Source: Forbes
By Larry Bell
A rapidly growing number of Americans are coming to distrust “scientific” climate report conclusions that emanate from authoritarian government and institutional sources - often with good reason. Such skepticism has arisen in part from revelations of conspiracies among influential researchers to exaggerate the existence and threats of man-made climate change, withhold background data and suppress contrary findings evidenced in the “ClimateGate” scandal.
Other doubt is legitimately fueled by direct observations. We commonly witness alarmist claims based upon short-term warming events, while other equally notable cooling episodes are dismissed in importance, attributed to warming, or cited as proof of disturbing “climate change.”
Who pays for all this bad science, and worse, news? We do, of course. And it doesn’t come cheap. According to data compiled by Joanne Nova at the Science and Public Policy Institute, the U.S. Government spent more than $32.5 billion on climate studies between 1989 and 2009. This doesn’t count about $79 billion more spent for related climate change technology research, foreign aid and tax breaks for “green energy.”
To suggest that climate science money trickles down from government would be a gross understatement. Actually, it cascades from mountains on high, presided over by agencies and their federal and state minions we generally assume to be knowledgeable and objective. But often we might be wrong. This occurs when a particularly orthodox or partisan view becomes inculcated into government leadership and surrogate organization power structures - yes, exactly like man-made global warming, for example. Then follow the rivers, streams and creeks as those influences spread.
Agencies get funding appropriations based upon how important they are, or more accurately, how important we are persuaded to think they are. In the case of climate and environmental issues, they appear to be a lot more important when represented to address (certainly not waste) a crisis. Climate change, a topic offering an opportunity to regulate something really dangerous, like natural air, is just too wonderful to pass up.
Who populates these agencies? People with orthodox credentials of course. It helps a lot if they have published books or articles that favor and advance those views, or at least associate with influential organizations that do. Let’s call that the “orthodox mainstream.” Then again, most of those books and articles wouldn’t have been published at all if the authors didn’t have good science credentials, right? They would need to have undertaken research that was published in respected journals.
Farther downriver, the universities that support learned research and hire scientists to conduct it depend upon federal and state agencies (again from us). To compete for that money they must address topics that are recognized by the orthodox mainstream as being very important. Only then can they hire and produce people who write successful proposals to support staff to do the research to prepare the papers that get published in the respected journals.
But what if those learned people’s papers can’t get published in the respected journals because they contradict views of influential orthodox mainstream gatekeepers who attack their merit - the exact circumstances exposed in the U.K. East Anglia University Climate Research Unit’s ClimateGate e-mails? In this case, those scientists wouldn’t win grants and contracts (from tax and tuition money we supply) to gain tenure and promotions at leading universities and research laboratories, or gain credentials needed to get hired by the agencies and surrogate organizations that distribute and administer the funding. Others who play the game by the rules of politics and ideology are likely to fare much better.
Is this a real problem? Consider just a few examples.
A June 4, 2003, e-mail from Keith Briffa to fellow tree ring researcher Edward Cook at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York stated: “I got a paper to review (submitted to the Journal of Agricultural, Biological and Environmental Sciences), written by a Korean guy and someone from Berkeley, that claims that the method of reconstruction that we use in dendroclimatology (reverse regression) is wrong, biased, lousy, horrible, etc…If published as is, this paper could really do some damage…It won’t be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically… I am really sorry but I have to nag about that review - Confidentially, I now need a hard and if required extensive case for rejecting.”
A July 2004 communication from the U.K. East Anglia Climate Research Unit’s director Philip Jones to Michael Mann referred to two papers recently published in Climate Research with a “HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL” subject line observed: “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer review literature is”. Jones and Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, were joint lead authors for a key chapter of that 2007 report. Mann was an originator of the infamous “hockey stick” graph suggesting accelerating human-caused global warming since the Industrial Revolution.
Tom Wigley, a senior scientist and Trenberth associate at the National Center for Atmospheric Research suggested in another e-mail to Mann: “If you think that [Yale professor James] Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official [American Geophysical Union] channels to get him ousted” [as editor-in-chief of the Geophysical Research Letters journal].
So what about the “fourth branch of government,” the media? What do they appear to think about such breaches of public trust? Judging from all of the seven invited representatives at Part Two of a Nov. 23, 2010, Yale Forum titled “Scientists and Journalists on Lessons Learned [from the ClimateGate e-mail release],” not very much at all.
Curtis Brainard of the Columbia Journalism Review observed: I’d say that most journalists didn’t learn anything from the ‘ClimateGate’ and IPCC-errors ‘pseudo scandals’…those events only served to confuse editors and reporters.” He was less confused about motives behind the reporting of those events, stating, “The New York Times had a great front-page story about climate denial being an ‘article of faith’ for the Tea Party, which made it clear that the group’s climate politics are not synchronous with climate science.”
Richard Harris from NPR believed that ClimateGate reporting “was not a product of journalism, but activism…crafted by people with a desired objective.”
Elizabeth Kolbert of The New Yorker agreed with both Brainard and Harris: “The obvious lesson of faux scandals like “ClimateGate” is that they tend to be created by groups or individuals with their own agendas, and journalists ought to be very wary about covering them.”
Eric Pooley of Bloomberg Businessweek also dismissed the legitimacy and importance of the e-mail revelations. “When the next climate scandalette comes along,” he said, “some news organizations will surely play to hype and get carried away with their coverage- in effect, becoming a handy transmission belt for the professional deniers.”
Does anyone else detect any indication of media bias here? Maybe it’s just me.
But consider a much larger issue. Whatever our individual political orientations or climate views, let’s all recognize that it is a very big deal indeed when key professionals entrusted with important science and reporting responsibilities betray our trust. Think about government policy impacts involving many billions of dollars that are influenced by false premises, including regulatory standards and budgets attached to energy, environmental, science and education programs. Try to imagine but a few of the sweeping impacts of bad science upon our national economy and daily lives.
So where is responsible journalism in all of this? All too often the mainstream is very far downstream in channeled disregard of abuses. The combined Bernard Madoff and Enron hoaxes did far less national damage yet received a whole lot more media attention.
The house of cards that is the greenhouse warming theory continues to collapse. Last week it was the CERN findings relative to cosmic rays and low level clouds, today it is satellite findings that suggest IPCC models get the energy balance VERY wrong.
By Dr. Roy Spencer, Dr. Phllip Gentry, UAH
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (July 26, 2011)—Data from NASA’s Terra satellite shows that when the climate warms, Earth’s atmosphere is apparently more efficient at releasing energy to space than models used to forecast climate change have been programmed to “believe.”
The result is climate forecasts that are warming substantially faster than the atmosphere, says Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist in the
Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville.
The previously unexplained differences between model-based forecasts of rapid global warming and meteorological data showing a slower rate of
warming have been the source of often contentious debate and controversy for more than two decades.
In research published this week in the journal ”Remote Sensing”, Spencer and UAHuntsville’s Dr. Danny Braswell compared what a half dozen climate models say the atmosphere should do to satellite data showing what the atmosphere actually did during the 18 months before and after warming events between 2000 and 2011.
“The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show,” Spencer said. “There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans.”
Not only does the atmosphere release more energy than previously thought, it starts releasing it earlier in a warming cycle. The models forecast that the
climate should continue to absorb solar energy until a warming event peaks. Instead, the satellite data shows the climate system starting to shed energy
more than three months before the typical warming event reaches its peak. “At the peak, satellites show energy being lost while climate models show
energy still being gained,” Spencer said.
This is the first time scientists have looked at radiative balances during the months before and after these transient temperature peaks.
Applied to long-term climate change, the research might indicate that the climate is less sensitive to warming due to increased carbon dioxide
concentrations in the atmosphere than climate modelers have theorized. A major underpinning of global warming theory is that the slight warming
caused by enhanced greenhouse gases should change cloud cover in ways that cause additional warming, which would be a positive feedback cycle.
Instead, the natural ebb and flow of clouds, solar radiation, heat rising from the oceans and a myriad of other factors added to the different time
lags in which they impact the atmosphere might make it impossible to isolate or accurately identify which piece of Earth’s changing climate is feedback
from manmade greenhouse gases. “There are simply too many variables to reliably gauge the right number for that,” Spencer said. “The main finding from this research is that there is no solution to the problem of measuring atmospheric feedback, due mostly to our inability to distinguish between radiative forcing and radiative feedback in our observations.”
For this experiment, the UAHuntsville team used surface temperature data gathered by the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Great Britain. The radiant
energy data was collected by the Clouds and Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) instruments aboard NASA’s Terra satellite.
The six climate models were chosen from those used by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The UAHuntsville team used the
three models programmed using the greatest sensitivity to radiative forcing and the three that programmed in the least sensitivity.
See paper here.
By Dr. Tim Ball, Climate Change Dispatch
The temperature graph dubbed the “hockey stick” (HS) was designed to rewrite history by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) because it contradicted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claim the 20th century was the warmest ever. As Lord Monckton explains, “Dr. McIntyre’s account of the systematically dishonest manner in which the “hockey-stick” graph falsely showing that today’s temperatures are warmer than those that prevailed during the medieval climate optimum was fabricated in 1998/9, adopted as the poster-child of climate panic by the IPCC in its 2001 climate assessment, and then retained in its 2007 assessment report despite having been demolished in the scientific literature.” It did more damage than generally discussed.
A major problem and serious limitation in climate science is the amount and nature of data. Temperature measures come from a variety of sources so creating meaningful continuous records is very difficult. The Hockey Stick fiasco underlined this, but what they did possibly deters many from taking up the problem. In his autobiography Hubert Lamb said he founded the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in 1972 because, “it was clear that the first and greatest need was to establish the facts of the past record of the natural climate in times before any side effects of human activities could well be important.”” He was right and nobody did more to reconstruct the past. Ironically, his graph with the MWP in the first two IPCC Reports triggered the HS. Due to misplaced funding for data collection and corrupted research, it is worse now.
Temperature data comes in two forms; direct instrumental measurement or a secondary indicator known as a proxy temperature. Proxies are used by paleoclimatologists and include ice cores, tree rings, lake sediments (varves), pollen counts, or anything that results from temperature or precipitation changes.
Another challenge in obtaining measures of temperature is the problem of reconstructing a continuous temperature record. Traditionally, climate has recognized three periods.
Most recent is the instrumental (secular) period that some claim covers 150 years, but in reality is inadequate for the entire period. Temperatures are measured by half a degree Celsius so any other temperature number is a statistic. Accuracy is also a problem. CRU Director Phil Jones claimed an increase of 0.6C in the last 130 years, but with an error range of plus/minus 0.2C.
Historic records cover approximately 3000 years. They include everything from information on the walls of Pharaohs tombs to crop reports such as the remarkable wine harvest record used in Times of Feast, Times of Famine by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie or the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) records I used to reconstruct almost 300 years. At best accuracy of 1C is possible.
This is the largest sector covering most of the Earth’s history and includes proxy indicators from biologic and geologic sources. Levels of accuracy decrease and the error factor increases going back in time. Even if you get a reasonable temperature estimate you must have an accurate date. Good materials and skilled hands can yield ages that are certain to within 1 percent, even in rocks only 10,000 years old, in which quantities of 40Ar are vanishingly small. But 1 percent of 1 million years is 10,000 years and we have emerged from an Ice Age in that time. Even radiocarbon dating used for dates over 65,000 years, have a relatively wide error factor.
Some proxies cross these boundaries and are therefore valuable. Tree rings are one of these and provide a transition across all three. Particularly appealing are Bristlecone Pines because the oldest is 4,789, but they were problematic because growth
is primarily controlled by precipitation. The hockey stick gang assumed annual growth rings were due to temperature when most are about precipitation levels. I was involved in early work to make links. Dendroclimatologist Joel Guiot used the HBC temperature record I created for Churchill, Canada in his 1986 paper. His objective was to create a regression formula by comparing the temperature record with tree rings for the modern record, then use it to provide temperature records from past tree rings. He detected an 18.6 and 22-year cycle. The problem is I also detected a 22 year cycle but in the precipitation pattern. This matched with evidence from other sources, especially other tree ring records.
Guiot’s attempt to create a regression formula against the modern instrumental record has promise for the right variables. The Hockey Stick people did it differently they tacked the modern temperature record on to the tree ring record. In his great book, The Hockey Stick Illusion A.W. Montford says, “The inclusion of the instrumental record was instantly controversial, with global warming skeptics accusing Mann of having spliced two entirely different data sets.’ Mann said they were not spliced but overlaid. The leaked email from Phil Jones to Ray Bradley on 16 November 1999 to Ray Bradley, revealed the overlay was the now infamous “hide the decline” or “Mike’s trick”. Tree ring data showed decline in the 20th century so the addition from Jones’ temperature record solved the problem. It was visually effective providing the sharp up turn of the hockey stick blade. Leaked emails were sensational but more telling were the leaked computer codes. They show how the computer was programmed to amend any undesirable trend.
Billions were wasted on climate research to prove the AGW hypothesis, including those used to create the hockey stick. Understandably politicians angered by misuse of funding to create deceptive science are canceling the grants. Researchers will be loathe to pursue similar valuable research and unlikely to get funding. It is minor collateral damage compared to the energy policies built around the false science, but damage to progress in understanding climate nonetheless.