With United Nations climate negotiators facing an uphill battle to advance their goal of reducing emissions linked to global warming, it's no surprise that the woman steering the talks appealed to a Mayan goddess Monday.
Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, invoked the ancient jaguar goddess Ixchel in her opening statement to delegates gathered in Cancun, Mexico, noting that Ixchel was not only goddess of the moon, but also "the goddess of reason, creativity and weaving.
The Mayans used to also cut the hearts out of living human beings as sacrifices to their gods, an apt metaphor for what the assembled UN delegates want to do to development and the world economy.
Regular readers will have no doubts about my skepticism of the theory of catastrophic man-made global warming. In particular, in these pages and at Climate Skeptic, I have repeatedly criticized the details of Michael Mann's work on the hockey stick. I won't repeat those issues today, though some of the past articles are indexed here.
That being said, efforts by Republicans in Virginia to bring legislative or even criminal action against Mann for his work when he was at the University of Virginia is about the worst idea I have heard in quite some time. Though nominally about forcing public disclosure (something I am always in favor of from state entities) the ultimate goal is to drag Mann into court
Cuccinelli has said he wants to see whether a fraud investigation would be warranted into Mann's work, which showed that the earth has experienced a rapid, recent warming
[As an aside, this is actually NOT what Mann's hockey stick work purports to show. The point of the hockey stick is to make the case that historic temperatures before 1850 were incredibly stable and flat, and thus recent increases of 0.6-0.8C over the last 150 years are unprecedented in comparison. His research added nothing to our knowledge about recent warming, it was on focused on pre-industrial warming. The same folks that say with confidence the science is settled don't even understand it].
For those frustrated with just how bad Mann's work is and upset at the incredible effort to protect this work from criticism or scrutiny by hiding key data (as documented in the East Anglia climategate emails), I know it must feel good to get some sort of public retribution. But the potential precedent here of bringing up scientists on charges essentially for sloppy or incorrect work is awful.
Bad science happens all the time, completely absent any evil conspiracies. Human nature is to see only the data that confirms ones hypotheses and, if possible, to resists scrutiny and criticism. This happens all the time in science and if we started hauling everyone into court or into a Senate committee, we have half of academia there (and then likely the other half when the party in power changed). Team politics are a terrible disease and the last thing we need is to drag them any further into science and academia.
Science will eventually right itself, and what is needed is simply the time and openness to allow adversarial scrutiny and replication within academia to run its course. Seriously, are we next going to drag the cold fusion guys in to court? How about all the folks in the geology field that resisted plate tectonics for so long. Will we call to account the losers in the string theory debate?
If legislators want to help, they can
Make sure there are standards in place for archiving and public availability of any data and code associated with government funded research
Improve the governments own climate data management
Ensure that state funding is distributed in a way to support a rich dialog on multiple sides of contested scientific issues.
Robert Orr, UN under secretary general for planning, said the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on global warming will be much worse than the last one.
Hmm, that kind of confirms what critics have been saying for years, that the IPCC has nothing to do with science. Because, you see, to my knowledge the scientists of the next IPCC have not even started their work, but the UN leadership has already determined what the report will say. Which is consistent with their process in the last go around, where the UN political guys crafted the management summary first, and then circulated it to the scientific teams with instructions to adjust their sections of the report to fit the pre-existing conclusion.
In the same article, we get more of the "accelerating" nonsense:
He said UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon would make it clear to world leaders in Cancun "that we should not take any comfort in the climate deniers' siren call."
"The evidence shows us quite the opposite-- that we can't rest easy at all" as scientists agree that climate change "is happening in an accelerated way."
Its not even clear what the value of the first derivative is for climate change, or even if such a metric has any meaning in the complex climate system where regional trends can easily be going in opposite directions. But anyone who can tell you that we know the second derivative, or even its sign, is totally full of crap.
Never (except perhaps with shark attack scares which come and go) have I seen such a classic case of observer bias. Certain events occur in the tail ends of the normal distribution. Suddenly everyone claims that these events are happening with more frequency, mainly because they get reported with more frequency. I reported on a great example of this from a supposedly scientific government report here, where researchers mistook improved measurement of certain events as a real underlying increase in the number of such events. Another example here.
Of course, 95 percentile events can't be, by definition, happening more frequently. The only thing that can happen is the normal distribution can have its standard deviation increase. Similar to the second derivitive argument above, I am not a statistician, but my sense is that the odds that we could detect a standard deviation shift in the distribution of weather events using just a few years of highly imperfect data, even if such an underlying shift existed, is really really low.
I wanted to link to Richard Lindzen's Congressional testimony. For slides, they are pretty easy to follow as they are mostly text. I want to particularly point out slide 4, which I think on one page outlines the single most important point to understand about anthropogenic global warming theory. When given just one minute to discuss climate, this slide embodies the message I give.
Here are two statements that are completely agreed on by the IPCC. It is crucial to be aware of their implications.
1. A doubling of CO2, by itself, contributes only about 1C to greenhouse warming. All models project more warming, because, within models, there are positive feedbacks from water vapor and clouds, and these feedbacks are considered by the IPCC to be uncertain.
2. If one assumes all warming over the past century is due to anthropogenic greenhouse forcing, then the derived sensitivity of the climate to a doubling of CO2is less than 1C. The higher sensitivity of existing models is made consistent with observed warming by invoking unknown additional negative forcings from aerosols and solar variability as arbitrary adjustments.
Given the above, the notion that alarming warming is "˜settled science' should be offensive to any sentient individual, though to be sure, the above is hardly emphasized by the IPCC. 4
My most recent climate video, which discusses this issue and more, is here. I also have an older, shorter video focusing on just the issues in Lindzen's fourth slide here.
From the Thin Green Line, a reliable source for any absurd science that supports environmental alarmism:
Sending and receiving email makes up a full percent of a relatively green person's annual carbon emissions, the equivalent of driving 200 miles.
Dealing with spam, however, accounts for more than a fifth of the average account holder's electricity use. Spam makes up a shocking 80 percent of all emails sent, but most people get rid of them as fast as you can say "delete."
So how does email stack up to snail mail? The per-message carbon cost of email is just 1/60th of the old-fashioned letter's. But think about it "” you probably send at least 60 times as many emails a year than you ever did letters.
One way to go greener then is to avoid sending a bunch of short emails and instead build a longer message before you send it.
This is simply hilarious, and reminds me of the things the engineers would fool the pointy-haired boss with in Dilbert. Here was my response:
This is exactly the kind of garbage analysis that is making the environmental movement a laughing stock.
In computing the carbon footprint of email, the vast majority of the energy in the study was taking the amount of energy used by a PC during email use (ie checking, deleting, sending, organizing) and dividing it by the number of emails sent or processed. The number of emails is virtually irrelevant -- it is the time spent on the computer that matters. So futzing around trying to craft one longer email from many shorter emails does nothing, and probably consumers more energy if it takes longer to write than the five short emails.
This is exactly the kind of peril that results from a) reacting to the press release of a study without understanding its methodology (or the underlying science) and b) focusing improvement efforts on the wrong metrics.
The way to save power is to use your computer less, and to shut it down when not in use rather than leaving it on standby.
If one wants to argue that the energy is from actually firing the bits over the web, this is absurd. Even if this had a measurable energy impact, given the very few bytes in an email, reducing your web surfing by one page a day would keep more bytes from moving than completely giving up email.
By the way, the suggestion for an email charge in the linked article is one I have made for years, though the amount is too high. A charge of even 1/100 cent per email would cost each of us about a penny per day but would cost a 10 million mail spammer $1000, probably higher than his or her expected yield from the spam.
If you are young (I suppose 20's or younger) and have been actively involved in some way as a climate skeptic in the Washington DC area, reporter Andrew Restuccia of the Washington Independent would like to talk to you. He is writing an article on young climate skeptics, I think. Drop him a note, he seems to be developing a hypothesis that skeptics are all crusty old dudes and showing him some fresh faces would help: arestuccia --at-- washingtonindependent.com
Nick Rahall, a Democratic Congressmen from WV and a supporter of the global warming alarmist position (probably an issue in coal-dependent WV this election cycle) gave an analogy I think is right on:
"Climate change "” to deny it exists, to just put your head in the sand and, "˜oh no, it doesn't exist, what are you talking about,' is about like standing on the floor of Macy's during the month of December and claiming Santa Claus doesn't exist.
While he was trying to actually denigrate climate skeptics, in fact he confirms exactly what we believe. Saying Santa Claus does not exist is absolutely correct, but doing so would get in the way of everyone around us making money off the myth. Via Climate Depot
I suppose one cold say that climate alarmism jumped the shark years ago. But they have certainly moved to a new level, one for which there is not even a term, in this video. This video has everything - the government school teacher politically indoctrinating the kids, followed by bloody gory death dealt out to the kids who refuse to toe the government line. I am not kidding.
When I first saw it, I was sure it was a skeptic satire, ala Jonathon Swift's 'A Modest Proposal,' and I am still afraid that this may be some elaborate put-on because the video and its message -- that skeptics need to be killed -- is so obscene. But apparently, according to this article at the Guardian, it is totally for real and includes contributions from some fairly prominent artists, as well as funding from the UK government and the 10:10 program (a plea to reduce carbon emissions by 10% per year, eerily with a name probably purposely similar to 9-11).
Our friends at the 10:10 climate change campaign have given us the scoop on this highly explosive short film, written by Britain's top comedy screenwriter Richard Curtis, ahead of its general release....
Had a look? Well, I'm certain you'll agree that detonating school kids, footballers and movie stars into gory pulp for ignoring their carbon footprints is attention-grabbing. It's also got a decent sprinkling of stardust "“ Peter Crouch, Gillian Anderson, Radiohead and others. But it's pretty edgy, given 10:10's aim of asking people, businesses and organisations to take positive action against global warming by cutting their greenhouse gas emissions by 10% in a year, and thereby pressuring governments to act.
"Doing nothing about climate change is still a fairly common affliction, even in this day and age. What to do with those people, who are together threatening everybody's existence on this planet? Clearly we don't really think they should be blown up, that's just a joke for the mini-movie, but maybe a little amputating would be a good place to start?" jokes 10:10 founder and Age of Stupid film maker Franny Armstrong.
But why take such a risk of upsetting or alienating people, I ask her: "Because we have got about four years to stabilise global emissions and we are not anywhere near doing that. All our lives are at threat and if that's not worth jumping up and down about, I don't know what is."
The latter claim is hilarious. Over the next four years, CO2 levels will likely increase, if they stay on trend, from .0392% of the atmosphere to .0400% of the atmosphere. I would love to see these so-called science-based folks demonstrate how the next .0008% shift in atmospheric concentration triggers the point-of-no return tipping point. In actual fact, the have just latched onto the round number of 400ppm and declared, absolutely without evidence, that this number (which the Earth has crossed many times in the past) will somehow lead to a runaway chain reaction.
Anyway, I have teased it long enough, here is the video. Beware -- there is gore (no pun intended) here worthy of a zombie movie.
Wow, its sure good that the world has decided that skeptics are the mindless, thuggish, anti-science side of this debate, because if that had not already been made clear, we might think that key climate alarmism groups had lost their freaking minds. It will be interesting to see if this gets any play in the US media -- my guess is it will not. Magazines are happy to spend twenty pages dissecting the motives of the Koch family in funding skeptic and libertarian causes, but environmentalists get a free pass, even with stuff like this.
Lubos Motl is all over this, and has mirror sites for the video if (or more likely when) the video gets taken down. This is one of those propaganda offers that are the product of an echo chamber, with a group of like-minded people all patting themselves on the back only to be surprised at the inevitable public backlash.
I have mirrored the video here in case it gets a youtube takedown.
Update: As a reminder, this is not satire. It is made by a group of true believers. It was funded and approved and released by a climate alarmism group, which paid top dollar (including UK taxpayer funds) for a large professional team of actors, writers, and directors. All interviewed participants, including the first little actor blown up, have stated how proud they were of the film and its contribution to educating people on the need for immediate action on global warming.
For the last hour, I have sat and tried to think if, as a skeptic, I had wanted to make a satire critiquing the excesses of global warming alarmism, could I have made a better video. The only thing that might have made it better would have been if the final button-pusher was someone famous like James Cameron or Bono, who after then pushed the button climbed on their Gulfstream jet to fly home. But that's just a quibble. I have changed my opinion. This may be the greatest skeptic video ever, and the Koch family didn't even have to pay a dime for it. Thanks 10:10.
Update #2: This movie reminds me of nothing so much as Tarantino's Inglorious Bastards. It is clearly not reality, but the author's fantasy. Tarantino fantasizes about a group of jews kicking ass on the Nazi high command and ending the war early. 10:10 fantasizes about blowing up skeptics, in a video that, amazingly, is more blood-spattered than Tarantino's.
Update #3: The group pulls the video with a classic "I'm sorry you guys are so easily offended" apology.
Update #4: Unsurprisingly, Joe Romm (in the italics in this post) goes to the kindergarten argument of "he started it," arguing that the video is just the flip side of the stuff skeptics are doing all the time. In making his pitch, he shows the mindset that allowed this stupid film to get made.
I am not sure exactly what comparable films skeptics have produced that are similar, and the only example he can cite is Anthony Watt's blog post comments on the shooting of an eco-terrorist. I did not even go back and look at Watt's comments, but I generally think that lots of people are too gleeful when suspected criminals, who are innocent before the law, are gunned down by police.
Never-the-less, its seems a stretch to equate the offhand comments in real time of an independent blogger with a film involving probably a hundred people (including those who commissioned it in the 10:10 organization), commissioned in an official and thoughtful act (after all this had to be months in the works), and funded in part by the British government. He takes the opportunity of his team's screw-up to launch this broadside on people like me (in bold no less).
None of this excuses that disgusting video. But the difference is that those who are trying to preserve a livable climate and hence the health and well-being of our children and billions of people this century quickly denounce the few offensive over-reaches of those who claim to share our goals "†but those trying to destroy a livable climate, well, for them lies and hate speech are the modus operandi, so such behavior is not only tolerated, but encouraged.
Is anyone else getting tired of this working definition that "hate speech" is any speech by people who disagree with me, because I have the best interest of humanity in mind so clearly those who oppose me hate the human race?
Note you can see this right in his statement -- "for those trying to destroy a livable climate." That's absurd. Does he really think anyone is trying to destroy a livable climate? I could say that through CO2 controls he is trying to impoverish billions of poor people in lesser developed countries by halting development, but I don't think that is really his motive. I think that is an outcome of what he advocates, just as he thinks an unlivable climate is an outcome of what I advocate, but I can distinguish between motives and assumptions, but he apparently cannot. This attitude is EXACTLY what causes this kind of unfortunate video to be made -- it is only a small step from believing, as he says he does, that skeptics are "trying to destroy a liveable climate" to making a movie that jokes about killing them all (or, to be frank, to feeling justified in acts of eco-terrorism).
I encourage you to watch my climate video and decide if folks like me are trying to thoughtfully decipher nature or are engaging in hate speech.
Update #6: I guess this was inevitable, but all the rats in the 10:10 ship are claiming that they had no idea what the video would be like and were appalled when they saw it. Right. An organization funds a major film production, including any number of high profile participants, and no one asked to see a script, screened the video before release, or even asked for some kind of written treatment of the concept? Yeah, right. No one in the 10:10 organization or who funded the video even peeked at it before it was released to the entire planet? This is so utterly lame but will probably be enough of a fig leaf for most of the media to hide behind and allow them not to follow up on a video whose basic premises they likely agree with.
I have written before about carbon offset scams -- even well intentioned programs are unlikely to achieve their promised benefits because
The projects they fund are typically not incremental -- many likely would have proceeded without the offset funds, so that the benefits are effectively double counted.
I have never seen any of these programs submit themselves to 3rd party offset of their supposed CO2 reductions. In most cases, these are faith-based programs where it is impolite to ask if the promised reductions actually occur.
Randal O'Toole has a good example of a program that makes all these mistakes, and compounds them with absurdly high administrative costs. One is left to wonder whether the Oregon state-run program is actually reducing CO2 or simply making sure a number of government salaries get paid.
In 2006, Climate Trust spent about two-thirds of its funds on carbon offsets, while most of the rest went for payroll and professional fees. In 2007, the share going to carbon offsets declined to 64 percent. By 2008, as near as I can tell, none of Climate Trust's money went for carbon offsets. Instead, 73 percent of its $1.65 million budget went for salaries, fees, and other compensation. It also spent more than $120,000 on travel and conferences and $95,000 on rent and office expenses. In 2008, Climate Trust paid its executive director $154,000, not counting health insurance and other fringe benefits. At least one other staff member whose title was "director of offset programs" was paid more than $100,000 and a third one received $88,000.
Over at my climate blog, I discuss the amazing similarity between Obama's claims for the effects of the stimulus and the IPCC's claims for the effects of CO2 on past temperatures. Both seem to reach their results by assuming that all the other variables in a complex system (climate or the economy) can be isolated and assessed and coincidentally are exactly the value necessary to prove that the variable under study (CO2 or the stimulus) had exactly the effect the studies authors thought it would.
Do you remember the State Science Institute report on Rearden Metal? If you were like me, you thought that this ridiculous report was an exaggeration, a literary device to make a point. But as in so much of Atlas Shrugged, I am finding that it was no exaggeration at all.
There are potential impacts on cancer both directly from climate change and indirectly from climate change mitigation strategies. Climate change will result in higher ambient temperatures that may
increase the transfer of volatile and semi-volatile compounds from water and wastewater into the atmosphere, and alter the distribution of contaminants to places more distant from the sources, changing subsequent human exposures. Climate change is also expected to increase heavy precipitation and flooding events, which may increase the chance of toxic contamination leaks from storage facilities or runoff into water from land containing toxic pollutants. Very little is
known about how such transfers will affect people's exposure to these chemicals"”some of which are known carcinogens"”and its ultimate impact on incidence of cancer. More research is needed to determine the likelihood of this type of contamination, the geographical areas and populations most likely to be impacted, and the health outcomes that could result.
Although the exact mechanisms of cancer in humans and animals are not completely understood for all cancers, factors in cancerdevelopment include pathogens, environmental contaminants, age, and genetics. Given the challenges of understanding the causes of cancer, the links between climate change and cancer are a mixture of fact and supposition, and research is needed to fill in the gaps in what we know.
One possible direct impact of climate change on cancer may be through increases in exposure to toxic chemicals that are known or suspected to cause cancer following heavy rainfall and by
increased volatilization of chemicals under conditions of increased temperature. In the case of heavy rainfall or flooding, there may be an increase in leaching of toxic chemicals and heavy metals
from storage sites and increased contamination of water with runoff containing persistent chemicals that are already in the environment. Marine animals, including mammals, also may suffer
direct effects of cancer linked to sustained or chronic exposure to chemical contaminants in the marine environment, and thereby serve as indicators of similar risks to humans.64 Climate impact
studies on such model cancer populations may provide added dimensions to our understanding of the human impacts.
Remember, the point of this all is not science, but funding. This is basically a glossy budget presentation, probably cranked out by some grad students over some beers, tasked to come up with scary but marginally plausible links between health issues and climate change. Obama has said that climate is really, really important to him. He has frozen a lot of agency budgets, and told them new money is only for programs that supports his major initiatives, like climate change. So, every agency says that their every problem is due to climate change, just as every agency under Bush said that they were critical to fighting terrorism. This document is the NIH salvo to get climate change money, not actual science.
I will be making a presentation on the science of the climate skeptic's position on April 12 from 5-7PM at the University of Colorado "“ Colorado Springs (UCCS) in the UC 302 theater (campus map). I hope folks who are interested in the Denver / Colorado Springs area will attend.
I will be making a presentation on the science of the climate skeptic's position on April 12 from 5-7PM at the University of Colorado "“ Colorado Springs (UCCS) in the UC 302 theater (campus map). I hope folks who are interested in the Denver / Colorado Springs area will attend.
The Securities and Exchange Commission today voted to provide public companies with interpretive guidance on existing SEC disclosure requirements as they apply to business or legal developments relating to the issue of climate change.
I haven't seen anyone explain the reason for this requirement, so I thought I would do so. Companies know that no real investor is going to pay any attention to these climate disclosures, so to avoid any future action accusing them of not being forthcoming enough, companies are going to go overboard outlining potential risks far beyond what they think is likely. These exaggerations will protect them from the SEC while at the same time having no effect on their stock price. Then, alarmists will collate all of these and use them as evidence of the high cost of climate change, saying "see, look at what all these public companies are saying climte change will do to them." Lacking any evidence of harmful climate change in the actual climate or economy, this is one way to manufacture fake evidence.
By the way, here is the diclosure every oil company should put in their reports:
Notice: Poplist politicians are very likely to demagogue this company for a wide-range of imagined crimes in an attempt to get re-elected, including crimes against the climate in various forms. Politicians will attempt to preferentially saddle this company with new taxes and regulations given that this company is not liked by many voters (despite the fact that many of these voters freelydo business with this company). Politicians will likely continue to try to sieze portions of this company's earnings, despite the fact that those earnings are relatively low given the magnitude of the our investments and the amount of value we add.
Last week I did a very enjoyable interview Stefan Molyneux of FreeDomain Radio. My presence was almost superfluous, as Stefan was incredibly well-informed as well as passionate on climate topics. Our discussion hits on many critical topics related to the science of the skeptics position, from positive feedbacks to urban heat biases to hockey sticks. The interview is embedded below, but I encourage you to check out his site, he seems to get a lot of interesting interviews of which I appear to be the most pedestrian.
I have cleaned up my Powerpoint presentation and added my narration on the notes pages. I have this available both as a .ppt file as well as a pdf. The pdf, I think, works particularly well -- it looks and reads more like a book. This is my best current cut at presenting the science of the skeptic's position and mostly supersedes my earlier book. Right click either to download. You are welcome to use the presentation with your own local groups.
I have at least one experience with the core alarmist community responding where I pointed out an error. The responses I got in that case are very similar to the ones today for the CRU - basically the responses either are tangential to the basic point or try to retroactively change the alarmists original assertions. They are responses that stand up only if the questioner is unwilling or unable to do the smallest amount of verification work (in other words, they work with most of the media).
The series of posts began with this image from the recent US government climate assessment. Its point was to provide electric grid outages as a proxy measurement variable for severe weather, the point being that severe weather must have increased.
This chart screams one thing at me: Basis change. Somehow, the basis for the data is changing in the period. Either reporting has been increased, or definitions have changed, or there is something about the grid that makes it more sensitive to weather, or whatever (this is a problem in tornado charts, as improving detection technologies seem to create an upward incidence trend in smaller tornadoes where one probably does not exist). But there is NO WAY the weather is changing this fast, and readers should treat this whole report as a pile of garbage if it is written by people who uncritically accept this chart.
He said that there may be an underlying upward trend out there (particularly in thunderstorms) but that most of the increase in this chart is from improvements in data gathering. In 1997, the EIA (and Makins himself) took over the compilation of this data, which had previously been haphazard, and made a big push to get all utilities to report as required. They made a second change and push for reporting in 2001, and again in 2007/2008. He told me that most of this slope is due to better reporting, and not necessarily any underlying trend. In fact, he said there still is some under-reporting by smaller utilities he wants to improve so that the graph will likely go higher in the future....
At the end of the day, this disturbance data is not a good proxy for severe weather.
The author of that section of the report, Evan Mills, responded and then I dealt with his response here. Here is just one example of the BS we have to slog through every time we criticize even a tangential analysis like this. See the links for his whole response, but he says in part:
As noted in the caption to the figure on page 58 of our report (shown above)"”which was masked in the blogger's critique [ed. actually it was not masked- the source I got the chart from had left off the caption]"”we expressly state a quite different finding than that imputed by the blogger, noting with care that we do not attribute these events to anthropogenic climate change, but do consider the grid vulnerable to extreme weather today and increasingly so as climate change progresses, i.e.:
"Although the figure does not demonstrate a cause-effect relationship between climate change and grid disruption, it does suggest that weather and climate extremes often have important effects on grid disruptions."
The associated text in the report states the following, citing a major peer-reviewed federal study on the energy sector's vulnerability to climate change:
"The electricity grid is also vulnerable to climate change effects, from temperature changes to severe weather events."
This was pretty amazing - citing his chart's caption but hoping that somehow I or other readers would miss the very first line of the caption which he fails to quote:
To Dr. Mills' point that I misinterpreted him "” if all he wanted to say was that the electrical grid could be disturbed by weather or was vulnerable to climate change, fine. I mean, duh. If there are more tornadoes knocking about, more electrical lines will come down. But if that was Dr. Mills ONLY point, then why did he write (emphasis added):
The number of incidents caused by extreme weather has increased tenfold since 1992. The portion of all events that are caused by weather-related phenomena has more than tripled from about 20 percent in the early 1990s to about 65 percent in recent years. The weather-related events are more severe"¦
He is saying flat out that the grid IS being disturbed 10x more often and more severely by weather. It doesn't even say "reported" incidents or "may have" "” it is quite definitive. So which one of us is trying to create a straw man? It is these statements that I previously claimed the data did not support, and I stand by my analysis on that.
I deconstructed a lot of the rest of his longer post, and you can follow it all, but the bottom line is that if a you are drawing a trend line between two points, and you have much more data missing from the begginning end point than the end, your trend is going to be SNAFU'd. Period. No point in arguing about it. See the chart below. It represents the situation at hand. The red is the reported data. The blue is the unreported data, which declines as a percentage of the total due to a push for better data reporting by the database owners. My point was simply that the red trend line was meaningless. Its amazing to me that even accepting the basics of this picture, Dr. Mills wants to fight that conclusion.
I really wish I could be more positive about the Kyrgyzstan material, but I swear I pulled every trick out of my sleeve trying to milk something out of that. I don't think it'd be productive to try and juggle the chronology statistics any more than I already have - they just are what they are...
Yep, sometimes the measured results from nature are what they are. Well, I actually that most of the time they are what they are, but not in climate apparently. Never give up a flawed analysis that yields the "right" answer without a fight. I concluded:
Look Dr. Mills, I don't have an axe to grind here. This is one chart out of bazillions making a minor point. But the data set you are using is garbage, so why do you stand by it with such tenacity? Can't anyone just admit "you know, on thinking about it, there are way to many problems with this data set to declare a trend exists.
Via Wawick Hughes, this "voting" site is pretty funny.
Apparently Google has launched a site where you can "vote" on climate change and the IPCC process. Except that you can only vote "yes." Fill in your name and hit submit, and you are counted as having voted the party line. Seriously. Since when does this meet anyone's definition of "vote?"
Every day Google innovationist Justin Baird pedals to work at the internet giant, where he is thinking big in his global campaign to act on climate change.
"My personal mission is to drive positive change through technology," he said.
"I am in a position where I can understand the issues surrounding climate change. And understanding the technology solution that can empower us to communicate collectively."
I guess we know now why Google did not have any qualms about cooperating with the Chinese government. They have been "communicating collectively" in their elections for years.
"From your local postcode it aggregates it together to a state level, then country level, then across the world, so what we're doing is generating a global statistic. Over time it starts to generate and show the strength of public support of what's happening," Mr Baird said.
Wow - I am predicting his point of view wins in a landslide
Chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council, Tim Flannery, says the Google tool is an interesting invention.
"I can imagine a day not so long from now where the UN secretary-general is elected through Show Your Vote. It's a very interesting world that we're entering into," he said.
Yeah, unfortunately, I can imagine a day too. Already leaders around the world in countries like Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran are elected just this way.
When someone starts to shout "but its in the peer-reviewed literature" as an argument-ender to me, I usually respond that peer review is not the finish line, meaning that the science of some particular point is settled. It is merely the starting point, where now a proposition is in the public domain and can be checked and verified and replicated and criticized and potentially disproved or modified.
The CRU scandal should, in my mind, be taken exactly the same way. Unlike what more fire-breathing skeptics have been saying, this is not the final nail in the coffin of catastrophic man-made global warming theory. It is merely a starting point, a chance to finally move government funded data and computer code into the public domain where it has always belonged, and start tearing it down or confirming it.
To this end, I would like to share a post from year ago, showing the kind of contortions that skeptics have been going through for years to demonstrate that there appear to be problems in key data models -- contortions and questions that could have been answered in hours rather than years if the climate scientists hadn't been so afraid of scrutiny and kept their inner workings secret. This post is from July, 2007. It is not one of my most core complaints with global warming alarmists, as I think the Earth has indeed warmed over the last 150 years, though perhaps by less than the current metrics say. But I think some folks are confused why simple averages of global temperatures can be subject to hijinx. The answer is that the averages are not simple:
Let's say you had two compasses to help you find north, but the compasses are reading incorrectly. After some investigation, you find that one of the compasses is located next to a strong magnet, which you have good reason to believe is strongly biasing that compass's readings. In response, would you
Average the results of the two compasses and use this mean to guide you, or
Ignore the output of the poorly sited compass and rely solely on the other unbiased compass?
Most of us would quite rationally choose #2. However, Steve McIntyre shows us a situation involving two temperature stations in the USHCN network in which government researchers apparently have gone with solution #1. Here is the situation:
He compares the USHCN station at the Grand Canyon (which appears to be a good rural setting) with the Tucson USHCN station I documented here, located in a parking lot in the center of a rapidly growing million person city. Unsurprisingly, the Tucson data shows lots of warming and the Grand Canyon data shows none. So how might you correct Tucson and the Grand Canyon data, assuming they should be seeing about the same amount of warming? Would you
average them, effectively adjusting the two temperature readings
towards each other, or would you assume the Grand Canyon data is cleaner
with fewer biases and adjust Tucson only? Is there anyone who would not choose the second option, as with the compasses?
The GISS data set, created by the Goddard Center of NASA, takes the USHCN data set and somehow uses nearby stations to correct for anomalous stations. I say somehow, because, incredibly, these government scientists, whose research is funded by taxpayers and is being used to make major policy decisions, refuse to release their algorithms or methodology details publicly. They keep it all secret! Their adjustments are a big black box that none of us are allowed to look into (and remember, these adjustments account for the vast majority of reported warming in the last century).
We can, however, reverse engineer some of these adjustments, and McIntyre does. What he finds is that the GISS appears to be averaging the good and bad compass, rather than throwing out or adjusting only the biased reading. You can see this below. First, here are the USHCN data for these two stations with only the Time of Observation adjustment made (more on what these adjustments are in this article).
As I said above, no real surprise "“ little warming out in undeveloped nature, lots of warming in a large and rapidly growing modern city. Now, here is the same data after the GISS has adjusted it:
You can see that Tucson has been adjusted down a degree or two, but Grand Canyon has been adjusted up a degree or two (with the earlier mid-century spike adjusted down). OK, so it makes sense that Tucson has been adjusted down, though there is a very good argument to be made that it should be been adjusted down more, say by at least 3 degrees**. But why does the Grand Canyon need to be adjusted up by about a degree and a half? What is biasing it colder by 1.5 degrees, which is a lot? The answer: Nothing. The explanation: Obviously, the GISS is doing some sort of averaging, which is bringing the Grand Canyon and Tucson from each end closer to a mean.
This is clearly wrong, like averaging the two compasses. You don't average a measurement known to be of good quality with one known to be biased. The Grand Canyon should be held about the same, and Tucson adjusted down even more toward it, or else thrown out. Lets look at two cases. In one, we will use the GISS approach to combine these two stations"“ this adds 1.5 degrees to GC and subtracts 1.5 degrees from Tucson. In the second, we will take an approach that applies all the adjustment to just the biases (Tucson station) "†this would add 0 degrees to GC and subtract 3 degrees from Tucson. The first approach, used by the GISS, results in a mean warming in these two stations that is 1.5 degrees higher than the more logical second approach. No wonder the GISS produces the highest historical global warming estimates of any source! Steve McIntyre has much more.
** I got to three degrees by applying all of the adjustments for GC and Tucson to Tucson. Here is another way to get to about this amount. We know from studies that urban heat islands can add 8-10 degrees to nighttime urban temperatures over surrounding undeveloped land. Assuming no daytime effect, which is conservative, we might conclude that 8-10 degrees at night adds about 3 degrees to the entire 24-hour average.
These adjustments are supposed to adjust for station moves "“ the procedure is described in Karl and Williams 1988 [check], but, like so many climate recipes, is a complicated statistical procedure that is not based on statistical procedures known off the island. (That's not to say that the procedures are necessarily wrong, just that the properties of the procedure are not known to statistical civilization.) When I see this particular outcome of the Karl methodology, my mpression is that, net of the pea moving under the thimble, the Grand Canyon values are being blended up and the Tucson values are being blended down. So that while the methodology purports to adjust for station moves, I'm not convinced that the methodology can successfully estimate ex post the impact of numerous station moves and my guess is that it ends up constructing a kind of blended average.
LOL. McIntyre, by the way, is the same gentleman who helped call foul on the Mann hockey stick for bad statistical procedure.
I thought this was funny. I am not going to deconstruct or lampoon this guy's beliefs, nor am I knowlegeable enough to argue whether Genesis 1:28 really mandates that man should forecast the climate system. I am in fact trying really hard to say that I am not making an ad hominem attack here, but merely pointing out an irony: Many dismiss skeptics as all part of the religious fundamentalist Right, I presume to try to lump us in with evolution deniers. I can't tell you how many emails I get calling me some sort of religious fundamentalist freak, which is actually hilarious given a) I never mention religion of the g-word on either of my sites almost ever and b) the actual nature of my beliefs.
So this is funny in an ironic way: The guy that originally wrote a bunch of the CRU code that has since been criticized as forcing a warming result is Tim Mitchell, who has shared some of his thoughts online (via Odd Citizen):
The climate system is made up of the earth's atmosphere, oceans, ice, vegetation, and streams. It is both beautiful and complex. Humans have a mandate to forecast its behavior and use it (Genesis 1:28). However, we feel in awe of its destructive potential, seen in such things as hurricanes and floods, which are part of the curse inflicted upon the earth following the Fall (Genesis 3.17). Moreover, control and certainty belong to God alone (Job 38-41). So there is a possibility that our actions may affect the climate system in unexpected ways. It was claimed in the 1970s that the earth might be about to enter an ice age. The evidence for this was minimal, but the decades of painstaking research that have followed the 1970s have unveiled both the natural variability in the climate system, and the dramatic effects of human actions....
What can individual Christians do? Some, but not many, are called to be scientists and politicians. However, we all have the vote, and environmental issues ought to be among those that we weigh up carefully before casting our vote. We are also each responsible for a small part of the daily emissions of greenhouse gases. Do we use our energy-intensive cars wisely? Are we guilty of worldly attitudes to public transport? With domestic heating and insulation, do we spend more and pollute more than is necessary? The government urges us to reduce our energy usage so that we may indulge ourselves in other ways, but we have a higher motive for reducing waste (1 Timothy 6.17-19). Although I have yet to see any evidence that climate change is a sign of Christ's imminent return, human pollution is clearly another of the birth pangs of creation, as it eagerly awaits being delivered from the bondage of corruption (Romans. 19-22).
Tim Mitchell works at the Climactic Research Unit, UEA, Norwich, and is a member of South Park Evangelical Church.
Again, I am not trying to purge the scientific ranks of Christian fundamentalists, I just think this is funny given all the accusations of blind Christian fundamentalism aimed (often with no basis) at skeptics.
Believe it or not, I am not going to update on the CRU emails. The insights into the science process are illuminating, and confirm much that we have suspected, but faults in transparency do not automatically win the game -- they lead to [hopefully] future transparency which then allows for better criticism and/or replication of the work.
My frustration today is a recent article in Scientific American [with the lofty academic title "Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense"] which purports to shoot down the seven key skeptics arguments. Many others have shown how the author does not do a very good job of shooting down these seven, but that is not my main frustration. The problem is that, like many of the global warming myth buster articles like this, the author completely fails to address the best, core arguments of skeptics, preferring to snipe around at easier prey at the margins.
Here are my seven alternative skeptics' claims I would like to see addressed:
Claim A: Nearly every scientist, skeptic and alarmist alike, agree that the first order warming from CO2 is small. Catastrophic forecasts that demand immediate government action are based on a second theory that the climate temperature system is dominated by positive feedback. There is little understanding of these feedbacks, at least in their net effect, and no basis for assuming feedbacks in a long-term stable system are strongly net positive. As a note, the claim is that the net feedbacks are not positive, so demonstration of single one-off positive feedbacks, like ice albedo, are not sufficient to disprove this claim. In particular, the role of the water cycle and cloud formation are very much in dispute.
Claim B: At no point have climate scientists ever reconciled the claims of the dendroclimatologists like Michael Mann that world temperatures were incredibly stable for thousands of years before man burned fossil fuels with the claim that the climate system is driven by very high net positive feedbacks. There is nothing in the feedback assumptions that applies uniquely to CO2 forcing, so these feedbacks, if they exist today, should have existed in the past and almost certainly have made temperatures highly variable, if not unstable.
Claim C: On its face, the climate model assumptions (including high positive feedbacks) of substantial warming from small changes in CO2 are inconsistent with relatively modest past warming. Scientists use what is essentially an arbitrary plug variable to handle this, assuming anthropogenic aerosols have historically masked what would be higher past warming levels. The arbitrariness of the plug is obvious given that most models include a cooling effect of aerosols in direct proportion to their warming effect from CO2, two phenomenon that should not be linked in nature, but are linked if modelers are trying to force their climate models to balance. Further, since aerosols are short lived and only cover about 10% of the globe's surface in any volume, nearly heroic levels of cooling effects must be assumed, since it takes 10C of cooling from the 10% area of effect to get 1C cooling in the global averages.
Claim D: The key issue is the effect of CO2 vs. other effects in the complex climate system. We know CO2 causes some warming in a lab, but how much on the real earth? The main evidence climate scientists have is that their climate models are unable to replicate the warming from 1975-1998 without the use of man-made CO2 -- in other words, they claim their models are unable to replicate the warming with natural factors alone. But these models are not anywhere near good enough to be relied on for this conclusion, particularly since they admittedly leave out any number of natural factors, such as ocean cycles and longer term cycles like the one that drove the little ice age, and admit to not understanding many others, such as cloud formation.
Claim E: There are multiple alternate explanations for the 1975-1998 warming other than manmade CO2. All likely contributed (along with CO2) but it there is no evidence to give most of the blame to Co2. Other factors include ocean cycles (this corresponded to a PDO warm phase), the sun (this corresponded to the most intense period of the sun in the last 100 years), mankind's land use changes (driving both urban heating effects as well as rural changes with alterations in land use), and a continuing recovery from the Little Ice Age, perhaps the coldest period in the last 5000 years.
Claim F: Climate scientists claim that the .4-.5C warming from 1975-1998 cannot have been caused natural variations. This has never been reconciled with the fact that the 0.6C warming from 1910 to 1940 was almost certainly due mostly to natural forces. Also, the claim that natural forcings could not have caused a 0.2C per decade warming in the 80's and 90's cannot be reconciled with the the current claimed natural "masking" of anthropogenic warming that must be on the order of 0.2C per decade.
Claim G: Climate scientists are embarrassing themselves in the use of the word "climate change." First, the only mechanism ever expressed for CO2 to change climate is via warming. If there is no warming, then CO2 can't be causing climate change by any mechanism anyone has ever suggested. So saying that "climate change is accelerating" (just Google it) when warming has stopped is disingenuous, and a false marketing effort to try to keep the alarm ringing. Second, the attempts by scientists who should know better to identify weather events at the tails of the normal distribution and claim that these are evidence of a shift in the mean of the distribution is ridiculous. There are no long term US trends in droughts or wet weather, nor in global cyclonic activity, nor in US tornadoes. But every drought, hurricane, flood, or tornado is cited as evidence of accelerating climate change (see my ppt slide deck for the data). This is absurd.
This is from a post of mine last January, long before the Climategate scandal (though most of us who spent a lot of time with climate issues knew of the Climategate abuses long before the smoking gun emails were found). The one thing this article does not mention is what we know today -- that climate scientists were actively working to keep skeptical studies out of the literature, even to the point of getting editors fired.
Peer review is not a guarantee of accuracy or a good housekeeping seal of correctness. It is a process that insures a work is worthy of publication by a scholarly magazine. Whether a scientific question is "settled" does not end with peer review, it only begins. It becomes settled after it survives decades of criticism and replication work, a process that was stonewalled by the folks at the CRU, which is really the heart of the scandal.
Yesterday, while I was waiting for my sandwich at the deli downstairs, I was applying about 10% of my consciousness to CNN running on the TV behind the counter. I saw some woman, presumably in the Obama team, defending some action of the administration being based on "peer reviewed" science.
This may be a legacy of the climate debate. One of the rhetorical tools climate alarmists have latched onto is to inflate the meaning of peer review. Often, folks, like the person I saw on TV yesterday, use "peer review" as a synonym for "proven correct and generally accepted in its findings by all right-thinking people who are not anti-scientific wackos."
But in fact peer review has a much narrower function, and certainly is not, either in intent or practice, any real check or confirmation of the study in question. The main goals of peer review are:
Establish that the article is worthy of publication and consistent with the scope of the publication in question. They are looking to see if the results are non-trivial, if they are new (ie not duplicative of findings already well-understood), and in some way important. If you think of peer-reviewers as an ad hoc editorial board for the publication, you get closest to intent
Reviewers will check, to the extent they can, to see if the methodology and its presentation is logical and clear "” not necesarily right, but logical and clear. Their most frequent comments are for clarification of certain areas of the work or questions that they don't think the authors answered.
Peer review is not in any way shape or form a proof that a study is correct, or even likely to be correct. Enormous numbers of incorrect conclusions have been published in peer-reviewed journals over time. This is demonstrably true. For example, at any one time in medicine, for every peer-reviewed study I can usually find another peer-reviewed study with opposite or wildly different findings.
Studies are only accepted as likely correct a over time the community tries as hard as it can to poke holes in the findings. Future studies will try to replicate the findings, or disprove them. As a result of criticism of the methodology, groups will test the findings in new ways that respond to methodological criticisms. It is the accretion of this work over time that solidifies confidence (Ironically, this is exactly the process that climate alarmists want to short-circuit, and even more ironically, they call climate skeptics "anti-scientific" for wanting to follow this typical scientific dispute and replication process).
Further, the quality and sharpness of peer review depends a lot on the reviewers chosen. For example, a peer review of Rush Limbaugh by the folks at LGF, Free Republic, and Powerline might not be as compelling as a peer review by Kos or Kevin Drum.
But instead of this, peer review is used by folks, particularly in poitical settings, as a shield against criticism, usually for something they don't understand and probably haven't even read themselves. Here is an example dialog:
Politician or Activist: "Mann's hockey stick proves humans are warming the planet"
Critic: "But what about Mann's cherry-picking of proxy groups; or the divergence problem in the data; or the fact that he routinely uses proxy's as a positive correlation in one period and different correlation in another; or the fact that the results are most driven by proxies that have been manually altered; or the fact that trees really make bad proxies, as they seldom actually display the assumed linear positive relationship between growth and temperature?"
Politician or Activist, who 99% of the time has not even read the study in question and understands nothing of what critic is saying: "This is peer-reviewed science! You can't question that."
For those interested in the science of the skeptics position please see my recent movie.
I just couldn't bear to post this at my climate site, which I really try to keep science-based. Since this doesn't have even a sniff of science to it, I will post it here for your entertainment: According to the UN, Global Warming Causes Prostitution
The effects of climate change have driven women in communities in coastal areas in poor countries like the Philippines into dangerous work, and sometimes even the flesh trade, a United Nations official said.
Suneeta Mukherjee, country representative of the United Nations Food Population Fund (UNFPA), said women in the Philippines are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change in the country.
"Climate change could reduce income from farming and fishing, possibly driving some women into sex work and thereby increase HIV infection," Mukherjee said during the Wednesday launch of the UNFPA annual State of World Population Report in Pasay City.
If you are in the Phoenix area and interested in a scientific discussion of climate issues, and in particular the science behind the skeptic's position, you will likely enjoy my lecture this coming Tuesday (Nov 10) in Phoenix. The presentation is free to the public, and will be from 7-9PM in Dorrance Auditorium at the Phoenix Country Day School, on 40th Street just north of Camelback Road. Hope to see you there.
