By James Delingpole
When I first read this morning that the police had paid a nocturnal visit to the blogger Tallbloke to confiscate his computers I thought at first it was a non-story. Jolly annoying and inconvenient for Tallbloke, obviously, but nothing too sinister. Tallbloke was one of the first people contacted when mystery whistleblower FOIA 2011 leaked the Climategate 2.0 files onto the internet; the ongoing investigation by Norfolk police into the identity of the Climategate leaker has been singularly unsuccessful; so it seemed sadly inevitable that in their flailing desperation to be seen to be doing something, anything, to get their man, the Norfolk plod would resort to tactics like this. (H/T Sir Gawain Towler)
(To give you an idea of the spirit in which Tallbloke is taking it, here’s what he says at Climateaudit: “The detective- insprctor and his colleagues were polite, well mannered and did not over-react when I declined to give them my wordpress password. I politely explained that they had a warrant to search my house, not my head.")
But no: it seems the true instigator of this vexatious abuse of power by arbitrary authority may be none other than President Obama.
Here’s Chris Horner with the lowdown in the Washington Examiner:
I have seen apparent proof that the United States Department of Justice (DOJ), Criminal Division, is working with United Kingdom police to pursue the leaker of the 2009 and 2011 “Climategate” emails.
I have learned that last week DOJ sent a search-and-seizure letter to the host of three climate-change “skeptic” blogs. Last night, UK police raided a blogger’s home and removed computers and equipment.
On December 9, DOJ sent a preservation letter under 18 U.S.C 2703(f) to the publication platform (website host) WordPress. This authority authorizes the government to request an Internet Service Provider (ISP) to preserve all records of a specific account for 90 days while the feds work on a warrant.
Norfolk PD affirmed to the subject of at least one of their raids that this international law enforcement hunt is for the leaker, meaning not for those whose acts the leaker exposed by making public emails containing admissions in their own words.
That last paragraph of Horner’s addresses a conundrum which has been puzzling quite a few of us, viz: why are all these public resources being wasted on the pursuit of somebody who, even if the police catch him, has no case whatsoever to answer. If a whistleblower leaks information in the public interest - as Climategate and Climategate 2.0 clearly are - then he is pretty much immune from prosecution. (Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998)
Sure if you listen to the spivs at the University of Easy Access, the sphincter-burstingly angry propagandists at comedy websites like RealClimate, or to lavishly paid palaeopiezometrists like the Bob Ward, then, yes, the Climategate and Climategate 2.0 emails were “stolen.” But no serious person really believes that. The “stolen” meme was just a shoddy ruse - first promoted by the Warmists’ amen corner the BBC - designed to distract attention from the only genuinely criminal acts of this whole affair: the flagrant and deliberate breach of FOI regulations by sundry Climategate “scientists”; the potentially fraudulent use of millions of pounds and dollars of public money for political ends.
Why this is the sledgehammer being used to crack a nut?
We can but feverishly speculate. My personal favourite theory so far - lent credence by several of the wise comments at Watts Up With That - is that it concerns all those encrypted emails that FOIA 2011 claimed to have in his possession when he unleashed Climategate 2.0. In other words, there may be more juicy stuff - much, much more juicy stuff - to come. It may also be that the names incriminated are not merely those of low-rent types like Phil Jones and Michael Mann, but senior politicians and businessmen with much more to lose if they’re ever found out.
So let’s hope they are, eh?
PS Memo to Norfolk police: if you do pop round this evening to confiscate my computer, that massive porn archive has nothing to do with me. It’s the kids’. Or the cat’s. Something like that.
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See much more detail on WattsUpWithThat. Time to reread Orwell’s novel 1984. 1984 is a tribute to a man who saw the true dangers of historian Lord Acton’s (1834-1902) statement: “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
1984 joins Winston Smith as he sets about another day, where his job is to change history by changing old newspaper records to match with the new truth as decided by the Party. “He who controls the past, controls the future” is a Party slogan to live by and it gives Winston his job, but Winston cannot see it like that. Barely old enough to recall a time when things were different, he sets out to expose the Party for the cynically fraudulent organisation that it is. As Winston said, even if you are a minority of one it does not make you wrong. Sound familiar????
The end of November 2011 completes 33 years of satellite-based global temperature data, according to John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center (ESSC) at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. Globally averaged, Earth’s atmosphere has warmed about 0.45 Celsius (about 0.82 F) during the almost one-third of a century that sensors aboard NOAA and NASA satellites have measured the temperature of oxygen molecules in the air.
This is at the lower end of computer model projections of how much the atmosphere should have warmed due to the effects of extra greenhouse gases since the first Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) went into service in Earth orbit in late November 1978, according to satellite data processed and archived at UAHuntsville’s ESSC.
“While 0.45 degrees C of warming is noticeable in climate terms, it isn’t obvious that it represents an impending disaster,” said Christy. “The climate models produce some aspects of the weather reasonably well, but they have yet to demonstrate an ability to confidently predict climate change in upper air temperatures.”
The atmosphere has warmed over most of the Earth’s surface during the satellite era. Only portions of the Antarctic, two areas off the southwestern coast of South America, and a small region south of Hawaii have cooled. On average, the South Pole region has cooled by about 0.05 C per decade, or 0.16 C (0.30 F) in 33 years. The globe’s fastest cooling region is in the central Antarctic south of MacKenzie Bay and the Amery Ice Shelf. Temperatures in that region have cooled by an annual average of about 2.36 C (4.25 F).
The warming trend generally increases as you go north. The Southern Hemisphere warmed 0.26 C (0.46 F) in 33 years while the Northern Hemisphere (including the continental U.S.) warmed by an average of 0.65 C (1.17 F).
The greatest warming has been in the Arctic. Temperatures in the atmosphere above the Arctic Ocean warmed by an average of 1.75 C (3.15 F) in 33 years. The fastest warming spot is in the Davis Strait, between the easternmost point on Baffin Island and Greenland. Temperatures there have warmed 2.89 C (about 5.2 F).
While Earth’s climate has warmed in the last 33 years, the climb has been irregular. There was little or no warming for the first 19 years of satellite data. Clear net warming did not occur until the El Niño Pacific Ocean “warming event of the century” in late 1997. Since that upward jump, there has been little or no additional warming.
“Part of the upward trend is due to low temperatures early in the satellite record caused by a pair of major volcanic eruptions,” Christy said. “Because those eruptions pull temperatures down in the first part of the record, they tilt the trend upward later in the record.”
Christy and other UAHuntsville scientists have calculated the cooling effect caused by the eruptions of Mexico’s El Chichon volcano in 1982 and the Mt. Pinatubo volcano in the Philippines in 1991. When that cooling is subtracted, the long-term warming effect is reduced to 0.09 C (0.16 F) per decade, well below computer model estimates of how much global warming should have occurred.
Although volcanoes are a natural force, eruptions powerful enough to affect global climate are rare and their timing is random. Since that timing has a significant impact on the long-term climate trend (almost as much as the cooling itself), it makes sense to take their chaotic effect out of the calculations so the underlying climate trend can be more reliably estimated.
What it doesn’t do is tell scientists how much of the remaining warming is due to natural climate cycles (not including volcanoes) versus humanity’s carbon dioxide emissions enhancing Earth’s natural greenhouse effect.
“That is the Holy Grail of climatology,” said Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist in the ESSC, a former NASA scientist and Christy’s partner in the satellite thermometer project for more than 20 years. “How much of that underlying trend is due to greenhouse gases? While many scientists believe it is almost entirely due to humans, that view cannot be proved scientifically.”
When the first MSU went into orbit in 1978, it wasn’t designed for monitoring long-term changes in the climate. Instead, it was built to give meteorologists two temperature readings a day over about 96 percent of the planet to provide input into computerized weather prediction models, the forerunners of climate models.
“All of the satellite instruments but one were designed to measure day-to-day weather changes, not long-term climate,” said Spencer. “It has been a challenge to make the necessary corrections to the data so we can use the instruments for long-term climate monitoring.”
While the satellite data record is shorter than the surface thermometer record, it has several strengths. It has the greatest global coverage: With 96 percent coverage of the globe (except for small areas around the north and south poles), the satellite sensors cover more than twice as much of Earth’s surface as do thermometers.
It is also less likely than surface-based thermometers to be influenced by local development, Spencer said. Urbanization typically contributes to local warming due to the asphalt effect, when paving and buildings absorb and convert into heat sunlight that would naturally have been reflected back into space.
While that heat can raise temperatures recorded by thermometers at surface weather stations, the effect on the atmosphere is so local and so shallow that it dissipates before it can heat the deep atmosphere above it. As a result, satellite measurements have shown no indication of an urban contamination effect, Spencer said.
Another strength is that the microwave sensors gather temperature data for a deep layer of the atmosphere, rather than just at the surface.
“What we look at is a bulk measurement of the atmosphere’s heat content,” Christy said. “That is the physical quantity you want to measure to best monitor changes in the climate. Plus, it’s consistent. You can take a single satellite ‘thermometer’ and measure the temperature of the whole Earth, rather than just at a single spot.”
While the satellite dataset has its strengths, unlike thermometers and temperature probes used on weather balloons the Microwave Sounding Units were new, largely untested tools when they were put into space. Spencer, Christy and other scientists have had to develop small corrections that they use every month to reduce errors caused by the satellites losing altitude or drifting in their orbits.
While year-to-year temperature variations measured by the satellite sensors closely match those measured by both surface thermometers and weather balloons, it is the long-term warming trend on which the satellites and the surface thermometers disagree, Spencer said, with the surface warming faster than the deep layer of the atmosphere.
If both instruments are accurate, that means something unexpected is happening in the atmosphere.
“The satellites should have shown more deep-atmosphere warming than the surface, not less” he said. “Whatever warming or cooling there is should be magnified with height. We believe this is telling us something significant about exactly why the climate system has not warmed as much as expected in recent decades.”
Publication of the November 2011 Global Temperature Report was delayed by several days due to a ground station malfunction.
Archived color maps of local temperature anomalies are available on-line here.
The processed temperature data is available on-line here.
As part of an ongoing joint project between UAHuntsville, NOAA and NASA, Christy and Spencer use data gathered by advanced microwave sounding units on NOAA and NASA satellites to get accurate temperature readings for almost all regions of the Earth. This includes remote desert, ocean and rain forest areas where reliable climate data are not otherwise available.
The satellite-based instruments measure the temperature of the atmosphere from the surface up to an altitude of about eight kilometers above sea level. Once the monthly temperature data is collected and processed, it is placed in a “public” computer file for immediate access by atmospheric scientists in the U.S. and abroad.
Neither Christy nor Spencer receives any research support or funding from oil, coal or industrial companies or organizations, or from any private or special interest groups. All of their climate research funding comes from federal and state grants or contracts.
Article written by Joe Bastardi:
If it changes to something else beforeyou read this, just type it in.
Joe Bastardi co chief meteorologist, Weatherbell Analytics.
As many of you know, I am 1st Hand Weather Blogger Garrett Bastardi’s Father and like my father before me will do anything to fuel his childrens passion for what they are made to do. He appears to have the same kind of drive I had for this, and of course with my dad as a meteorologist, there is a genetic predisposition toward it.
Besides the title of Garrett’s Dad I am also the chief meteorologist, along with Joe D’Aleo at Weatherbell Analytics and hope you will give our site a try as we post extensively and I seek to explain the why behind the what before hand. Most forecasters will tell you what will happen but most of the time you wont hear a why until they are explaining it after if something went wrong. I encourage you to give our site behind the paywall a test drive, it s 50 cents a day for two cups of Joe ( D Aleo and I) if after the test drive you decide to climb aboard. I post a couple of times a day and do some videos,but right or wrong, always lay out my case before hand. The weather is not a snapshot, its a movie, a relentless constantly changing opponent that to paraphrase Rocky Balboa, will beat you down and keep you there if you let it.. So you must fight back, and view it as challenge, forming an opinion based on what you see in the PHYSICAL reality of the pattern, not a virtual reality. Most of the time someone will see a model then start to post on it. The trick is not going to the model, but having the model come to you, because you have a working idea of what the atmosphere is doing. It is the reason that getting a degree in meteorology involves more than just being able to stand in front of Tv an look good. A someone who has done TV work, (I prefer to sit, and there is nothing I can do for my looks) t is interesting to note, right off the bat, that modeling that says it is going to get warmer is virtual, and the only objective temperature reality we truly have is since the start of the satellite era in the late 70s, at the end of the last cold PDO. We do know over the past couple of hundred years we have warmed, but that was out of the little ice age. If we had not warm, we probably would not have progressed to where we are today as a species.
Something you should read is here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/09/durban-what-the-media-are-not-telling-you/#more-52760
It’s alarming.
But here’s why am I so into this global warming fight.
1) Its a test of right and wrong, and I think on multiple levels. It should just be about the weather, no different than you and I forecasting a snow event and then see who is closer. However it has been turned into something much bigger, and the right or wrong on that idea involves a desire to curtail freedoms because of what some think is a ticking time bomb of co2.
2) It is a fight on a higher plane. I am not a very humble person in front of others, I have been told, but I am humble before the atmosphere and its creator. Arrogance abounds in many that think somehow they have the right idea on how to control the atmosphere, as if they can control something they did not create, nor have any influence over. They can however have influence over other people, by using distorted science to drive home their agenda.
3) I know my climate history, as I have been as fascinated with that as much as the forecast since i was young. I have a father who regaled me with stories about how bad the weather was when he was growing up, and unlike the tired rants of those saying this is the worst that has ever happen, he will tell you it was far worse , heat, hurricanes, drought etc in the 30s-50s, the last time of climatic hardship as now. And because I know that, I am simply seeing the same things happen now in front of me as he saw the last time the pdo/amo were in similar cycles, The difference is we now have the chance to objectively measure it.
4) One never knows when one is called to fight, but its how you respond. Over the years, the words of Edmund Burke have echoed louder in my ears over this. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” Imposing ones will upon someone is evil, and not allowing the answer to play out is simply not allowing a chance for the truth to come out, which is also evil. I am no saint, but I will avoid the sin of doing nothing when I see I can do something to make sure the truth, even if it means I am wrong, can come out.
5) The idea that by spending your life in research, and not in actually doing something that demands an answer that has to be right (as in the private sector) or you get fired, runs counter to the idea that not only must you know how to do something, you must actually do it. Recreations of the past are a good tool to for a basis to forecast the future, but unless you are out in the real world, you have no idea what its like to apply virtual knowledge to a future event. In fact, the disdain that many with higher power degrees that look upon the “laborers” among us that actually have to forecast for a living, it matched only by our distrust of them. Its like someone sitting in a castle telling someone in the trenches taking bullets, how to fight.
If you go into a gym, who are you going to trust. an overweight trainer or the trainer that is in shape?
I respect the advanced degrees, for what they are, sgns that the person persisted in their education. But it does not give them license for them to be an authority on something that have never practically applied! When I was in school there was a saying ( mind you at that time PSU was out and out the unchallenged number one meteorology department in the country, something I am well aware can not be said today as there are many great schools) among the meteorologists ( we were a cocky bunch) that if you can’t do the meteorology, you can be a climatologist. I still bust my brother on it, cause his degree is in climatology though HE IS VEHEMENTLY AGAINST AGW. But the point is the idea that a meteorologist can’t weigh in on this debate when in reality a good forecaster has to know his clime is simply another way to try and silence dissent.
So there is more behind this than the tired old argument that people that resist this tide of agenda driven drivel are shills of the fossil fuel industry. Is about allowing the light or truth to determine who is rig and who is wrong, and if there is going to be a benefit for society, it will only be that the truth wins the day.
Here is the crux of my argument.
Since the little ice age, the earth has been warming up, but only since the late 1970s have we had the way to objectively measure it with the accuracy we have today . There is plenty of reason to believe that sunspot activity may have had something to do with the warm up, but also reason to believe, since there has been a drastic increase in industrialization that man may have had something to do with it. What is not known is if this warm up was simply a reversal back to where we should be, and is partly because we were so cold to start with, or is the doomsday clock ticking faster with each passing minute because we are pumping so much co2 into the air. A simple test will give us the answer. If CO2 is the culprit, then temperatures should continue to rise. Unfortunately they are not rising as seen here.
Since someone can accuse me of “cherry picking” lets look a the relationship between co2 and temp over a longer period of time.
If we square the correlation, we have the strength of correlation. You can see there was very little correlation before 1980, and as we saw above, since the late there is little also. In the entire period, the correlation of CO2 was only positive with the temperature for about 30 years!
Is there something has a stronger relationship.?
Actually yes, the PDO and AMO together!
Even more damming evidence against CO2.. the direct relationship between the enso and the global temps with the overall rise correlated with the warm PDO and the spikes with warm enso episodes, the cooling with La Nina or Volcanic activity. You cant get much more cause and effect.
In May, I predicted we would fall to levels we fell to in 2008, Overall the rise has stopped as it should given La Chateliers principle, which states any system in abnormally fights to return toward normalcy. Even without the PDO flip, the process of balancing had begun! The latest figure is plus 0.033C and we should go below normal in December. How the media does not pick up on this and ignores this shows.. well if you ignore something, that makes you ignorant of it. It’s all there, so its ignorance out of choice.
So the question is: How can any rational observer claim that CO2 HAS TO BE CAUSING this when its plain that there is a much closer relationship between the warming of the tropical Pacific and Atlantic and the earth’s temperature? But as you will read below, just because the measured temp warms, it does not mean the earths energy is being trapped.
We have a way of objectively measuring temps now, which we did not have until the end of the last cold cycle of the PDO, which was in the late 1970s. Warm the tropical Pacific and you are naturally going to warm the air, since it means more heat gets into the air. Kick in with the warm AMO and look out, its Katie bar the door.
But here is the dirty little secret that few pushing AGW will address. Because there is much more energy in warm moist air than cold dry air, in terms of the total energy, there is no detectable change. That means that all we are seeing is a distortion of the temperature pattern. Suppose for instance we totaled the temp up along the date line from pole to pole and had many of the areas north of 40 north warm. There may be many more warm readings than cooler but a 15 degree rise where the air is cold and dry is offset energy wise by a 1 degree fall where its warm and moist. So all we are seeing is a distortion and the key may be in the ice caps. Since the NORTH polar ice caps are surrounded by land, it stands to reason that warming the Pacific and Atlantic in a way where warm water is near their coasts and in their equatorial areas would warm the continents next to them (75% of the land is in the northern hemisphere). SInce those continents surround the ice cap, and warmer water is flowing around the cool pool that is in the middle in the warm phases of these oscillations, what should happen to the northern ice cap? It should shrink But if there was true warming so should the south pole. Since it is tougher to heat or cool maritime air, it would be tougher to grow the southern ice cap but over all it has slightly anyway. In other words the shrinking in the north should outweigh the gain in the south, if it was simply a cyclical matter, rather than something that would signal the actual demise of the ice cap and a true build up of heat in the oceans and atmosphere. Well lets take a look. SEE MORE HERE.
JB concludes:
I encourage people to open their minds. I have never asked for people to accept what I say, BUT ACCEPT THE CHALLENGE OF WHAT I AM SAYING and then go look for themselves. I think you will see that at the very least there is reason to doubt this and as many have, dismiss it as a red herring to cover up a bigger issue that is at play. That the weather and climate are now being prostituted this way, that something we love is used as a cheap tool to drive ideas down people throat, should be alarming enough for you to arm yourself with the knowledge that will form the armor to resist such assaults on free thinking people of good will.