to reader interest in Dr. Ferenc Miskolczi’s provocative greenhouse theory challenging the widespread belief in man-caused global warming, Examiner.com has asked the former NASA researcher to explain his work further. Earlier this week he attacked the prevailing climate-change theory, calling it “a lie.”
At Dr. Miskolczi’s request, we also have posted his letter sent last year to the Environmental Protection Agency, summarizing his research and questioning the agency’s efforts to declare CO2 a harmful pollutant that poses a threat to earth’s climate.
Examiner.com: Has there been global warming?
Dr. Miskolczi: No one is denying that global warming has taken place, but it has nothing to do with the greenhouse effect or the burning of fossil fuels.
Examiner.com: According to the conventional anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory, as human-induced CO2 emissions increase, more surface radiation is absorbed by the atmosphere, with part of it re-radiated to the earth’s surface, resulting in global warming. Is that an accurate description of the prevailing theory?
Dr. Miskolczi: Yes, this is the classic concept of the greenhouse effect.
Examiner.com: Are man-made CO2 emissions the cause of global warming?
Dr. Miskolczi: Apparently not. According to my research, increases in CO2 levels have not increased the global-average absorbing power of the atmosphere.
Examiner.com: Where does the traditional greenhouse theory make its fundamental mistake?
Dr. Miskolczi: The conventional greenhouse theory does not consider the newly discovered physical relationships involving infrared radiative fluxes. These relationships pose strong energetic constraints on an equilibrium system.
Examiner.com: Why has this error escaped notice until now?
Dr. Miskolczi: Nobody thought that a 100-year-old theory could be wrong. The original greenhouse formula, developed by an astrophysicist, applies only to the stars, not to finite, semi-transparent planetary atmospheres. New equations had to be formulated.
Examiner.com: According your theory, the greenhouse effect is self-regulating and stabilizes itself in response to rising CO2 levels. You identified (perhaps discovered) a “greenhouse constant” that keeps the greenhouse effect in equilibrium. Is that a fair assessment of your theory?
Dr. Miskolczi: Yes. Our atmosphere, with its infinite degree of freedom, is able to maintain its global average infrared absorption at an optimal level. In technical terms, this “greenhouse constant” is the total infrared optical thickness of the atmosphere, and its theoretical value is 1.87. Despite the 30 per cent increase of CO2 in the last 61 years, this value has not changed. The atmosphere is not increasing its absorption power as was predicted by the IPCC.
Examiner.com: You used empirical data, rather than models, to arrive at your conclusion. How was that done?
Dr. Miskolczi: The computations are relatively simple. I collected a large number of radiosonde observations from around the globe and computed the global average infrared absorption. I performed these computations using observations from two large, publicly available datasets known as the TIGR2 and NOAA. The computations involved the processing of 300 radiosonde observations, using a state-of-the-art, line-by-line radiative transfer code. In both datasets, the global average infrared optical thickness turned out to be 1.87, agreeing with theoretical expectations.
Examiner.com: Have your mathematical equations been challenged or disproved?
Dr. Miskolczi: No.
Examiner.com: If your theory stands up to scientific scrutiny, it would collapse the CO2 global warming doctrine and render meaningless its predictions of climate catastrophe. Given its significance, why has your theory been met with silence and, in some instances, dismissal and derision?
Dr. Miskolczi: I can only guess. First of all, nobody likes to admit mistakes. Second, somebody has to explain to the taxpayers why millions of dollars were spent on AGW research. Third, some people are making a lot of money from the carbon trade and energy taxes.
Examiner.com: A huge industry has arisen out of the study and prevention of man-made global warming. Has the world been fooled?
Dr. Miskolczi: Thanks to censored science and the complicity of the mainstream media, yes, totally.
This comment is to demonstrate, that the origin of the observed global warming (positive global average surface temperature trend) in the last few decades can not be caused by the observed increase of the atmospheric CO2 concentration.
In theoretical radiative transfer, the absorbing power of infrared active gases are measured by the total infrared optical depth (TIOD). This dimensionless quantity is the negative natural logarithm of the ratio of the absorbed surface upward radiation by the atmosphere to the total emitted surface upward radiation.
The recent value of the TIOD is 1.87, which value fully complies with the theoretical expectation of an optimal (saturated) greenhouse effect of a greenhouse gas (GHG)-rich planet. (Miskolczi - 2007).
With relatively simply computations, we show that in the last 61 years, despite the 30 per cent increase in the atmospheric CO2 concentration, the cumulative greenhouse effect of all atmospheric greenhouse gases has not been changed - that is, the atmospheric TIOD is constant.
According to the most plausible explanation of the above fact, the equilibrium atmospheric H2O content is constrained with the theoretical optimal TIOD. Our simulation results are summarized in . . . Fig. 2.
. . . Apparently, increased total CO2 column amount is coupled with decreasing H2O column amount. As the result of the opposing trends in the two most important GHGs, in Fig. 2 the red curve shows no trend in the TIOD. In the last 61 years, the infrared absorbing capability of the atmosphere has not been changed; therefore, the greenhouse effect can not be the cause of the global warming.
In case of fixed atmospheric H2O column amount, simulation results show that according to the positive trend in the CO2 content of the atmosphere, there would also be a significant positive trend in the TIOD (blue curve).
The above results are the plain proofs that the IPCC consensus on the causes of the global arming is totally wrong, and the physics of the greenhouse effect requires serious revisions.
Hot Enough for You? Global warmists used to love talking about the weather! By James Taranto
It’s been a slow week for news because it’s been a big week for weather. The East Coast is covered in snow, and Time magazine blames global warming. No, seriously: “There is some evidence that climate change could in fact make such massive snowstorms more common, even as the world continues to warm.” The New York Times says the same thing, though two-sidedly: “The two sides in the climate-change debate are seizing on the mounting drifts to bolster their arguments.”
The Time story notes that climate is not the same thing as weather:
Ultimately, however, it’s a mistake to use any one storm--or even a season’s worth of storms--to disprove climate change (or to prove it; some environmentalists have wrongly tied the lack of snow in Vancouver, the site of the Winter Olympic Games, which begin this week, to global warming). Weather is what will happen next weekend; climate is what will happen over the next decades and centuries. And while our ability to predict the former has become reasonably reliable, scientists are still a long way from being able to make accurate projections about the future of the global climate.
Wait a minute, “scientists are still a long way from being able to make accurate projections about the future of the global climate”? We thought global warming was settled science, and anyone who doubted it was a knuckle-dragging lackey or handmaid of Big Oil! (Sorry for the mixed metaphors, but at least we’re gender inclusive.)
It is now clear the media’s approach ... assigning too much authority to the IPCC. Yesterday London’s Guardian, a left-wing paper that has long been squarely in the global-warmist camp, carried a damning report titled “How to Reform the IPCC”:
The IPCC says its reports are policy relevant, but not policy prescriptive. Perhaps unknown to many people, the process is started and finished not by scientists but by political officials, who steer the way the information is presented in so-called summary for policymakers [SPM] chapters. Is that right, the Guardian asked?
“The Nobel prize was for peace not science . . . government employees will use it to negotiate changes and a redistribution of resources. It is not a scientific analysis of climate change,” said Anton Imeson, a former IPCC lead author from the Netherlands. “For the media, the IPCC assessments have become an icon for something they are not. To make sure that it does not happen again, the IPCC should change its name and become part of something else. The IPCC should have never allowed itself to be branded as a scientific organisation. It provides a review of published scientific papers but none of this is much controlled by independent scientists.”
And of course the University of East Anglia emails showed that the so-called independent scientists manipulated data and tried to blacklist colleagues who did not accept the global-warmist hypotheses.
It’s true that cold weather, while providing an occasion to mock global warming, does not disprove it. But the mocking would be far less effective had global warmists not spent the past quarter-century making a mockery of the scientific method.
By Marlo Lewis in Pajamas Media, Februrary 10, 2010
Air quality in the United States has improved dramatically over the past 40 years, yet Moveon.Org wants you to believe that breathing the air is like being a pack-a-day smoker.
Moveon broadcasts this disinformation in TV ads bashing Senators Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Ben Nelson (D-NB), and Mary Landrieu (D-LA). The ads show little leaguers, a mother and her bottle-feeding infant, track athletes, and even a mother giving birth all smoking cigarettes. As these images flash by, the text of the ads says: While Senator Landrieu [or Lincoln, or Nelson] works to roll back the Clean Air Act, many Americans are already smoking the equivalent of a pack a day just from breathing the air.
Senator Landrieu [or Lincoln, or Nelson], Americans need the Clean Air Act. Leave it alone.
The Moveon ad is a triple whopper, piling falsehood upon falsehood upon falsehood. No American smokes the equivalent of a pack a day just by breathing. The senators are not working to “roll back” the Clean Air Act. The policy they support - one that Moveon opposes - would not slow any federal or state efforts to clean the air. Let’s examine each falsehood in turn.
Moveon claims that “many” Americans breathe the equivalent of a pack of cigarettes a day. Cigarette smoking accounts for 30% of all cancer deaths in the United States, and nine out of 10 lung cancer deaths. So how does cigarette smoke compare with outdoor air in regard to airborne carcinogens?
Nazaroff and Singer (2004), a study by researchers at UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, found that, by breathing indoor “environmental tobacco smoke” (ETS), non-smokers who live with a smoker each year inhale 1.2 to 150 times more of six known carcinogens than they inhale from “ambient"(outdoor) sources. Smokers themselves get a bigger dose of carcinogens, since they inhale both first- and second-hand smoke.
Not only is Moveon’s pack-a-day claim false, it could also harm “the children,” because it trivializes the risks of smoking. After all, a gullible teenager might reason, if breathing is as unhealthy as smoking, then how bad can smoking be?
Maybe what Moveon means is that people living in some U.S. cities inhale as much airborne particulate matter (PM) as a smoker gets from a pack a day. Much recent EPA action targets the so-called fine particles, those measuring 2.5 micrometers or less in size, known in regulatory parlance as PM2.5. Elevated levels of PM2.5 are associated with increased risks of cardiopulmonary and cardiovascular diseases. Do many (or any) of us get a pack-a-day dose of PM2.5 just by breathing?
Koong et al. (2009), a 24-country study by three prestigious health institutes, found substantially higher PM2.5 levels in workplace ETS than in the ambient air, in all regions of the world. In the Americas, for example, PM2.5 levels average 248 micrograms per cubic meter (μg/m3) in workplaces where smoking is allowed. On the other hand, PM2.5 in outdoor air averages less than 15 micrograms/m3, and even the most polluted U.S. cities average about 20 micograms/m3, or less than one-tenth the 248 micrograms/m3 of PM2.5 found in smoking venues.
Moveon is blowing smoke - nowhere in the United States is breathing the equivalent of a pack a day or even one cigarette a day.
Turning now to the second falsehood, none of the senators is working to “roll back” the Clean Air Act. The senators have crossed party lines to support a resolution, introduced by Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, to stop the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from dealing itself, trial lawyers, and activist judges into a position to set climate policy for the nation.
Here’s the pertinent background you won’t get from Moveon’s attack ads. Last December, EPA issued a finding that emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. If this were just a scientific assessment of the relevant literature - like the surgeon general’s famous finding in 1964 that cigarette smoke causes cancer - the Senate would have no business voting on it.
But unlike the surgeon general’s report, which did not presume even to advise Congress on policy options, EPA’s finding will trigger a regulatory cascade through multiple provisions of the Clean Air Act. EPA could end up administering global warming regulations more costly and intrusive than any Congress has considered and either rejected or failed to pass, yet without the people’s elected representatives ever voting on the policies.
As even the EPA all-but-acknowledges, the endangerment finding tees up several “absurd results” that are contrary to congressional intent. For example, EPA will have to apply Clean Air Act pre-construction permitting requirements to tens of thousands of small businesses, and operating permit requirements to millions. Unless EPA poaches legislative power and amends the Act, as it proposes to do in its legally dubious “tailoring rule,” the permitting programs will crash under the own weight, freezing construction activity and putting millions of firms in legal limbo. Apply the Clean Air Act to CO2 - the inescapable consequence of the endangerment finding - and the Act mutates into a gigantic anti-stimulus program.
Murkowski’s resolution would avert this debacle. In so doing, it would also remove the necessity for EPA to play lawmaker and violate the separation of powers in order to avoid “absurd results.” The Murkowski resolution would be good policy even if we were not experiencing the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
Moveon also neglects to mention that the endangerment finding logically commits EPA to establish national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS) for CO2 set below current atmospheric levels. Even a global depression lasting several decades would not be enough to bring America (and the world) into attainment with such a standard. Yet the Clean Air Act obligates states to attain “primary” (health-based) NAAQS within five or at most 10 years, or face various restrictions and sanctions such as the loss of federal highway funds. Regulating CO2 under the NAAQS program is a recipe for national economic disaster. Murkowski’s resolution would nip that mischief in the bud as well.
Although a strong case can be made that the endangerment finding is scientifically flawed, that is not what Sen. Murkowski’s resolution is about. Contrary to misrepresentation by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and others, the resolution is not a referendum on climate science. It is a referendum on whether bureaucrats with a vested interest in expanding their power should make climate policy. The resolution would veto the regulatory force and legal effect of the endangerment finding - not its scientific reasoning or conclusions. Indeed, Sen. Murkowski is not a global warming skeptic, nor is she opposed in principle to greenhouse gas regulation. She simply believes that climate policy is too important to be made by a bureaucracy with no accountability to the American people.
The Murkowski resolution would not change one word of the Clean Air Act. It would not alter any program that EPA administers under the Act. It would not reduce funding for any EPA program. It would, however, avert an era of unaccountable regulation. It’s this defense of democracy that Moveon.org vilifies.
Moveon’s third whopper is the notion - implied rather than stated - that CO2 is an air contaminant like tobacco smoke and, thus, that anyone who opposes EPA regulation of CO2 must be in favor of polluting the air. Unless EPA regulates CO2 emissions, Moveon suggests, even more people will smoke just by breathing.
This claim too is complete bunk. An odorless, colorless trace gas that is non-toxic to humans and animals at more than 30 times ambient levels, CO2 is an essential plant nutrient, the basic building block of the planetary food chain. Animal life depends on plant life, and plants raised in CO2-enriched environments grow larger and faster, use water more efficiently, and are more resilient to environmental stresses such as drought and air pollution. Yes, CO2 is a greenhouse (heat trapping) gas, but so is water vapor, which obviously is not air pollution. Calling CO2 emissions “carbon pollution” is a rhetorical trick designed to fool the unwary into believing the kind of nonsense Moveon.org is peddling.
History proves that cleaning the air does not depend on capping or otherwise restricting CO2 emissions. U.S. air quality has improved dramatically, decade by decade for almost as long as we’ve been measuring it. Indeed, particulate matter has been dropping since at least the late 1950s. Between 1980 and 2008, nationwide air pollution levels decreased 79% for carbon monoxide, 25% for ozone, 92% for lead, 46% for nitrogen dioxide, and 71% for sulfur dioxide. Between 1990 and 2008, air pollution levels decreased 31% for coarse particulates (PM10) and 20% for PM2.5.
This progress will continue under regulations already on the books or planned, as motor vehicle fleets turn over to cleaner vehicles and new capital stock replaces old. The bottom line: America’s air is very clean by historical standards, and pollution levels will continue to drop under existing EPA and state requirements that will not be affected in any way by the Murkowski resolution.
Moveon’s ad campaign is a falsehood from top to bottom. Moveon.org should promptly do three things: (1) Apologize to Sens. Landrieu, Lincoln, and Nelson for subjecting them to a smear campaign. (2) Apologize to its members for feeding them falsehoods instead of providing truthful information. (3) Return every penny to anyone whom the ads frightened or angered into contributing money to Moveon.Org.
Update: A new storm is moving east and will dump another heavy snow on the Mid-Atlantic. It is likely to give DCA and PHL their all-time seasonal snow records with still more winter to come. Another storm will follow in the deep south with snow close to the Gulf. See the view of the deep snow from space from NASA below and enlarged here.
The mainstream mediasphere and the alarmist blogosphere has been ignoring or dismissing the dominos of global warming collapsing as the fraudulent machinations of the IPCC are exposed, NOAA and NASA and CRU data manipulation is revealed and their heroes Michael Mann and Phil Jones are being investigated, and this incredible winter unfolds in many areas of the United States and Europe and Asia.
China has had the coldest weather since 1971. Europe and Russia experienced brutal, deadly cold and heavy snows. Snow and cold surprised delegates to the UN Copenhagen global warming conference and followed Obama and congress back to DC.
Florida and parts of the southeast had the longest stretch of cold weather in history. Florida citrus areas had the worst damage since 1989. Washington saw a heavy snowstorm in December and now a record breaking storm in early February. Another one is on the way and will likely affect other cities further north.
In recent years snows have fallen in unusual places like Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Buenos Aires, southern Brazil. Johannesburg, South Africa, southern Australia, the Mediterranean Coast and Greece. All-time record snows fell in many locales across the western and northern United States from Washington State and Oregon and Colorado to Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Vermont and Maine. All-time records were also set in southern Canada and now the Mid-Atlantic.
Snow returned to the UK reminiscent of the Dickens winters the last few years.
Washington was oblivious to the wild weather, so nature has brought the wild weather to their backyard. This storm brought over 3 feet of snow to a few spots around the nation’s capitol, perhaps to estates of some of the nation’s political leaders or media bigwigs (see list of snow totals here). See a news accounts of it here. It and following storms will ensure DC will have the All-TIME SNOWIEST WINTER ever going back to 1871. Expect the enviro wackos and their media lapdogs to come out and claim the storm and cold winter is the result of global warming.
The winter was not a surprise to many of the private industry forecasters, unencumbered by the global warming albatross. We expected the winter to be a harsh one (see here). The reasons we felt so was a developing stratospheric warming in the polar regions of the northern hemisphere favored in east QBO low solar years and east QBO low solar El Ninos and also in winters following high latitude volcanoes (Redoubt and Sarychev). The stratospheric warming started in late November peaked in December then faded in mid January. Often in years when it occurs early, it recurs later (2000-2001, 1995-1996, 1977-78).
The stratospheric warming leads to a negative arctic oscillation (exceeding 5 standard deviations in December and again in February) which pushed cold air to middle latitudes while surface temperatures in the higher latitude are cold but above normal under the warm ridging aloft. This kind of pattern happened in the 1960s and 1970s and indeed the winter is very much like 1965/66, 1968/69, and 1977/78 in that regard.
See Steve Goddard;s post in Watts Up With That in what that might mean for the arctic ice this summer here.
See how well through February 3rd, the upper level pattern has fit the expected pattern based on these natural factors.
Also we are back in the cold Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) phase which favors the colder El Ninos of the late 1950s to late 1970s (and again 2002/03).
Expect another storm this upcoming week with perhaps more snow for DC and this time further north, where less has fallen so far this season. The SOI hit an amazing 8 STD negative last week.
The water is warmest in the central tropical Pacific. A cold pool northwest of Hawaii also favors a cold central and east. That argues for a continued active southern storm track. The warm central Pacific and cold east also favors the same pattern as the East QBO low solar El Ninos, cold PDO. Once again natural oscillations provide a better indication of weather AND climate then the CO2, aerosol forcing dominated tinkertoy climate models (see a new peer review paper on their limitations here).
Looking ahead, these stratospheric warming events last 4 to 6 weeks so since it began in late January, expect it to continue at least several more weeks. Cold air and snow will be returning to Europe too after the same January thaw we experienced here in the states before winters return. See full PDF here. Updates to come after the storms the next week.
