Climate Contrarians Ignore Overwhelming Evidence

Every snowflake is unique, but attacks on climate science all seem the same. I should know. I’ve been one of the climate contrarians’ preferred targets for years. A recent op-ed on this page by blogger and climate-change denier James Delingpole attacked the “hockey stick” graph my co-authors and I published more than a decade ago with well-worn, discredited arguments ("Climategate 2.0,” Nov. 28).

Our original work showed that average temperatures today are higher than they have been for at least the past 1,000 years. Since then, dozens of analyses from other scientists based on different data and methods have all affirmed and extended our original findings.  Contrarians have nonetheless painted a misleading picture of climate science as a house of cards teetering on the edge of a hockey stick. In reality, my research is just one piece in a vast puzzle scientists have painstakingly assembled over the past 200 years establishing the reality of human-caused climate change.

Does that mean that everyone should have to drive an electric car and adopt a polar bear? Of course not. Policy decisions must balance matters of economics, international diplomacy and ethics in a way that is informed, rather than prescribed, by science.

In 2006, then-Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R., N.Y.) asked the National Academy of Sciences to look into studies like the hockey stick. It affirmed our conclusions. In recent years, attacks on climate science have become personal. After my colleagues and I had our emails stolen and posted online in November 2009, attacks from climate contrarians were subsequently shot down by investigations from two universities, the National Science Foundation, two federal agencies and several media outlets. Contrarians declared that those institutions were part of an imagined global-warming conspiracy.
In April 2010, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli demanded emails I sent or received from other scientists while at the University of Virginia. A judge concluded Mr. Cuccinelli hadn’t demonstrated any good reason to see that correspondence. Shortly after that, the American Tradition Institute, a group with ties to fossil-fuel interests, asked for the same emails under the state’s open records laws. The university rightly asserted that much of my private correspondence is just that and not subject to release.

Many fossil-fuel interests and their allies are following the same attack-the-science strategy that tobacco companies adopted to delay smoking regulation. Climate scientists can also find kinship with Dr. Herbert Needleman, who identified a link between lead contamination and impaired childhood brain development in the 1970s. The lead industry accused him of misconduct. Later, the National Institutes of Health exonerated him.

Mr. Delingpole ends his piece by saying the anonymous hacker or hackers who stole emails from me and my colleagues deserve thanks. What they deserve is to be brought to justice. But British police have not determined who stole the emails. Recent reports of police expenditures suggest they may be devoting far fewer resources to it than other similar investigations.
Celebrating theft is silly. We should respect the role science and scientists play in society, especially when scientists identify new risks. Whether those risks stem from smoking, lead exposure or the increasing use of fossil fuels, scientists will always work to increase knowledge and reduce uncertainty. And we all benefit from that work.

Prof. Michael E. Mann
Meteorology Department
Penn State University

See Bishop Hill’s post on Tim Barnett’s challenge of Mann’s Hockey Stick.

It’s interesting how much evidence there is now that the Hockey Stick was known to be a problem. Perhaps readers can help collate a list of emails making this point.

NAS panel review of hockeysticks prompted by McIntyre and McKitrick.

#1104 -Heinz Wanner - on reporting his NAS panel critique of Mann to the media.
I just refused to give an exclusive interview to SPIEGEL because I will not cause damage for climate science.

#1656 Douglas Maraun - on how to react to skeptics.
How should we deal with flaws inside the climate community? I think, that “our” reaction on the errors found in Mike Mann’s work were not especially honest.

#3234 Richard Alley
Taking the recent instrumental record and the tree-ring record and joining them yields a dramatic picture, with rather high confidence that recent times are anomalously warm. Taking strictly the tree-ring record and omitting the instrumental record yields a less-dramatic picture and a lower confidence that the recent temperatures are anomalous.

Paleoclimate and hide the decline

#0300
Bo Christiansen - On Hockey stick reconstructions
All methods strongly underestimates the amplitude of low-frequency variability and trends. This means that it is almost impossible to conclude from reconstruction studies that the present period is warmer than any period in the reconstructed period.

Ed Cook #3253
The results of this study will show that we can probably say a fair bit about <100 year extra-tropical NH temperature variability (at least as far as we believe the proxy estimates), but honestly know fuck-all about what the >100 year variability was like with any certainty (i.e. we know with certainty that we know fuck-all).

#4133 Johnathan Overpeck - IPCC review.
What Mike Mann continually fails to understand, and no amount of references will solve, is that there is practically no reliable tropical data for most of the time period, and without knowing the tropical sensitivity, we have no way of knowing how cold (or warm)the globe actually got.

[and later]

Unsatisfying, perhaps, since people will want to know whether 1200 AD was warmer than today, but if the data doesn’t exist, the question can’t yet be answered. A good topic for needed future work.

Rob Wilson - 1583
The palaeo-world has become a much more complex place in the last 10 years and with all the different calibration methods, data processing methods, proxy interpretations - any method that incorporates all forms of uncertainty and error will undoubtedly result in reconstructions with wider error bars than we currently have. These many be more honest, but may not be too helpful for model comparison attribution studies. We need to be careful with the wording I think.

#3234 Richard Alley - on NAS panel and divergence
records, or some other records such as Rosanne’s new ones, show “divergence”, then I believe it casts doubt on the use of joined tree-ring/instrumental records, and I don’t believe that I have yet heard why this interpretation is wrong.

#4758 Tim Osborne - Criticizing other people for doing the same thing
Because how can we be critical of Crowley for throwing out 40-years in the middle of his calibration, when we’re throwing out all post-1960 data ‘cos the MXD has a non-temperature signal in it, and also all pre-1881 or pre-1871 data ‘cos the temperature data may have a non-temperature signal in it! If we write the Holocene forum article then we’ll have to be critical or our paper as well as Crowley’s!

#0497 - Phil Jones UEA - Scientists don’t know the magnitude of past warming.
Even though the tree-ring chronologies used have robust rbar statistics for the whole 1000 years ( ie they lose nothing because core numbers stay high throughout), they have lost low frequency because of standardization. We’ve all tried with RCS/very stiff splines/hardly any detrending to keep this to a minimum, but until we know it is minimal it is still worth mentioning.

#0886 Jan Esper on his own reconstruction [ also hidden decline
And the curve will also show that the IPCC curve needs to be improved according to missing long-term declining trends/signals, which were removed (by dendrochronologists!) before Mann merged the local records together.

Tiim Osborne 4007
Also we have applied a completely artificial adjustment to the data after 1960, so they look closer to observed temperatures than the tree-ring data actually were

Tim Osborne #2347
Also, we set all post-1960 values to missing in the MXD data set (due to decline), and the method will infill these, estimating them from the real temperatures - another way of “correcting” for the decline, though may be not defensible!

#3234 Richard Alley
Unless the “divergence problem” can be confidently ascribed to some cause that was not active a millennium ago, then the comparison between tree rings from a millennium ago and instrumental records from the last decades does not seem to be justified, and the confidence level in the anomalous nature of the recent warmth is lowered.

I think the best way to sum up all of this is a quote from a guest post at tAV and DieKlimazweibel by Bo Christiansen:
Where does all this lead us? It is very likely that the NH mean temperature has shown much larger past variability than caught by previous reconstructions. We cannot from these reconstructions conclude that the previous 50-year period has been unique in the context of the last 500-1000 years.

Of course we all know that the IPCC reports differently.

See also Delingpole’s response to Mann.  H/T Chris Horner, Marc Morano

By Dr. J. Cao, Australia

The second law of thermodynamics states the entropy of an isolated system increases always with time towards its maximum.  William Thomson (Lord Kevin), one of the most brilliant minds in the field of thermodynamics in the 19th century, applied the law to the case of the universe and formulised a hypothesis that says: when the maximum entropy is reached the universe will have no thermodynamic free energy any more to sustain motion or life - ultimate fate of the universe is heat death.  The theory has been further developed since, and cosmological research suggests eventually all matters will decay into iron, and collapse into black holes in some remote future of 10’s 3 digits power (>10^100) years from now.  Presumably this is the scariest projection our human minds are capable to image.

A century after Lord Kevin, another scary projection is formulised by climate scientists.  Instrumental observations have found that atmospheric carbon dioxide absorbs significant amount of earth outgoing radiation.  It is then believed that atmospheric carbon dioxide traps heat and warms up the atmosphere.  With the concentration of CO2 increasing more and more, the Earth will become warmer and warmer, ice melts, sea level rises, leading to catastrophic climate change that will destroy the living environment of the mother Earth.

Unlike the theory of heat death of the universe that is only studied by academics, the theory of global warming has alarmed and mobilised our mankind.  We’ve spent trillions of dollars trying to combat global warming.  From the Kyoto Protocol to the Copenhagen Climate Summit COP15 to the current Durban conference COP17, world leaders have shown how they are convinced that carbon dioxide is causing global warming.  Australian parliament even recently passed a carbon tax law.

While the theory of heat death of the universe remains a valid scientific hypothesis, the theory of global warming has been found to be a false illusion due to technical errors.  Physics analysis of carbon dioxide, oxygen and nitrogen molecules shows carbon dioxide is cooler than, gains heat by molecular collision from, and dissipates heat by radiation for nitrogen and oxygen gases. 

CO2 is a cooling agent for the atmosphere; nitrogen and oxygen gases secure the Earth a warm liveable near surface atmosphere.  In the thermosphere where CO2 is sorted out due to heavier molecular weight, the temperature of residual air is well above 100C, goes higher and higher with altitude reaching a value exceed 1000C.

http://jinancaoblog.blogspot.com/

Look at the disgust at exposure of the truth on the faces of Waxman and Markey during Gingrich’s crisp destruction of the alarmist arguments.

And Steve Mcintyre on Climategate 2.0 on the Bolt Report:

Listen to Marc Morano rant on the Climategate emails on the Corebtt Report here.

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Gavin Schmidt on ideal ways to communicate climate science

By Lubos Motl, the Reference Frame

The data must be as impenetrable as possible

One year ago, a pr*ck named Chris Mooney was inserted as a director into the American Geophysical Union and became responsible for science communication.

Apologies for the picture of the main hero (Gavin Schmidt above) of this blog entry. Because someone wants to learn something about him, other people have to suffer.

Last month, we learned about the first result of Mooney’s “work”: on behalf of the AGU, he chose the best climate communicator in the world. Who is it? Is it Michael Mann who likes to hide the decline? Heidi Cullen who works on the Nuremberg trials for skeptics? Phil Jones? John Cook who has already won lots of money in the Australian “spit on Archimedes” contest? Al Gore? One of the 3,000 folks across the third world whom Al Gore has trained to be almost as marvelous as Gore himself? Nope!

Chris Mooney decided that the $25,000 award would go to Gavin Schmidt, the main full-time spinner and part-time liar behind George Soros’ Real-Enough-To-Be-Pure-Imaginary Climate propagandist blog.

Icecap Note: More appropriate would have been the ‘major award’ leg lamp that Darren McGavin won in the classic “Christmas Story” movie from 1983.

When Andrew Revkin enthusiastically endorsed this outrageous choice five weeks ago, I was stunned and instantly removed him from my list of Facebook contacts. The Climategate 2011 e-mails show that I shouldn’t have been surprised at all. One may see several e-mails in which Revkin offers his services and considers what’s the best way to produce propaganda that would harm skeptics such as Christy and Singer. “Will you feel better if I will lick the left side or the right side of your r*ctum?” Revkin asked the members of the Hockey Team. Revkin offers his “tongue full of power” especially to Ben Santer who is just planning to beat the crap out of Pat Michaels.

However, the Climategate 2011 e-mails also show how the second best climate science communicator in the world after Kook John Cook (who just opened a new German server, Kooks-Klimafakten.de), namely Gavin Schmidt, envisions the best possible way to communicate climate science. How do you make it literally accessible to other climatologists, the scientific public, and the public in general? What Steve Milloy has found is pretty hilarious.

In the e-mail 3343.txt (di2.nu), Gavin Schmidt laments that the evil skeptics actually want to see the data used to deduce all the remarkable conclusions – instead of treating Phil Jones et al. as holy prophets. The text makes it clear that all of his comrades are convinced that it would be suicidal to show a single bit of information to anyone. However, Gavin Schmidt suddenly offers Michael Mann a remarkably audacious idea how to protect their pal Phil Jones which is the most accurate counterpart of “glasnosť” inside the Hockey Team that you may find:

Gavin:

Frankly, I would simply put the whole CRU database (in an as-impenetrable-as-possible form) up on the web site along with a brief history of it’s provenance (and the role of the NMSs) and be done with it.

So if you want to be the best climate science communicator in the world, you have to release the data in an as-impenetrable-as-possible form.

I don’t remember what was exactly released as a result of these exchanges but let me say that if a part of these discussions led to the publication of the HadCRUT3 data in 2011, I needed a few hours to convert the files to a Mathematica-friendly format and make the first calculations of the trends and their statistical properties as distributed over the stations. So the dataset could have been as impenetrable as possible but it wasn’t impenetrable enough. Michael Mann made a mistake of changing Schmidt’s adjective “as impenetrable as possible” to “raw data” which are unfortunately much more penetrable than anything that any of these Gentlemen ever published on science (none of which has made any sense so far).

All of this sounds very amusing to those of us who are trying hard to share the raw data and the results of our work in as transparent ways as possible because we are actually trying to find as accurate insights about the system rather then to “help a cause”. But in some sense, all of those other people promoting the idea of a dangerous global warming are even worse than Gavin Schmidt. They would never dare to say that something should be released. They know that every single bit of the actual empirical data hurts their “cause” and there’s always a risk that even if they release the data in an impenetrable form, a neutral user i.e. a skeptic may manage to penetrate them. And it’s always bad because the real data don’t show any reason for worries.

Phil Jones has described the main problem with the skeptics: they prefer to mostly look at observations and ignore papers on modeling because they believe by default models are wrong! Another basic problem, as Phil Jones realized elsewhere, is that all models are wrong, indeed. These two problems add up to a big problem and it’s created purely by the skeptics. If they weren’t thinking that the models are wrong, no one would care because the only other people who know that the models are wrong are all the other climatologists and they would never tell it to anyone.

Some of the most hardcore deniers even prefer to look at the thermometers instead of watching the Day After Tomorrow even though the latter shows the true nature of the global warming armageddon theory much more accurately than what any instrument will ever be able to do.

But we are not talking about cheating Michael Mann, Phil Jones, and Gavin Schmidt. The fraudulent tactics seem to cover pretty much anyone in climatology who is visually “on the same side” as these individuals. In an 2006 e-mail, Tom Wigley who is extremely far from being innocent himself writes the following to the provider of the trees to produce hockey sticks: “Are you hiding something [from Steve McIntyre et al.] - your apparent refusal to be forthcoming sure makes it look as though you are.” These people may be divided to the fraudsters who have already revealed themselves as crooks in the public, like Mann, and fraudsters who remain in the closet (but who are kind of known to be cheating by everyone including other alarmists), like Briffa.