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Climate Change

Roanman For President ... the second plank in our platform

Submitted by Roanman on Tue, 11/27/2012 - 09:14

 

Our second plank offers up our thinking on "Climate Change" which having not sold all that well under it's original name, "Global Warming" and many of it's chief promoters having been discredited as haters, cowards, shameless profiteers and crazed sex poodles it has now been repackaged with a new name, new marketing and a new catastrophe ... Hurricane Sandy.

To begin with, the earth has been heating up lately ..... probably.

 

 

If you look at the chart above and notice the orange lines at the right end.  Those lines represent those years where temperatures were actually measured using instruments that record real temperatures.  

Take note of the word "Reconstructed" in the key at the upper left hand corner.

Among the problems with calculating "Climate Change" is that word "Reconstructed" as in the year 1000 AD there were almost no thermometers hanging outside the conning tower at your local airport recording daily temperatures.

For the better part of 1900 years out of a 2000 year ... ish ... chart, we're calculating average temperatures from tree rings and ice cores ..... among other things.

This bares repeating ..... tree rings and ice cores.

The problems in data collection are endless as even recently, examples of blatant stupidity and/or pure fraud have been detected in the numbers.

Here are just two physical examples.

By way of explanation for what you're about to look at here, the refrigeration unit and air conditioners blow cold air into the building and exhaust the hot air out ..... pretty much directly at the temperature sensor/thermometer.

Click on either photo below for more examples of sensor placements which are likely serving to help cook the books.

Get it? ..... Cook? ... the books?

 

 

 

I can't crunch the numbers on the research but there are enough complaints about the treatment of the numbers from people who can, not to mention enough assurances from a raft of people who for damn sure can't, to make my bullshit detector swing wildly.

Read this Richard Muller paper from 2003, it's a little long but it's not very tough reading.

Or you can take my word for it as I did read it because, while it is a little long it's not very tough reading.

There is a goodly amount of political nonsense and blatant profiteering being sold as "Science".

Understand something here, all of this is before you even begin to consider possible causes.

Which brings us to our first position.

 

 

The Moon is also warming up by the way.

Yeah, yeah that's only a 4 year chart, we're just having a little fun pretending to be Progressives.

NASA also thinks that Mars is warming up along with maybe Jupiter and Triton, but who the hell knows.

They're studying it because ..... that's what scientists do.

Finally, having researched and pondered this issue to the fullness of our not inconsiderable capabilities we arrive at the following conclusion.

Having been both warm and cold, it is our strongly held opinion that ...

 

 

What happened to the climate refugees?

Submitted by Roanman on Sat, 04/23/2011 - 07:27

 

Last week, Gavin Atkins published the following piece at AsianCorrespondent.com.

As usual, clicking on the map will take you to the entire piece.

 

What happened to the climate refugees?

By Gavin Atkins Apr 11, 2011  

In 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme predicted that climate change would create 50 million climate refugees by 2010. These people, it was said, would flee a range of disasters including sea level rise, increases in the numbers and severity of hurricanes, and disruption to food production.

The UNEP even provided a handy map. The map shows us the places most at risk including the very sensitive low lying islands of the Pacific and Caribbean.

 

 

  It so happens that just a few of these islands and other places most at risk have since had censuses, so it should be possible for us now to get some idea of the devastating impact climate change is having on their populations. Let’s have a look at the evidence: 

Bahamas:

Nassau, The Bahamas – The 2010 national statistics recorded that the population growth increased to 353,658 persons in The Bahamas.  The population change figure increased by 50,047 persons during the last 10 years.

 St Lucia:

The island-nation of Saint Lucia recorded an overall household population increase of 5 percent from May 2001 to May 2010 based on estimates derived from a complete enumeration of the population of Saint Lucia during the conduct of the recently completed 2010 Population and Housing Census.

 Seychelles:

Population 2002, 81755

Population 2010, 88311

 Solomon Islands:

The latest Solomon Islands population has surpassed half a million – that’s according to the latest census results.

It’s been a decade since the last census report, and in that time the population has leaped 100-thousand.

 

That's when it gets interesting.

Even though by rights, the story belongs to Mr. Atkins, we'll let Anthony Watts of Watts Up With That and The Daily Caller bring it home.

 

The UN ‘disappears’ 50 million climate refugees, then botches the cover-up 

 

Oh boy, government idiocy at its finest. Not only is the original claim bogus, the attempts to disappear it are hilariously inept. Apparently, they’ve never heard of Google Cache at the UN. Rather than simply saying “we were wrong,” they’ve now brought even more distrust onto the UN.

Back on April 11th, Gavin Atkins of Asian Correspondent asked this simple question: What happened to the climate refugees?

It is a valid question, and he backs it up with census numbers.

After Asian Correspondent posted the story on April 11th, it was picked up by news outlets around the world, such as Investor News and American Spectator, and was referred to in yesterday’s Australian newspaper and even got a mention on Fox News.

Since that story appeared, the “handy map” Atkins cites in his original story seems to be gone down the memory hole. This is what you get now; note my yellow highlight:

 



Only one small problem there, UN people: a little annoyance called Google Cache, which has that page archived.

Google Cache pulls up the page that had been removed, with the “50 million refugees” title, but the map is missing.

Fear not, dear readers, because as astoundingly smart as those UN people think they are, they forgot one very important yet tiny detail. The map links to a hi-resolution version of the “climate refugee map,” and if you delete the page above and the map it contains, you also have to delete the hi-res image it links to.

Oops.

I’m always happy to help the UN in times of “need,” so I’ve recovered it and saved it, because that image link is likely to go down the memory hole on Monday.

 And there you have it, folks, another bogus climate claim rubbished by reality, followed by an inept cover-up attempt.

Thanks to the reality of census numbers, followed by the UN’s handling of this, we can now safely say that the claim of “climate refugees” is total fantasy. Be sure to leave comments on any website that makes this claim, and link to this and the Asian Correspondent website.

 Kudos to Gavin Atkins for asking this simple question after six years of this fantasy being used to push an agenda.

 

I think that just about covers it.

Except for just one more thing.

 

 

 

 

WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!

Submitted by Roanman on Wed, 02/09/2011 - 19:25

 

Just kidding.

But, now that I have your attention.

This story has been around for a couple of years or more, this is the first time I've seen it in what I consider to be a mainstream forum, The Salem News.

I stumbled across the link at my friend Richard Nolle's closed facebook group NolleAstro.

As always, click the photo to link up to the entire story.

Fascinating stuff, and a much easier read than any I'd seen previously, easily worth the 10 minutes.

Be smarter than all your friends.

 

Magnetic Polar Shifts Causing Massive Global Superstorms

Superstorms can also cause certain societies, cultures or whole countries to collapse. Others may go to war with each other.

(CHICAGO) - NASA has been warning about it…scientific papers have been written about it…geologists have seen its traces in rock strata and ice core samples… 

Now "it" is here: an unstoppable magnetic pole shift that has sped up and is causing life-threatening havoc with the world's weather.

Forget about global warming—man-made or natural—what drives planetary weather patterns is the climate and what drives the climate is the sun's magnetosphere and its electromagnetic interaction with a planet's own magnetic field.

When the field shifts, when it fluctuates, when it goes into flux and begins to become unstable anything can happen. And what normally happens is that all hell breaks loose.

Magnetic polar shifts have occurred many times in Earth's history. It's happening again now to every planet in the solar system including Earth.

The magnetic field drives weather to a significant degree and when that field starts migrating superstorms start erupting.

 

 

Reading on a Sunday Morning

Submitted by Roanman on Mon, 11/08/2010 - 13:51

 

From the Telegraph.co.uk.

Click the photo below for the entire piece.

 

Climate change game launched

An educational computer game in which users have to save the world from climate change offers an interesting solution – decide the problem is overpopulation and design a virus to kill millions.

 

Ya know what I find to be most interesting in all of this?

The fact that you never hear about any of the Greens calling for a suicide pact amongst themselves.

Benefits would accrue from a minor decline in the world's population, a disproportionate decline in methane emissions as these gas bags expire, and finally their own pain would end.

It would be a classic win-win solution.

 

The Cardinal Cross of 2010, July 31, 2010

Submitted by Roanman on Sat, 07/31/2010 - 07:10

 

The following was taken from a piece at globalphysics.com titled The Global Cross of Julya and August (evidently, the editing at globalphysics is exactly as lame as it is at JustThinking)

I think it offers some insight into that aspect of astrology that promotes the most skepticism, if not outright scorn.

Aspect ..... get it?

That being the tendency on the part of Astrology's practitioners and true believers to just flat out cram an interpretation for a particular chart into their own, personal world view ........... after the fact.

In fairness to Astrology, the same can be said of climate science.

Or at least that which passes for climate science as practiced at Penn State University, the University of East Anglia, and NASA.

Although in the instance of climate science, financial considerations must be recognized.

I think what it comes down to is simply people being people, and feeling a human's need to define down the universe in which we live in order to feel bigger, stronger and a maybe little less like a pinball.

 

Mars conjunct Saturn, exact July 31.

This happens every two years on average. Mars swinging past Saturn tends to lend a militant edge to Saturn’s restrictive presence, quite often as a start/stop energetic that usually lasts only a couple of weeks during “normal” times. Mars will be within a five degree orb of influence to Saturn from July 21 to August 9 , effectively bracketing the most intense phase of the Cardinal Cross.

Mars’ previous conjunction with Saturn happened in July 2008, right when US voters were making up their minds about who would be next to enter the White House. Mars’ touch of militancy signaled a turn-off of McCain’s overly debilitated Saturnian (war-mongering) persona, switching many over to Obama’s more Uranian side, just a few short months before Saturn (McCain) and Uranus (Obama) reached their first precise opposition on Election Day.

Mars’ subsequent opposition to Saturn (April 2009) represented Obama’s attempts to wisely (Saturn) utilize troops (Mars) in Iraq and Afghanistan, a process necessarily involving extreme Saturnian patience. This is “why” it took him so long to come up with effective strategies, and why the jury is still out on the effectiveness of those moves.

 

And once again, at the risk of redundancy.

 

Two letters and an editorial comment

Submitted by Roanman on Tue, 05/04/2010 - 06:52

 

Here are two letters from the second week of April 2010.

The first from Professors Rees and Cicerone to the Financial Times in response to an editorial titled Cooler on Warming published April 5, 2010.

The second from Howard Hayden to the U. S. State Department dated April 10, 2010.

Apologies in advance for the volume of reading here as nobody hates long posts and small type more than I do.

But, it is worth the slog.

 

What’s happening to the climate is unprecedented

Published: April 9 2010 03:00

From Prof Martin Rees and Dr Ralph J. Cicerone.

Sir, We were stimulated by your editorial “Cooler on warming” (April 5). There has undoubtedly been a shift in public and media perceptions of climate change – a consequence of, at least in part, leaked e-mails from some climate scientists and the publication of errors in the fourth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

However, as your editorial acknowledges, neither recent controversies, nor the recent cold weather, negate the consensus among scientists: something unprecedented is now happening. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rising and climate change is occurring, both due to human actions. If we continue to depend heavily on fossil fuels, by mid-century CO 2 concentrations will reach double pre-industrial levels. Straightforward physics tells us that this rise is warming the planet. Calculations demonstrate that this effect is very likely responsible for the gradual warming observed over the past 30 years and that global temperatures will continue to rise – superimposing a warming on all the other effects that make climate fluctuate. Uncertainties in the future rate of this rise, stemming largely from the “feedback” effects on water vapour and clouds, are topics of current research.

It is the responsibility of scientific organisations like ours to present the public and politicians with a balanced assessment of the evidence – and, importantly, to indicate the level of confidence and the range of uncertainties attached to them.

Our two science academies have long contributed critical, objective and open reports on climate change. We intend to draw upon the efforts of leading scientists everywhere to make our future reports more accessible and valuable and, by fostering scientific research, we hope to do a better job of reducing inherent uncertainties. We must also promote best scientific practice, especially with regard to the sharing of data. But policymakers and the public must realise that, even if scientific uncertainties could be reduced to zero, formulating effective political responses would still be controversial and challenging. Our academies will provide the scientific backdrop for the political and business leaders who must create effective policies to steer the world toward a low-carbon economy.

Martin Rees,
President of the Royal Society

Ralph J Cicerone,
President of the US National Academy of Sciences

 

HOWARD HAYDEN
Climate Realists
April 27, 2010

To: Department of State

Date: 23 April 2010

Re: U.S. Climate Action Report 2010. 5th ed.

Many states around the nation are trying to enact laws to restrict carbon emissions, and industries too numerous to mention have begun making changes hoping to be fully prepared to comply with laws they haven’t seen yet. Congress is considering laws in hopes that they can avoid having EPA impose its own version of CO2 restrictions.

Before jumping on this bandwagon, we should be certain that we understand the science. U.S. Climate Action Report 2010, 5th ed. might be understood by some Americans to be the definitive word; however nary a word in the report even pretends to establish a link between CO2 and putative global warming show that the increase in CO2 concentration is due to human activity instead of natural causes (such as natural warming of the oceans) show that either an increase in CO2 concentration or an increase in temperature is, on balance, bad (or worse than laws restricting CO2 emissions) or

do any science whatsoever.

 

Despite screams to the contrary, a vast number of scientists dispute the findings of the IPCC. Perhaps the Department of State believes that “the science is settled.” If so, please let us know which of the two dozen models—see Fig. 1 showing a slight disagreement by a factor of 3000 among the modelssettled the science so that all of the others can be thrown into the dustbin of failed science and de-funded.

 

 

Like an ant crawling out an anthill and concluding that the world is made of 1-millimeter rocks, global-warming activists have looked at the last three-millionths of one percent of the earth’s climate history and made brash conclusions about climate, and especially their understanding of it. They wax eloquent about results from computer models. In the longer view—see Fig. 2—we see that the last million years or so are rather anomalous. The highest CO2 concentrations during the last many ice ages and interglacials are lower than at any other time for the last 300 million years. The dinosaurs lived when CO2 concentrations were 5 to 20 times as high as now. Indeed, such large creatures could not survive without the very verdant conditions afforded by adequate plant food known as carbon dioxide.

 

Figure 2: Carbon dioxide concentrations for the last 600 million years. Points represent actual measurements; lines represent computerized smoothings. The most recent million years is in a very narrow strip to the left of the graph, with concentrations less than 400 ppmv. The right-hand scale is in multiples of quaternary average.

 

That long history teaches us something else. We have all been in an auditorium when somebody was testing out the sound system and there was a sudden screech owing to a “tipping point” wherein the amplified sound at the microphone was loud enough to be picked up and made louder yet. If the people did not act immediately to cut the gain of the amplifier, and everybody just left the room and locked the door, the screech would persist forever if the power remained on. This behavior, often called “running to the rail” by electronics folks, is characteristic of all positive feedback systems. Once you reach the tipping point, there is no return. If high levels of CO2 were to cause the earth to reach a tipping point, it would have done so a long time ago, and we wouldn’t be here talking about it.

 

All in all, there is a best policy to direct toward climate change, and that is to have the courage to do nothing. We humans have precious little to do with climate. When and where did you read anything from climate alarmists that said that humans are responsible for about 3% of all CO2 emissions? When and where did you read anything from climate alarmists that said that warming oceans emit CO2? When and where did the climate alarmists tell you about CO2 levels that were up to 20 times current levels when dinosaurs roamed the earth? When and where did alarmists tell you that the conditions they openly worry about have repeatedly happened without turning the earth into an oven?

 

Nowhere and never, did you say? Perhaps you should consider that you have been deliberately misled.

 

Cheers,

Howard Hayden

The Energy Advocate

www.energyadvocate.com

Vales Lake Publishing, LLC

www.valeslake.com

 

 

 

 

 

I'll say it again

Submitted by Roanman on Thu, 12/17/2009 - 06:53
 
 
 
 

“IEA analysts say climatologists use the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations.  Rionovosta, via RiaNovosti, 12-15-09 

 

 This story is starting to fly around everywhere, but the funnest place to read it is here. (Yes, I know it's not a word)

 

 

Global Warming

Submitted by Roanman on Sat, 08/29/2009 - 09:54

 

All right, here's the story.

 

The Intergovernmental Agency on Climate Change was created  in 1989. It was set up by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), two agencies of the United Nations.  The initial task for the IPCC as outlined in the UN General Assembly Resolution 43/53 of 6 December 1988 was to prepare a comprehensive review and recommendations with respect to the state of knowledge of the science of climate change; social and economic impact of climate change, possible response strategies and elements for inclusion in a possible future international convention on climate.

 

The IPCC says the following of itself. 

 

The Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change is the leading body for the assessment of climate change, established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) to provide the world with a clear scientific view on the current state of climate change and its potential environmental and socio-economic consequences.

 

"The IPCC is a scientific body. It reviews and assesses the most recent scientific, technical and socio-economic information produced worldwide relevant to the understanding of climate change. It does not conduct any research nor does it monitor climate related data or parameters. Thousands of scientists from all over the world contribute to the work of the IPCC on a voluntary basis. Review is an essential part of the IPCC process, to ensure an objective and complete assessment of current information. Differing viewpoints existing within the scientific community are reflected in the IPCC reports."

 

And says the following about it's proceedures. 

 

In the course of the multi-stage review process, both expert reviewers and governments are invited to comment on the accuracy and completeness of the scientific/technical/socio economic content and the overall balance of the drafts. The circulation process among peer and government experts is very wide, with hundreds of scientists looking into the drafts to check the soundness of the scientific information contained in them. The Review Editors of the report (normally two per chapter) make sure that all comments are well taken into account.

 

The IPCC first assessment report was completed in 1990, and served as the basis of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). 


 The executive summary of the WG I Summary for Policymakers report states,

"We are certain of the following:  emissions resulting from human activities are substantially increasing the atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gases: CO2, methane, CFCs and nitrous oxide. These increases will enhance the greenhouse effect, resulting on average in an additional warming of the Earth's surface. The main greenhouse gas, water vapour, will increase in response to global warming and further enhance it.  

We calculate with confidence that: ...CO2 has been responsible for over half the enhanced greenhouse effect; long-lived gases would require immediate reductions in emissions from human activities of over 60% to stabilise their concentrations at today's levels...

Based on current models, we predict: under [BAU] increase of global mean temperature during the [21st] century of about 0.3 oC per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0.2 to 0.5 oC per decade); this is greater than that seen over the past 10,000 years; under other ... scenarios which assume progressively increasing levels of controls, rates of increase in global mean temperature of about 0.2 oC [to] about 0.1 oC per decade.

 

There has been dissent with regards to the quality of the science, the quality of peer review, the validity of computer modeling used to make predictions, and the integrity of the process itself.

 

In The Greenhouse Debate Continued: An Analysis and Critique of the IPCC Climate Assessment, a panel of climate scientists from Great Britain, Germany, Sweden, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States independently reviewed the three IPCC documents and found numerous discrepancies between them. Major discrepancies include:

 

The 1990 "Policymakers Summary" claims that climate warming during the past 100 years is "broadly consistent with predictions of [theoretical] climate models" The 1990 Report and 1992 Supplement, however, present no firm evidence from human-induced greenhouse warming in the climate record.

The Summary predicts a rapid increase in global temperatures, based on climate model calculations. The Report questions the reliability of current climate models, none of which have been validated by existing climate data.

The Summary claims to be "certain" that water vapor, the most important greenhouse gas, will "further enhance" any warming effect from human-produced increases in carbon dioxide. The Report stresses the lack of observational data on the distribution of water vapor and on the role of clouds.

  During the summer of 1991, the Science & Environmental Policy Project mailed questionnaires to the more than 100 U.S. IPCC contributors and reviewers, as well as to a group of atmospheric scientists, active in research but not involved in IPCC. Of the 126 surveys mailed, 37 percent were returned, many with signatures.   

 

Only about half of the respondents thought that the Policymakers Summary reflects the text accurately; a majority said that the Summary did not reflect their own views and might convey a misleading message to policymakers. About 90 percent agreed with the following statement (on page 254 of the Report): "It is not possible to attribute all, or even a large part, of the observed global-mean warming to the enhanced greenhouse effect on the basis of observational data currently available". Only 15 percent believed that current GCMs accurately portrayed the atmosphere-ocean system, and less than 10 percent thought that current GCMs had been adequately validated by the climate record. 

 

The other survey, conducted by Greenpeace International, polled 400 climate scientists who had worked on the IPCC study or had published on relevant issues during 1991. The key question was: "Do you think there will be a point of no return, at some [unspecified] time in the future at which continued business-as-usual policies run a serious risk of instigating a runaway greenhouse effect?" Of the 113 respondents, 13 percent said "Probably" and 47 percent said "Probably not." 

 

The SEPP makes the following statement.

 

The SEPP analysis raises doubts about IPCC claims--put forth in the Foreword to the 1990 Report and in the 1992 Supplement--that the documents had undergone "peer review" prior to their release. The IPCC claim implies a conventional scientific review process in which an editor, independent of the research, enlists scientists to critique a report anonymously. Here, the editors' who were also among the authors, simply circulated the draft to a known group  of colleagues, and then accepted or disregarded comments according to their own views. The editors admit to "minority" opinions, which they "have not been able to accommodate." But independent surveys of IPCC scientists demonstrate a substantial majority disagrees with the major assertions of the "Policymakers Summary"--which has been touted as "a international scientific consensus."

 

When the IPCC report, Climate Change 1995: The Science of Climate Change (Cambridge University Press, May 1996) was printed, it was discovered that significant changes and deletions had been made to Chapter 8, a crucial part of the report dealing with the detection and attribution of global warming. Moreover, these changes had been made after the draft report had been approved by the government delegations. 

Dr. S. Fred Singer founder of the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) alerted scientists who had contributed to the IPCC report via the internet.  As a result of Dr. Singer's on-line correspondence, a letter reprimanding the IPCC, signed by a dozen climate scientists, was published in the January 1997 issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society; a similar letter appears in August issue of Physics Today. 

A Dec. 20, 1995, Reuters report quoted British scientist  Keith Shine, one of IPCC's lead authors, discussing the IPCC Policymakers’ Summary: "We produce a draft, and then the policymakers go through it line by line and change the way it is presented.... It's peculiar that they have the final say in what goes into a scientists' report."

 

On April 23, 1998, Michael E. Mann, Raymond S. Bradley and Stephen Malcolm K. Hughes published an paper in Nature Magazine which began as follows;

"Spatially resolved global reconstructions of annual surface temperature patterns over the past six centuries are based on the multivariate calibration of widely distributed high-resolution proxy climate indicators. Time- dependent correlations of the reconstructions with time-series records representing changes in greenhouse-gas concentrations, solar irradiance, and volcanic aerosols suggest that each of these factors has contributed to the climate variability of the past 400 years, with greenhouse gases emerging as the dominant forcing during the twentieth century. Northern Hemisphere mean annual temperatures for three of the past eight years are warmer than any other year since (at least) AD 1400."

 Within this article, was a graph labelled Figure 5b of the authors calculations of Northern Hemisphere mean temperature changes for the past 600 or so years.  This graph referred to by the authors as the MBH98 reconstruction has become famous as

"The Hockey Stick"

In 2001 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published "The IPCC Third Assessment Report, Climate Change 2001" wherein "The Hockey Stick Graph" became a prominent part of the evidence supporting the theory of man made Global Warming.

The IPCC Third Assessment Report reaches the following conclusions;

An increasing body of observations gives a collective picture of a warming world and other changes in the climate system (The global average surface temperature has increased over the 20th century by about 0.6 °C; Temperatures have risen during the past four decades in the lowest 8 kilometers of the atmosphere; Snow cover and ice extent have decreased)

The TAR estimate for the climate sensitivity is 1.5 to 4.5 °C; and the average surface temperature is projected to increase by 1.4 to 5.8 Celsius degrees over the period 1990 to 2100, and the sea level is projected to rise by 0.1 to 0.9 meters over the same period. The wide range in predictions is based on scenarios that assume different levels of future CO2 emissions. Each scenario then has a range of possible outcomes associated with it.  The most optimistic outcome assumes an aggressive campaign to reduce CO2 emissions; the most pessimistic is a "business as usual" scenario.  Other scenarios fall in between."

The report goes on to say,

"There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the past 50 years is attributable to human activities."

 

 Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick published a paper in Energy and Environment v14 #6, 2003 entitled

CORRECTIONS TO THE MANN et. al. (1998) PROXY DATA BASE AND NORTHERN HEMISPHERIC AVERAGE TEMPERATURE SERIES 

This paper begins as follows:

The data set of proxies of past climate used in Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998,
“MBH98” hereafter) for the estimation of temperatures from 1400 to 1980
contains collation errors, unjustifiable truncation or extrapolation of source data,
obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculation of principal
components and other quality control defects.
 

We detail these errors and defects.


We then apply MBH98 methodology to the construction of a Northern Hemisphere
average temperature index for the 1400-1980 period, using corrected and updated
source data.

The major finding is that the values in the early 15th century exceed
any values in the 20th century.

The particular “hockey stick” shape derived in the MBH98 proxy construction – a temperature index that decreases slightly between the early 15th century and early 20th century and then increases dramatically up to 1980 — is primarily an artefact of poor data handling, obsolete data and incorrect calculation of principal components.

 

As you might reasonably expect, the fecal matter hit the fan almost immediately.  Name calling broke out all over the place.

 In an effort to defend their work, Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and their associates, established their blog Real Climate.org  

An example of a third party response to the McIntyre, McKitrick paper can be found here. 

In an effort to defend their work, McIntyre and McKitrick established their site Climate Audit.org

 

McIntyre and McKitrick defended their work in a presentation to the National Academy of Sciences Expert Panel on March 2, 2006 

Here they repeated their objections to both the original and updated studies by "Mann et. al."

The study used “new” statistical methods that turned out to “mine” for hockey stick shaped series. These methods were misrepresented and/or inaccurately described in important particulars and their statistical properties were either unknown to the authors or unreported by them.

The reconstruction failed an important verification test said to have used in the study. This failure was not reported and the statistical skill was misrepresented both in the original article and by the IPCC.

Dominant weight was placed on proxies known to be inappropriate temperature proxies, along with, at best, misleading information about their impact and, at worst, actual withholding of adverse results;

The method of confidence interval calculation leads to unrealistically narrow confidence intervals;

Systematic obstruction was placed at every step of the way of replication attempts. The underlying data were exceedingly hard to identify and obtain. The methodology was not accurately described in the paper and the computational code was withheld until the intervention of a Congressional investigation.

 

On January 24, 2006 climatologists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies announced that the highest global annual average surface temperature in more than a century was recorded in their analysis for the 2005 calender year.

 A study by NASA scientists published September 25, 2006 stated that that the world's temperature is reaching a level that has not been seen in thousands of years. 

Climatologists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City on January 6, 2008 announced that 2007 tied with 1998 for Earth’s second warmest year in a century.  And that eight warmest years in the GISS record have all occurred since 1998, and the 14 warmest years in the record have all occurred since 1990.

 

Stephen McIntyre (who seems to have time on his hands) again set out to verify the Goddard Institutes data, and methodolgy.  And found that NASA like Mann, does not fully publish the computer source code or the formulae they use to calculate the trends within their data.  Having reverse engineered NASA Goddard's process using the raw data and the processed data, he published a paper stating that having demonstrating the errors within NASA Goddard's findings.

 

NASA was forced to correct their findings.

 

In November of 2008 the Goddard Institute for Space Studies release it's statistics for October of 2008, and announced that October 2008 had been the warmest October on record, ever.  Within the data were findings that across Russia, temperatures were on average 10 degrees higher than normal for the month of October.

 

Stephen McIntyre (yet again), and Anthony Watts found this strange, since London had experienced its first October snow in 70 years. Chicago and the Great Plains states had broken several lowest-temperature records, some of which had stood for 120 years. Tibet had broken snowfall records. Glaciers in Alaska, the Alps and New Zealand had begun advancing. Sea ice expanded so rapidly it covered 30% more of Arctic than at the end of October 2007.   

 

Review of the data found that September 2008 data had been substituted for the true October data.

Nasa, Goddard was forced to correct themselves, again.

 

True believers in climate change would have you believe that the debate is over.

 After all, 2500 scientists can't be wrong!!!  

But wait, 31,407 scientists say, "It ain't so !!!!!!!!!!!!! 

 

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