By Andrew Bolt
Professor Eric Steig last month announced in Nature that he’d spotted a warming in West Antarctica that previous researchers had missed through slackness - a warming so strong that it more than made up for the cooling in East Antarctica. Whew! Finally we had proof that Antarctica as a whole was warming, and not cooling, after all. Global warming really was global now.
The paper was immediately greeted with suspicion, not least because one of the authors was Michael Mann of the infamous “hockey stick”, now discredited, and the data was reconstructed from very sketchy weather station records, combined with assumptions from satellite observations. But Steve McIntyre, who did most to expose Mann’s “hockey stick”, now notices a far more embarrassing problem with Steig’s paper.
Previous researchers hadn’t overlooked the data. What they’d done was to ignore data from four West Antarctic automatic weather stations in particular that didn’t meet their quality control. As you can see below, one shows no warming, two show insignificant warming and fourth - from a station dubbed “Harry’ shows a sharp jump in temperature that helped Steig and his team discover their warming Antarctic.
See larger graphs here.
Uh oh.
Harry in fact is a problematic site that was buried in snow for years and then re-sited in 2005. But, worse, the data that Steig used in his modelling which he claimed came from Harry was actually old data from another station on the Ross Ice Shelf known as Gill with new data from Harry added to it, producing the abrupt warming. The data is worthless. Or as McIntyre puts it:
“Considered by itself, Gill has a slightly negative trend from 1987 to 2002. The big trend in “New Harry” arises entirely from the impact of splicing the two data sets together. It’s a mess.”
Read this link and this to see McIntyre’s superb forensic work.
Why wasn’t this error picked up earlier? Perhaps because the researchers got the results they’d hoped for, and no alarm bell went off that made them check. Now, wait for the papers to report the error with the zeal with which they reported Steig’s “warming”. See Andrew Bolt’s post here.
Another black eye for Nature, another perversion of science by Mann and yet another foot-in-mouth embarrasment for George Moonbiot who just today attacked Christopher Booker’s attack on Steig, highlighted Antarctic warming and defended Mann’s hockey stick. Moonbiot in 2006 said “Every time someone dies as a result of floods in Bangladesh, an airline executive should be dragged out of his office and drowned.” Cognitive dissonance in action.
UPDATE: See this Bruce Hall Report on the flurry of activity after Steve McIntyre’s discovery, including post by Gavin Schmidt of Real Climate taking credit for descovery of the problems. See also Anthony Watts study of the problem here.
By Sen. James Inhofe in Human Events
As Democrats in Congress cobble together an obscenely massive spending bill, tens of billions of these dollars are intended to be force fed into so-called green and renewable energy programs under the pretense of job creation. There are also hundreds of millions more being proposed for climate-change research under the dubious banner of stimulating the economy.
In fact, climatologist Dr. Patrick Michaels slammed the stimulus package for its climate-related pork. “We already fund global climate-change research to the tune of $5-6 billion. What’s going on here I am guessing is to fatten up some programs or some budgets from some agency or administrator that didn’t get exactly what he or she wanted in the last budgetary cycle,” Michaels told CNN on January 28.
Beware of Gore’s OK
This funding boost’s real purpose may be to further the political aims of the Obama Administration when it comes to offering alleged global-warming “solutions.” Caution is a must when former Vice President Al Gore touts the stimulus as some sort of “solution” to global warming.
While some renewable energy programs included in the proposed stimulus may be promising, they unquestionably cost more and offer uncertain benefits. Instead of endlessly adding to the substantial government subsidies renewables already enjoy, Congress should address a handful of commonsense policies to encourage real energy and job creation - policies that wouldn’t cost the American taxpayer a dime.
ANWR, OCS and Oil Shale
For instance, Congress should open ANWR and the Outer Continental Shelf to environmentally sensitive oil and gas exploration, resulting in tens of thousands of high-paying jobs. Democrats should allow a sustained development of the oil shale in the American West, which the Rand Corporation estimates contains up to 1.1 trillion recoverable barrels. That is the equivalent of 145 years of domestic supply at current rates of oil consumption. In addition to reducing our dependence on foreign oil, this increased domestic energy production would provide both state and federal taxes, pay royalties to mineral owners, and keep jobs and dollars on American soil and in American pockets.
Expand Clean Coal Use
Additionally, let’s create a streamlined and consolidated permitting process for new refineries in which EPA would be required to either approve or disapprove of a project within a year for new applications. France currently derives more than 75% of its electricity from nuclear power, a clean, proven, and economical resource. Congress should encourage a reasonable and predictable process for the construction of the next generation of nuclear power. The American Coal Foundation says that U.S. coal deposits contain more energy than of all the world’s oil reserves, and the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity states that today’s coal-based electricity generating fleet is 70% cleaner than it was in 1970 and is getting cleaner. Washington should promote the development of clean coal technologies, not institute regulatory and legal roadblocks to bankrupt the industry.
What is the government actually doing when it spends nearly a trillion on a stimulus? That money doesn’t just materialize out of thin air. It comes from the taxpayers or if it’s deficit spending, it comes from private lenders when they buy Treasury bonds. Either way, this money is taken out of the private sector marketplace and then put right back in when it’s spent by Uncle Sam. And don’t be fooled into thinking that the entire trillion dollars is put back into the economy. No doubt a large percent is wasted on government overhead and bureaucracy. At best it’s a zero sum game. It’s not stimulus. This is bigger government and it is more likely to harm economic performance than to improve it.
Despite today’s lower energy costs, Congress must confront long-followed government policies that unnecessarily restrict our access to plentiful supplies of America’s own natural resources. Those restrictive policies heavily contributed to the $4 gasoline prices we experienced last summer. Since it’s also reasonable to conclude that those high prices played a role in our current economic downturn, America can’t wait until prices once again hit $4.
Where Are Deficit Hawks?
This historic spending binge, touted as an economic “stimulus,” reveals that the taxpayer’s hard earned money truly now has become an almost meaningless commodity in Washington. It is amazing how many of yesterday’s deficit hawks are now suddenly today’s top cheerleaders for a massive stimulus bill. Restoring fiscal sanity in Washington looks more and more like a dream of yesteryear. Read more here.
By Peter Glover, Energy Tribune European Associate Editor in The American Thinker
In November 2008, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), run by Dr James Hansen, and one of the four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that October 2008 was the “hottest on record”. Which must have come as something of a shock to the countless millions who trudged through the heavy snow and ice in what they had been told was an unseasonally cold October. But then Hansen should know. He is, after all, climate alarmism’s ‘Mr Big’. But then this is far from the first time Hansen has been caught ‘fiddling’ the climate figures.
In October, two independent monitors at Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, performed their own detailed analysis of Hansen’s reported data. What they found should disturb us all. They discovered that the GISS readings from across a swathe of Russia that appeared to reveal a warming of 10 degrees above average were not readings for October at all. They were a repeat of September’s readings.
A highly embarrassed GISS was forced to own up. GISS retracted the figures - and then immediately set about obfuscating its original error claiming they had discovered a new “hotspot” in the Arctic. This caused even more confusion. Intriguing as the new vacation prospect opened up by the GISS report might be, satellite indicators throughout the Fall consistently revealed the Arctic sea ice had undergone a remarkably fast, post-summer recovery with 30 percent more ice than for the same period in 2007.
A GISS spokesman sought to explain the false Russian temperature figures by shuffling off blame to “other bodies” on whom GISS rely and over whom they have no means of “quality control”. The problem is it’s NASA’s GISS published figures that are mostly quoted precisely because they are regularly higher than those reported by other monitoring bodies. Not to mention they go a long way to underpinning the UN’s IPCC ‘end is nigh’ climate scenario, too. Neither is it the first time Hansen’s NASA figures have been challenged as at odds with other monitoring evidence.
In June 2008, NASA temperature data was challenged again over its higher recordings of temperatures compared to the other official bodies. Back in 1998, satellite data from associate bodies at Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) and the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) were broadly in agreement with those at NASA. Tens years later, NASA’s reported figures are regularly higher than those published by RSS and UAH. One reason put forward for the NASA anomaly is that its figures are derived from a grid of ground-based thermometers (the less efficient method) and not by (the far more efficient) taking of satellite readings. But does it matter. Just what is at stake? Well, governments panicked into uneconomic measures; policies which mostly hurt the poor by avoiding the utilization of cheap and plentiful Western energy resources. Resources like plentiful and cheap coal - Hansen’s literal bete noir, which he believes is “the enemy of the human race”.
In pursuit of his campaign to have the West abandoning its precious coal reserves, Hansen recently took it upon himself in a bid to influence the UK Government to refuse a licence for a coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth in Kent. Kingsnorth is prospectively the first of six coal-fired stations under consideration. Hansen knows only too well that if the UK greenlights the Kingsnorth plant it could kick start a similar program across Europe - and in turn create pressure to follow suit in the US (which has over 25 percent of the world’s highest quality coal reserves). If that were to happen, the resultant boost to global CO2 emissions would effectively send the chief climate alarmist message, quite literally, up in smoke. So Hansen took up his pen and wrote to lobby over the decisions with letters to the British PM and to the Queen herself.
Next Hansen - ignoring the hypocrisy as do most leading alarmists - jetted to the UK to give evidence in defence of a group of Greenpeace activists in a British criminal case. The activists had invaded the existing Kingsnorth facility causing thousands of dollars worth of criminal damage. Ignoring the evidence of red-handed guilt, perversely, the jury acquitted whereupon Hansen expressed his public backing for the right to break the law in the cause of climate activism. Hansen didn’t say whether this was official NASA policy.
Al Gore regards Hansen as an ‘objective scientist’, but in 2004 Hansen received a grant of $250,000 from the Heinz Foundation shortly before publicly endorsing Teresa Heinz’s husband, John Kerry, for the presidency. While those who argue the skeptics case are consistently accused of being in the pay of Big Oil, Hansen got a free pass from the liberal media on the Heinz grant. As Senator James Inhofe, of the US Committee on Environment and Public Works put it, “It appears the media makes a distinction between oil money and ketchup money.”
NASA does fine work and there are fine people working for NASA. Some have even gone on record disparaging both Hansen and his publicity-seeking methods. In an article Science, Ignorance is not Bliss (Launch magazine, July/August 2008) former astronaut Walter Cunningham delivered a blistering denunciation of Hansen for fostering the “current hysteria” of climate alarmists by misusing NASA data. Cunningham states, “NASA should be at the forefront in the collection of scientific evidence and debunking the current hysteria over human-caused, or anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).” Nor is Cunningham happy at what Hansen is doing for NASA’s reputation as a serious player in scientific research. He says of NASA, “Unfortunately, it is becoming just another agency caught up in the politics of global warming, or worse, politicized science. Advocacy is replacing objective evaluation data, while scientific data is being ignored in favor of emotions and politics.”
And, for good measure, Cunningham reminds us of yet another Hansen blunder. “After warning 2007 would be the hottest year on record,” says Cunningham, “what we experienced was the coolest since 2001.” Lamenting that the GW debate had deteriorated into a “religious war” between “true believers and non-believers” Cunningham astutely observes about those who follow Hansen’s logic, “it is impossible to reason a person out of positions they have not been reasoned into.” Cunningham states Hansen is “a political activist who spreads fear even when NASA’s own data contradicts him.” To drive home his point that Hansen is circumventing the real science, Cunningham highlights that, “warming in the upper atmosphere should occur before any surface warming effect, but NASA’s own data show that has not been happening.” Cunningham goes on to note how when Hansen’s boss, Michael Griffin, “a distinguished scientist in his own right, attempted to draw a distinction between Hansen’s personal and political views and the science conducted by his agency” he was “forced to back off”.
In November, another former NASA astronaut, the award-winning Harrison ‘Jack’ Schmitt, the Apollo 17 moon-walker and former chair of NASA Advisory Chair, resigned from the Planetary Society. Schmitt’s resignation letter identified the Society’s new ‘roadmap’ that attempted to link space exploration and climate change research on earth. In his resignation letter Schmitt states: “You know as well as I, the ‘global warming scare’ is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, income and decision making. It has no place in the Society’s activities.” My guess is that Walt Cunningham and Jack Schmitt are not on Hansen’s Christmas card list.
That James Hansen has a private fame-seeking agenda and is using NASA to peddle it as he makes predictive blunder after predictive blunder in their name is patently clear. Which begs the question: Why is James Hansen - a publicity-seeking leftwing political activist, responsible for issuing false climate data to the detriment of NASA’s reputation and against the public good - still picking up a pay check in a top public sector job? And just how much are Hansen’s headline grabbing, ultimately false, pronouncements helping to propel governments towards hugely expensive precipitous climate action?
See post here.