By Lubos Motl, The Reference Frame

The Czech media just informed the nation about another study that rules out the industrial activity as the cause of the bulk of the 20th century climate change.

Warming is not related to industrial activity, a study shows (novinky.cz)

That’s a pretty clear title, isn’t it?

You may find it even more remarkable if I tell you that novinky.cz is a top left-wing news server on the Czech Internet - with loose institutional links to Právo, the newspapers that used to belong to the Communist Party - and that the story above is the “story of the day” on the server’s main page.

If you want to have an idea about the discussion under the article, the most favorably rated comment (Goodvotes - Badvotes = +200 within an hour) was written by Mr Martin Polacek. It says: “So at the end, it turns out that our president was right. Who will apologize to him for all the mockery?”

A vast majority of the other comments are anti-AGW, too. The readers point out that the Goreo-Bursík green industrial complex (Bursík is the most famous among the ex-chairmen of the Czech Green Party that was just eliminated from the Parliament) is highly profitable so these folks are unlikely to make a U-turn anytime soon.

Another reader mentions that it’s being confirmed that Mr Bursík and his biomass (a nickname for Ms Katerina Jacques, a vice-chairwoman of the Green Party who didn’t know what biomass was on a TV show - she recommended him to burn carrots and conjectured that biomass is always just a gas - and who has produced a baby with Mr Bursík) are ordinary green amateurs.

The story is based on an article,

Kononov, Friedrich, Böttger: Regional Summer Temperature Reconstruction in the Khibiny Low Mountains (Kola Peninsula, NW Russia) by Means of Tree-ring Width during the Last Four Centuries,

previously mentioned at Climate Audit, Science Centric, and Science Daily. See

Signs of reversal of Arctic cooling in some areas (press release)

A tree-ring reconstruction of the summer temperatures at the Kola peninsula - near Murmansk and the Arctic (Polar) Circle - by a German-Russian team has shown diverse changes of the Arctic temperatures in a recent century or so. The period 1630-1840 has crystallized as a Little Ice Age. The years 1935-1955 turned out to be the warmest ones while the years prior to 1990 were cooler than those around 1870. Warming returned after 1990.

Northern lights as seen from Kola.

The media mention that the results clash against the theories of anthropogenic climate change that hypothesize a significant industrial influence on the climate and that the solar activity seems to be more tightly correlated with the observed Arctic temperatures. The authors summarize this finding in the last sentence of the abstract:

The good coherence of multi-decadal to secular trends of our reconstruction and series of observed solar activity indicate that solar activity may have been one major driving factor of past climate on Kola Peninsula.

Well, it’s nice but I think that the readers - and the journalists - overestimate the importance of this single particular scientific article in Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research. The exchange kind of shows that many people are gullible. Still, it’s somewhat refreshing when simplified conclusions are also being presented on the “other side”. And be sure that the global warming orthodoxy is indefensible among most Czechs.

After all, President Klaus met the new Minister of Environment, Mr Drobil, a few days ago. They agreed about the environmental issues and they plan to discuss the matters on a regular basis.

I would still prefer the situation in which journalists and readers would actually be both able and willing to assign a reasonable degree of importance to any argument and any paper about the climate - and many other things. Read more here.

Environmental Policy Examiner, Thomas Fuller

Judith Curry, who has been kind enough to give interviews here before, has now crossed the line in the minds of the climate hysterics who have polluted this discussion with invective and hatred for so long.

Her crime has been to read a book. Really. The book is The Hockey Stick Illusion by Andrew Montford, who blogs under the nom de guerre (it’s a war now...) of Bishop Hill. The book, which reads like a detective thriller (it has been described as Stieg Larssen without the lesbian sex, which is just about the best one-line review in history), chronicles the exposure of Michael Mann’s famous Hockey Stick chart as irretrievably flawed.

Curry will pay--she’s already paying, in fact. She is now being described as a skeptic, a denialist, someone who has gone over to the Dark Side. Tim Lambert, who runs a blog that is arguably the worst of the climate hysteria genre, has a post up on his site devoted to criticism of Curry. The comments there are summed up by this: “Her comments at RC and CP do not read like those of a scientist, or even of a rational person. They read like those of the typical denialist.”

Now get this straight. Curry is not pronouncing that Montford’s book is the definitive source. She does not endorse the book. (I do, but I’m not a respected climate scientist...) Curry’s crime--what makes here a ‘denialist’ and ‘skeptic’ and ‘irrational’--is to say that people should read the book to get an understanding of what happened, how it happened and why it’s important.

Judith Curry actually had to say that people should read a book. That’s because some of the hysterics published phony studies saying it was not necessary to read a book to understand why they were right and their opponents were wrong. I am not making that up. Everybody from Brian Angliss to Michael Tobis is inventing reasons why they don’t need to read criticism of the position they support--that Michael Mann is a saint and the Hockey Stick chart is a holy relic.

There is no better vignette explaining the intellectual dishonesty of the hysterical position, championed by Joe Romm and Tim Lambert, supported by Real Climate, Tamino and Michael Tobis, and egged on from the sidelines by Eli Rabett and countless commenters.

Montford’s book shows how Steve McIntrye identified the errors in sample selection and analysis that made the Hockey Stick chart untrustworthy, and the efforts Michael Mann and his colleages went to to hide the defects of their study (which led to Climategate, which Montford covers at the end of his book).

Montford’s book is good. Curry’s recommendation to the community that they read it is a very good recommendation. I have seen too many defenses of the consensus and attacks on its opponents that showed an appalling ignorance of what happened to think otherwise.

Judith Curry is a respected climate scientist (who does not dispute the theory or existence of climate change due to human emissions of CO2). She holds respectable positions and has published well-respected papers in the literature.

She’s getting dragged through the mud by political hacks for the crime of telling these hacks that they should read what exactly their opponents are saying.

As I said above, there is no episode in all the climate wars that shows more clearly the cheap partisan political nature and moral bankruptcy of hacks like Joe Romm, Real Climate, Tim Lambert, Tamino and Eli Rabett. The question now is will Curry get burnt at the stake professionally and personally before people say ‘that’s enough’?

A new study by University of Guelph (Canada) Professor Ross McKitrick (see here) shows that the temperature data upon which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) relied in its Endangerment Finding has significant flaws and uncertainties that undermine that Finding.

Since the EPA Endangerment Finding is the basis for far-reaching EPA greenhouse gas (GHG) regulation, the McKitrick study also undermines EPA’s decision to regulate. The study also undermines confidence as to whether any particular year or decade is the warmest “on record.”

EPAs Endangerment Finding to a large extent was based on EPA’s analysis of 20th century temperature records. According to EPA, these records show a warming trend in the latter three decades of the century of fractions of a degree Fahrenheit per decade. EPA believes this trend is of sufficient enough magnitude as to necessarily be caused by human emissions of GHGs. But Professor McKitrick reveals a number of significant problems in the underlying data sets. Any of these problems introduce a margin of error that is comparable to, if not greater than, the very trend that EPA perceives and therefore may eliminate or significantly lessen the trend on which EPA relies.

Professor McKitrick reviews how both land and sea surface temperature records were created for the 20th century. He finds that the methodology by which temperatures were determined and the geographic regions covered have changed substantially over the years, with the result that different records have essentially been spliced together to create a single, continuous global record.

The fact that different types of records have had to be combined in an attempt to create a single record is not surprising because, historically, land-based temperature monitors and the methods used to measure sea surface temperatures were not designed as part of a systematic and standardized program to produce comparable data that could be used to produce a long-term global climatic record. They were designed instead to produce reasonably accurate local data.

The combination of these different data sets requires data adjustments so that the data “it” with each other. These adjustments are based on uncertain assumptions that introduce a high margin of error in the overall record.

The temperature trend for the last three decades of the 20th century, which EPA says was of such magnitude as to be unequivocally caused by human-emitted GHGs, was just 0.30F per decade. This cmpares with warming rates of 0.25F per decade during a number of 30-year periods spanning the 1910s to the 1940s, which EPA says were not caused by human-emitted GHGs. Thus, temperature increases of a mere 0.05F per decade are given decisive weight by EPA in concluding that
anthropogenic GHGs caused warming during the 20th century. Professor McKitrick, however, shows that the uncertainties in the data undermine confidence in the accuracy of temperature differences this small and therefore the conclusions that EPA reaches.

Based on the McKitrick study, Peabody Energy Company has today filed a petition (see here) with EPA under the Information Quality Act (IQA) in which it asks EPA to correct the temperature records on which the Endangerment Finding is based and to reconsider its GHG regulations. The IQA requires agencies to correct information that it uses for regulation.