James Taylor

“We have been hosting this conference for several years now, and during the course of these conferences we have cordially invited literally dozens of prominent global warming alarmists to participate. When they realize this is a conference where scientists will be allowed to present all points of view, and they will be encouraged to discuss and debate the scientific evidence with each other in an open, transparent, public setting, the alarmists quickly look for the nearest chair to hide under,” said conference coordinator James M. Taylor, senior fellow for environment policy at the Heartland Institute.

“Don’t blame us, and don’t blame global warming, for the rapidly escalating chair crisis. Blame the alarmists who are Bogarting all the chairs to hide under,” Taylor added.

Taylor’s list of alarmists who have rejected his invitation to participate in one or more ICCCs is a virtual Who’s Who of global warming media hounds.

“Al Gore, James Hansen, Michael Mann, Gavin Schmidt, Alan Robock, the list goes on and on,” said Taylor. “They all seem to have some sort of scheduling conflict whenever they have to share the stage with a scientist who will be challenging their evidence.”

“On the other hand,” Taylor reported, “Every time we hold an ICCC, I have to beat off skeptical scientists with a stick. We have had scientists from Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Penn, MIT, NASA, NOAA, etc., come together and present evidence against the alleged global warming crisis. We have invited the Al Gore’s, James Hansen’s, and Michael Mann’s of the world to come show us all where these skeptical scientists are wrong, yet they never seem able to make it.”

“I sure hope we can nevertheless find some remaining chairs for our conference,” said Taylor.

Taylor noted that the event is open to the public and is free of charge for Congressmen, congressional staffers, federal agency officials, and state government officials.

“This really is about investigating and discussing the science in an open, interactive manner,” said Taylor. “Whatever views we may have regarding the global warming debate, this is an opportunity to meet with, listen to, and even challenge the scientists themselves regarding the global warming debate. We challenge our elected officials and agency representatives to show they are considering all the scientific evidence by attending this event. There really is no excuse not to.”

The event is open to the public and the press. Tickets and supplementary information are available.

James M. Taylor is senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute and managing editor of Environment & Climate News.

By Steve Milloy

The Supreme Court stepped back from alarmist climate science in today’s decision in AEP v. Connecticut.

In the Court’s 2007 Justice Stevens-authored decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, a majority of the Court was fully in the alarmist camp. As an example, the Court held:

“The harms associated with climate change are serious and well recognized. The Government’s own objective assessment of the relevant science and a strong consensus among qualified experts indicate that global warming threatens, inter alia, a precipitate rise in sea levels, severe and irreversible changes to natural ecosystems, a significant reduction in winter snowpack with direct and important economic consequences, and increases in the spread of disease and the ferocity of weather events.”

Now contrast that position with the one stated in footnote 2 of today’s essentially unanimous opinion delivered by the liberal Justice Ginsberg:

“The Court, we caution, endorses no particular view of the complicated issues related to carbon dioxide emissions and climate change.”

Supreme panic has been replaced supreme neutrality.

We trace this change to Climategate and its progeny...the scandals that saved Western society.

Post and comments.

By Maxim Lott, FoxNews

Is climate change raising sea levels, as Al Gore has argued—or are climate scientists doctoring the data?

The University of Colorado’s Sea Level Research Group decided in May to add 0.3 millimeters—or about the thickness of a fingernail—every year to its actual measurements of sea levels, sparking criticism from experts who called it an attempt to exaggerate the effects of global warming.

“Gatekeepers of our sea level data are manufacturing a fictitious sea level rise that is not occurring,” said James M. Taylor, a lawyer who focuses on environmental issues for the Heartland Institute.

Steve Nerem, the director of the widely relied-upon research center, told FoxNews.com that his group added the 0.3 millimeters per year to the actual sea level measurements because land masses, still rebounding from the ice age, are rising and increasing the amount of water that oceans can hold. “We have to account for the fact that the ocean basins are actually getting slightly bigger… water volume is expanding,” he said, a phenomenon they call glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA).

Taylor calls it tomfoolery. “There really is no reason to do this other than to advance a political agenda,” he said.

Climate scientist John Christy, a professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, said that the amount of water in the ocean and sea level were two different things. “To me...sea level rise is what’s measured against the actual coast,” he told FoxNews.com. “That’s what tells us the impact of rising oceans.”

Taylor agreed. “Many global warming alarmists say that vast stretches of coastline are going to be swallowed up by the sea. Well, that means we should be talking about sea level, not about global water volume.”

In e-mails with FoxNews.com, Nerem indicated that he considered “sea level rise” to be the same thing as the amount of water in the ocean. “If we correct our data to remove [the effect of rising land], it actually does cause the rate of sea level (a.k.a. ocean water volume change) rise to be bigger,” Nerem wrote. The adjustment is trivial, and not worth public attention, he added.

“For the layperson, this correction is a non-issue and certainly not newsworthy...[The] effect is tiny—only 1 inch over 100 years, whereas we expect sea level to rise 2-4 feet.” But Taylor said that the correction seemed bigger when compared with actual sea level increases. “We’ve seen only 7 inches of sea level rise in the past century and it hasn’t sped up this century. Compared to that, this would add nearly 20 percent to the sea level rise. That’s not insignificant,” he told FoxNews.com.

Nerem said that the research center is considering compromising on the adjustment. “We are considering putting both data sets on our website—a GIA-corrected dataset, as well as one without the GIA correction,” he said. Christy said that would be a welcome change. “I would encourage CU to put the sea level rate [with] no adjustment at the top of the website,” he said.

Taylor’s takeaway: Be wary of sea level rise estimates. “When Al Gore talks about Manhattan flooding this century, and 20 feet of sea level rise, that’s simply not going to happen. If it were going to happen, he wouldn’t have bought his multi-million dollar mansion along the coast in California.”

ICECAP NOTE: Unadjusted data. The reason they are scurrying to adjust.

UKMet’s principle research scientist John Mitchell: “People underestimate the power of models. Observational evidence is not very useful,” adding, “Our approach is not entirely empirical.”

--------
On Queu, enter Michael Mann, Rahmstorff…

Mann’s new sea level hockey stick paper
Anthony Watts, Watts Up With That
WUWT readers may recall yesterday where

Dr. Mann was so eager to list this paper on his resume/CV, he broke the embargo set for 15:00 EST June 20th, today, at which time this blog post appears.

As much as this is an editorial target rich environment, I’m going to publish this press release and paper sans any editorial comment. There’s plenty of time for that later. Let’s all just take it in first. Below, figure 2 from the Kemp et al 2011 paper. It should look familiar. Note the reference in Figure 2 to GIA (Glacial Isostatic Adjustment) adjusted sea level data, which has recently been the subject of controversy, it was first noted here on WUWT.

Fig. 2. (A) Enlarged. Composite EIV global land plus ocean global temperature reconstruction (1), smoothed with a 30-year LOESS low-pass filter (blue). Data since AD 1850 (red) are HADCrutv3 instrumental temperatures. Values are relative to a preindustrial average for AD 1400-1800 (B) RSL reconstructions at Sand Point and Tump Point since BC 100. Boxes represent sample specific age and sea-level uncertainties (2σ. Inset is a comparison with nearby tide-gauge data. (C) GIA-adjusted sea level at Sand Point and Tump Point expressed relative to a preindustrial average for AD 1400–1800. Sealevel data points are represented by parallelograms because of distortion caused by GIA, which has a larger effect on the older edge of a data point than on the younger edge. Times of changes in the rate of sea-level rise (95% confidence change-point intervals) are shown. Pink envelope is a nine degree polynomial to visually summarize the North Carolina sea-level reconstruction.

First the press release:

Embargoed for release: 20-Jun-2011 15:00 ET

(20-Jun-2011 19:00 GMT)
Contact: Evan Lerner
elerner@upenn.edu
215-573-6604
University of Pennsylvania

Penn researchers link fastest sea-level rise in 2 millennia to increasing temperatures

PHILADELPHIA - An international research team including University of Pennsylvania scientists has shown that the rate of sea-level rise along the U.S. Atlantic coast is greater now than at any time in the past 2,000 years and that there is a consistent link between changes in global mean surface temperature and sea level.

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