Inconstant as the Weather

If you don't like the weather in South Dakota, just wait a bit; it will change. Apparently much the same is true about our President. Originally the President had planned to attend the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change. Then the Administration said he would not be attending. Then he announced that he would show up, on December 9^th. Now we learn that plans have been changed. President Obama will indeed grace the Danes with his presence, but on December 18^th. One wonders how many times he met, for how long, with how may advisers, before his Copenhagen attendance policy was finalized. If it is indeed finalized. With thirteen days to go, I figure he can change his mind about three more times.

The Hyde Park Hamlet is, as another Shakespearian character put it, inconstant as the moon. He is not entirely to blame, however, for his difficulties when it comes to climate change policy. A policy consists of a purpose and a means to achieve that purpose. The international community is not very good at making collective policy. No one but Iran wants Iran to get nuclear weapons, but getting Russia and China to agree on a common policy to prevent that looks hopeless.

On climate change, all the major nations seem to agree that global warming is a problem and that we should all do something about it. But no one is willing to do anything that would make a difference. For that reason, the Copenhagen Conference will produce no treaty, regardless of whether or on what day the President shows up.

I have been writing and blogging about global warming for several years. My original position was this:

1. The Earth has been warming for some time.

2. It is very likely that human activity is contributing to that warming.

3. It is very difficult to tell what consequences will follow from continued warming, for human beings or for the environment generally.

4. Economic development in China and India will overwhelm any reductions in greenhouse gases that the developed world could possibly achieve.

5. The developed world is not in fact going to voluntarily achieve any significant reduction in greenhouse emissions, because that would mean hobbling their own economies.

6. The only reasonable policy is to accept that global warming is happening and plan for it.

Propositions 3-5 have stood up very well. As for propositions 1 and 2, I trusted the scientists and just right now that trust has been greatly compromised. Consider this news, from the National Post:

Millions of measurements, global coverage, consistently rising temperatures, case closed: The Earth is warming. Except for one problem. CRU's average temperature data doesn't jibe with that of Vincent Courtillot, a French geo-magneticist, director of the Institut de Physique du Globe in Paris, and a former scientific advisor to the French Cabinet. Last year he and three colleagues plotted an average temperature chart for Europe that shows a surprisingly different trend. Aside from a very cold spell in 1940, temperatures were flat for most of the 20th century, showing no warming while fossil fuel use grew. Then in 1987 they shot up by about 1 C and have not shown any warming since. This pattern cannot be explained by rising carbon dioxide concentrations, unless some critical threshold was reached in 1987; nor can it be explained by climate models.

If this were ordinary science, it would be back to the drawing board. But it is politicized science, where retreat is now allowed. The global warming meme is as basket case. Anyone who cares about these things needs to go back to formula on the whole business. As for the President, neither attending nor non-attending will do any good.

Comments

[Yeti]

- Top NASA Climate Scientist: Copenhagen Must Fail... Researcher: NASA hiding climate data...
- NASA’s Latest Discovery: SUN HEATS THE EARTH (American Thincker, June 05, 2009) - Robert Calahan at NASA’s Goddard Space Center could be in big trouble -- for telling the truth. Here is a headline for an article in the Daily Tech: "NASA Study Acknowledges Solar Cycle, Not Man, Responsible for Past Warming"... World's Largest Science Group Rejecting Man-Made Climate Fears...
- PENTAGON: GLOBAL WARMING might suddenly trigger a massive GLOBAL COOLING... THE PENTAGON WARNS CLIMATE CHANGE WILL BRING GLOBAL CATASTROPHE... Now the PENTAGON TELLS BUSH (Guardian.co.uk., 22 February 2004): climate change will destroy us... BRITAIN WILL BE 'SIBERIAN' in less than 20 years:
http://cristiannegureanu.blogspot.com/2009/12/top-nasa-climate-scientist-copenhagen.html

[denature]

I’ll restrict myself to the pull quote as it relates to points 1 and 2.

The pretense that CRU is solely responsible for the established consensus on global warming is false. Multiple other groups reached confirming conclusions and the data is available.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/
As for CRU, most of their data is also available, but the problem is with data obtained from other organizations of which they pledged not to release to third parties. The blame and requests should be directed toward these parties rather than CRU.

You fail to show why the French guy should accepted compelling, and it doesn’t come across as a rational analysis of the issue. The climate community uses global data. Your pull quote uses data from Europe, and hand-picked from tens of stations at that. To falsify global warming, it is necessary to present global data.

If you want to restrict yourself to data just from Europe, you can find the relevant graphs in the IPCC report. That report shows a rise in Europe in the eighties as does the trendline for the French group. This begs the question as to what the big difference is in the data. In simulations with anthropogenic influences the data from the IPCC fits, in simulations ignoring CO2 the data doesn’t’ fit. If you examine discussions concerning the French groups machinations attempting to explain a cause other than CO2 to explain their own data, you would find them lacking.

In attempts to give the magnetic field responsibility for climate they ignore fundamental principles of physics. This is among multiple other problems.
http://www.realclimate.org/images/BardDelaygue.pdf
Or for a slightly less technical presentation see
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/les-chevaliers-de-l%E2%80%99ordre-de-la-terre-plate-part-ii-courtillots-geomagnetic-excursion/

[George Mason]

denature this can be distilled down to a simple question. If the people in the Global Warming Business are so certain of their science why are they distorting, destroying and withholding data? For 2 years NASA (read that James Hanson) has been fighting an FOIA request to produce their files on global warming. Why? This is weather not national security. It was an FOI request that got the shredders fired up in East Anglia, Penn State and Michigan. Please tell us what would cause serious scientists to go into panic cover-up mode if there is no question left about what they are promoting? Al Gore has beem telling the world that "the
science is settled" for ten years. That was a lie 10 years ago it is still a lie today. The members of the Church of Global Warming never learned that in science you publish all your data and accept the results whether your hypothesis proves out or not. After the great East Anglia E-mail dump perhaps we will witness a more open conversation.

[Springy]

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/03/researcher-says-nasa-hiding-climate-data/
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=2104

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=aIe9swvOqwIY

These and many more stories continue to show fraudulent data, inconsistent data collection, mishandling of data, misreporting of results, and the outright refusal to allow independent review of material supporting climate change.
The climate science is funded by groups interested in the big money shell game of carbon credits. And the pasties in the press continue to report all the claims and none of the retractions. A fine example is the total blackout of main stream media coverage of the “Climategate Email Scandal”.

[the bison know]

Climate drama climax looks elusive in Copenhagen……………………………By CHARLES J. HANLEY and JAN M. OLSEN………………………………..The Associated Press…Saturday, December 5, 2009…..Says former U.S. climate negotiator Eileen Claussen, now with the Pew Center on Global Climate Change:…"I think the most important thing we can do here is get started in the most ambitious way we can."……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….NEW FLASH, Eileen!.......The CRU has already gotten started in the most ambitious way they could. Their e-mails make it clear the most ambitious way is to manufacture an AGW catastrophe that we must pour billions into – right now. Apparently millions in grant money isn’t enough. Oh, and George and the Goricle want to be carbon billionaires before they die.

[William]

To a non-scientist following this issue, a couple of things are obvious:

1. Prominent scientists proposing the most extreme effects and measures to combat AGW / Global Climate Change are guilty of suppressing data and evidence that mitigates their alarmism and purposefully use their positions to wage professional attacks on their critics.

2. The most extreme "solutions" to the hypothesized threat are nothing more than political cover to increase centralized government and suppress freedom around the world.

As for dependence on "RealClimate.Org" as authoritative and unbiased reference, I suggest following this link.
http://reallyrealclimate.blogspot.com/

An excellent article, perhaps summarizing where the debate is at today and how "Climategate" will affect it is here.
"The distinction between utterly politicized scientists such as Jones, Mann, and NASA's James Hansen, and other more sober scientists has been lost on the media and climate campaigners for a long time now, and as a result, the CRUtape letters will cast a shadow on the entire field. There is no doubt plenty more of this kind of corruption in other hotbeds of climate science, but there are also a lot of unbiased scientists trying to do important and valuable work. Climate alarmists and their media cheerleaders are fond of warning about "tipping points" to disaster, but ironically this episode may represent a tipping point against the alarmists. The biggest hazard to serious climate science all along was not so much contrarian arguments from skeptics, but rather the damage that the hyperbole of the environmental community would inflict on their own cause."
Scientists Behaving Badly
A corrupt cabal of global warming alarmists are exposed by a massive document leak.
by Steven F. Hayward
http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/017/300ubchn.asp

[KB]

denature: A quick response before I post again on this topic: the question is not whether there are other sources for temperature records. The question is what we would see if we had a lot of confidential emails from those sources. I am guessing that a lot of deleting has been going on in recent weeks.

Second, the CRU may have legitimate reasons for refusing to release the data requested. But the reason you mention is only one of the stories issued to explain the refusal. There is also the "we lost the data when we moved" story. The only thing worse that no alibi is two. Just imagine for a moment that the shoe was on the other foot, and a group of scientists claiming to have refuted AGW was telling these kinds of stories. Would you buy it for a moment? This doesn't pass the smell test.

[denature]

re: George Mason and Springy

Remind me again how this massive conspiracy works?

I already posted how most of the data is freely available. Is this true or not? The request for information from NASA seems to be a hack job. Chris Horner works for think tanks receiving Exxon money. He is an advocate with the sole purpose to make it seem there is more doubt regarding global warming than actually exists. As I pointed out previously and your links confirm, it is not actually data he is requesting since that is already available. Outside of lying about what NASA actually claimed was the warmest year in the lower 48 states, answers to all of the questions posed in the linked articles can actually be readily found on the NASA website.

None of the minor corrections that NASA has made periodically due to software errors and the like altered the trendline that global temperatures have been steadily increasing and sea ice steadily declining. Do almost all of the highest global temps recorded occur in recent history or not? That NASA corrects errors, however minor, when they are discovered and reports this and the reasons why on their website is empirical evidence that they are not participating in a cover up. Would you expect the same behavior from Chris Horner? I don’t recall him issuing a correction when he claimed RealClimate was funded by George Soros.

And how does the National Academy of Science figure in to this shell game of carbon credits? If you want mainstream science coverage of the swifthacking see these responses:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7273/full/462545a.html
http://www.ametsoc.org/policy/climatechangeclarify.html

I would agree somewhat on big media coverage. They should be asking questions like who did the illegal hacking, how did they do it, who paid for it, and what was their motivation?

[denature]

Re William

Tell me what evidence was suppressed and its impact.

Tell me what criticisms were made that were unfounded.

And how exactly does taking action on an environmental issue lead to suppression of freedom? I assume the same was true with lead and acid rain and the ozone hole?

I’m not sure what your issue is with realclimate. The first link was to a repository of publicly available data. The second was to an archive of a comment published in a journal in response to the work done by the French group mentioned in the original post. Neither of these are works created by the realclimate website. The third link was a discussion of the journal comment, which I posted since I thought it might be more accessible to the lay audience. How exactly is a Colorado blog supposed to be taken more seriously than one by scientists discussing the science? But rather than disparage realclimate as a website it might be more relevant for you to just point out exactly how did the French group not screw up their data analysis?

I’m iffy on how the Weekly Standard qualifies as an excellent article. As to the content, certainly there are lots of unbiased scientists in the field. In a poll of working climate scientists, well over 90% accept that global warming is real and largely due to the activities of man. Their statement that temps have stopped rising is false. The AP recently provided raw data to several statisticians blind. They failed to find any compelling evidence of a recent reversal of global warming. I do agree with their conclusions that the “emails do not in and of themselves reveal that catastrophic climate change scenarios are a hoax or without any foundation.” Much of the points in the rest of the article I’ve dealt with above.

[denature]

Re KB

The question is what we would see in e-mails? Really? It would probably be much like CRU. A bunch of nothing, some violation of privacy like examples of people talking about surgeries, cancer, getting married etc. What you won’t find is people talking about deliberately fudging the data to mislead, or a conspiracy. Nothing in CRU e-mails found that. Of the three or so being cited out of 3000 since 1996, none discusses any issue of science that isn’t already in the public consciousness of the climate community, or hasn’t already been discussed on denialist blogs previously.

But if you really want to see those e-mails, I would like to see the ones from the Center for a Constructive Tomorrow, the American Enterprise Institute, the Media Research Center, the Cato Institute, the Heartland Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the National Center for Policy Analysis, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. What was your position when Palin’s e-mail got hacked?

As for you “lost the data” claim. Again is this new information from the e-mail hacking, or was this information already out there at the times of establishing the strong scientific consensus? They threw out raw data, which was not theirs, and was stored on magnetic tape and paper when they moved in the eighties. This was not wise, but it was before the time of Jones, which brings into question his role as leader of the climate cabal. The transformed data does still exist, and the point is moot since due to agreements signed with the reporting organizations, they weren’t allowed to release the data to third parties anyway. The issue is with the third parties not CRU. And this is just a small percent of the data. Most is available. Is it that CRU got better at faking data than they were before? Could they not buy off a few reporting stations so they silenced them, yet these stations who generated the data won’t speak out?

And data from multiple other parties confirmed their analysis. What does it mean that this data is available? Just that they were better at faking the millions of data points so they wouldn’t be caught if the data were released? You need to follow through with a smell test. Innuendo isn’t enough.

[George Mason]

Denature my friend; The only global warming we've experienced this week is the heat from your responses. "What evidence has been suppressed?" is of course the question so many people are now asking. And of course why was it so important to suppress it? That is what the e-mails have finally brought to the fore as far as the general public is concerned. What ever are they hiding? Under these current circumstances the questioning of any ones credibility by a member of the cult of global warming brings peels of laughter. Publish all the data, those of us with open minds can be persuaded. Dribs and drabs of anecdotal data with chicken little proclamations only make us more skeptical. As the snow flies and the temperature falls below zero this week we can be assured that the Church of Global Warming will proclaim it to be sunny with a low of 90.

[KB]

denature: if there are indeed other email sets out there for other climate data sources, as you suggest, then AGW is finished as a force for policy change. Your reference to "the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute," (I include here only those organizations I know something about) weakens your case. These are all explicitly political organizations. They are supposed to be trying to do politics rather than science.

The whole point of the peer review process is to make sure that the science we have is honest science. If we are going to base our policies on what the scientists tell us, we have to have confidence that they will tell us what the science says even if it conflicts with their own political and theoretical biases. The CRU emails undermined that confidence. I admire your heroic attempts to explain it all away, but I still think that such attempts are just digging a deeper hole.

[denature]

re: George Mason

Nothing in the e-mails shows data were faked. Nothing in the e-mails shows data were suppressed. Nothing in the e-mails show data were manipulated to deceive. Papers with the data are published. The methods are described.

A paper an e-mailer found lacking was published. It got published by finding a friendly editor and bypassing peer review. Several other editors resigned in protest. The publisher admitted mistakes were made. The controversy was in the popular press. How does the existence of a bad published paper show suppression of data?

One e-mailer expressed feelings that two papers shouldn’t be in the IPCC report. Guess what? He doesn't get to decide. Those papers were discussed in the IPCC report. How does a body responsible for reviewing the scientific understanding of global warming discussing a paper that at least one member didn’t think should be discussed imply that there is a conspiracy to hide dissenting views?

How can it be implied that there is a conspiracy to hide data, yet only two or three e-mailers are used as evidence?

A minimum requirement to determine if more investigation is needed would be to show that there is something implied in the e-mails of a significant coverup. Thus far, several scientific bodies and a top journal have stated that the e-mails do nothing to warrant a belief that research is flawed or faked. There is nothing there.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nnVQ2fROOg&feature=player_embedded

Data hasn’t been put out in dribels. I posted data sources above. There is also the empirical—higher seas, less ice, Spring starting earlier etc.
What scientist said that the existence of snow or local weather means that global warming doesn’t exist? If that were the case, I would have made a big deal out of the warm November.

[denature]

Re: KB

“if there are indeed other email sets out there for other climate data sources, as you suggest, then AGW is finished as a force for policy change.”

How so? Nothing in the e-mails presented show or imply anything that would falsify global warming.

“These are all explicitly political organizations. They are supposed to be trying to do politics rather than science.”

Yes they are. And they are given a free hand to manipulate and distort to their hearts content. They are free to frame the message. And they are free to take big oil money. And never issue a correction. Who do you think started the meme that scientists say what they want to due to some secret ill-defined profit scheme? Who has been trying to falsely imply there is more disagreement among scientists than actually exists? Wouldn’t you want to see their internal e-mails? If you prefer honest science to establish public policy, you shouldn’t accept a replay of the tobacco strategy.

“The whole point of the peer review process is to make sure that the science we have is honest science.”

And nothing in the e-mails shows that the peer review system was successfully broken by those in the climate science community who accept the consensus. There are thousands working in the field. An analysis of published papers show an overwhelming acceptance of the evidence that global warming exists and is largely because of man’s influence. Polls of scientists in the field show the same. Governing bodies of many science organizations have put out statements reflecting agreement that the science is strong. National Academies of many countries have done the same. Nature maintains it was honest science. As does the American Meteorological Society. As does the IPCC. But we should give the edge to the conclusions from political think tanks?

The IPCC report is a conservative document. Hansen for one likely finds the IPCC conclusions too timid. But he doesn’t control the process. Neither do the people in the e-mail. Neither do the people in the thousands of e-mails that didn’t make the cut. If confidence has been eroded in the conclusions of the IPCC document, it is because of political spin, not because climate scientists don’t take their jobs seriously. BTW, what was your position when the last administration took steps to prevent Hansen from accepting interview requests?

It is true that several results since the last IPCC report fall on the high side of their projections, and new information (since anything in the reported hacked e-mails) has indicated several indicators are worse than previously thought.
http://www.copenhagendiagnosis.com/executive_summary.html

[William]

Denature,

The bottom line is that the validity of the data for climate change and the science based on it are now in question, due to the manipulative behavior and unethical conduct by some of its most influential supporters.

Will this have a serious effect on the debate regarding the validity of the science and what mankind's response to its threat should be?

Yes, very much so.