Global Warming/Climate Change Super Thread

[Haletown]

Al Gore responds to ClimateGate

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ymxLA5oRYI

 

[KJK]

Further proof that carbon reduction is only for the masses not the important people. :

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/copenhagen-climate-change-confe/6736517/Copenhagen-climate-summit-1200-limos-140-private-planes-and-caviar-wedges.html

KJK 

 

[Dennis Ruhl]

Forget all that, recycling is going to destroy the environment first:

The recycling conundrum: How your blue bin hurts the environment

In Alberta electronics are collected and shipped back to Asia where things are stripped accomplishing some recycling of materials but I assume not components.  It would be interesting to see how much CO2 is generated and ulimately how much of the product simply ends up in an Asian landfill.  I would assume that scrounging a few dollars from an old computer would make no sense without the tax we are charged on purchase to collect and ship the things to Asia.

Smart green is nice;  Stupid green is ... stupid.

 

[a_majoor]

Jerry Pournelle:

http://jerrypournelle.com/view/2009/Q4/view599.html#Saturday

Summarizing Climategate

There is a good summary of what is known and what is not known about Climate Change models by MIT Meteorology professor Robert Lindzen in today's Wall Street Journal.
http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB10001424052748703939404
574567423917025400.html

It's a good introduction to what's serious about ClimateGate.

The notion that complex climate "catastrophes" are simply a matter of the response of a single number, GATA, to a single forcing, CO2 (or solar forcing for that matter), represents a gigantic step backward in the science of climate.

  GATA is the globally averaged temperature anomaly. It is the single figure of merit that governs the concern about climate change and global warming, and the real truth is that it can't be measured to the kind of accuracy demanded by the climate change/global warming hypothesis. Debates about the wisdom of governing multi-billion dollar economic decisions on the basis of a single figure of merit are certainly not inappropriate at the policy level; and debates about the reliability of that figure of merit are certainly appropriate in scientific journals. Note that those who advocate those debates are generally denounced as "deniers", and the Climategate Papers suggest strongly that political tactics, not scientific concern, have been the moving issue in much of the UN IPCC reports. Lindzen clarifies this. If you haven't read his paper, it's worth your time to go read it now.

Lindzen summarizes the science, and in an aside says that perhaps the worst crime of the IPCC conspirators as revealed by the Climategate Papers is "their destruction of raw data". We can all agree to that. Do note that the raw data cannot possibly generate a consensus GATA accurate to fractions of a degree. The data aren't that good.

Much of the raw data have been deleted, but some general observations remain. I've mentioned this before, but it's worth reminding ourselves of some things we all know.

The Earth has been much warmer in historical times. We have some general ideas about climate in ancient and classical times, but we needn't go back that far: we all know about the Medieval Warm period. We all know that the Vikings established dairy farms in Greenland. Some of those farms are emerging from glacial ice, but some remain covered. We all know from Doomsday Book that there were vineyards in northern England in the time of William the Conqueror. It's less well known that there were vineyards in Scandinavia and Scotland, but that's easy to establish. We have records of growing seasons from those times from both Europe and China. Protests that the Greenland Viking farms were due to some strange wandering of the Gulf Stream are merely assertions: neither evidence for those wanderings nor mechanisms for accomplishing them are backed with serous evidence. It was just plain warmer from about 800 AD, and that continued until about 1325 when climate changed rather dramatically with a year of dark and cold rain, and it began to get colder. The exact GATA of the Medieval Warm period isn't agreed -- how could it be? -- but that the Earth was warmer then is simply not in doubt, nor is there anything like a consensus on just why we had that warming. It was a significant fact in both Western and Chinese history -- food was more abundant, populations grew, travel was easier -- and the effects seem to have been positive.

We know that the Earth has been much colder in historical times. My favorite example is that the cannon of Ticonderoga, captured by Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys ("by the authority of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress!") and dragged across New England by Henry Knox. Rivers froze solid enough to drag cannon across them. We have other indications of temperatures from 1700 to 1800. It was cold. Rivers froze. Growing seasons were shorter than now. We have similar data for Europe and China. Recall Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates and skating contests on the frozen brackish canals of Holland. Again we have no reliable (to a degree, much less to fractions of a degree) estimations of GATA, but we can all agree that it was considerably colder.

We know that temperatures began slowly to rise sometime after 1800 (there was so far as I know no dramatic event) and the trend was obvious after about 1825. Growing seasons grew longer. Rivers that formerly froze solid became unreliable. Spring icebreaks came earlier, and streams froze later. Cuckoos nested earlier. Those trends continued into the Twentieth Century, and may be continuing now.

We know that the major climate alarm in the 1970's and early 1980's was the fear of a coming Ice Age. Gus Spaeth, Carter's environmental quality advisor, was concerned that nuclear waste depositories be able to withstand glaciation. Margaret Meade as President of AAAS had much to say about the coming bad times as the world began cooling. During the 1980's the speculations of Arrhenius made about 1895 about possible "greenhouse" effects of CO2 began pushing forward, and with increasingly powerful (and cheap) computers climate models became affordable to many academic and scientific institutions. The models began predicting warming, although the data collectors weren't really finding it. The rest is history. There emerged a "consensus" about an "inconvenient truth". Whether that consensus was forced by scientific data or by social engineering is open to question.

Finally we know that one phenomenon of the coldest part of the Little Ice Age was the "Maunder Minimum": a long period of minimal solar activities, characterized by long periods of few to zero sunspots. You can monitor rcent solar activity at http://www.solarcycle24.com/ .

Given that the science is not settled, and that the economic effect of national policy to counter "climate change" are enormous, simple Bayesian analysis would indicate that we ought to be spending a lot of money to determine just what the climate trend is: and that means funding contrarian studies, studies designed to refute the "consensus" theory, as well as funding the collection of accurate data. This seems an obvious conclusion. It is of course inconvenient to those whose careers have been financed by grants peer reviewed by peers who don't include "deniers."

 

[Dennis Ruhl]

I found this examination of climategate to be interesting:

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/Monckton-Caught%20Green-Handed%20Climategate%20Scandal.pdf

According to some the hockey stick should be facing blade down as they project 50 years of cooling.  To approach Copenhagen with corrupt research as our guide is lunacy.  This would make such a great election issue but I think the Conservatives might have sipped the Kool-Aid too.  The mid-term US elections may bring some debate if the world capitalist system remains ungutted and unflayed at the time.

 

[a_majoor]

Considering 54 newspapers around the world are not just actively propagandizing but have orchestrated a syncronized campaign of global kool-aid drinking

http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/12/cmon_everyone_its_time_for_mas.php

C'mon Everyone: It's Time for Mass Editorials!
07 Dec 2009 05:07 pm

Did anyone else manage to read this without thinking of this?

Considering LiveAid's success at ending hunger in Africa, I'm awfully glad newspapers are finally applying this model to global warming.  There's nothing like the sight of fifty-four newspapers performing a synchronized exercise in smug self-congratulation to induce life-altering change.

I am, of course, in favor of not slow-roasting the planet.  But these sort of exercises in mindless collectivism are excruciatingly silly.  Unsurprisingly, the op-ed it produced was puerile and unlikely to be read by anyone who does not already agree with its premise.  If fifty-four newspapers had wanted to make a serious statement about the environment that their readers were sure to pay attention to, they might have stopped printing and distributing their energy intensive product for a day.

 

[Kat Stevens]

Have a look at this latest shot fired in the war on global whatever it is.

http://adland.tv/commercials/moms-against-climate-change-kids-vs-police-demonstration-2009-30-canada

 

[Haletown]

Have a look at this latest shot fired in the war on global whatever it is.

http://adland.tv/commercials/moms-against-climate-change-kids-vs-police-demonstration-2009-30-canada

Joe Goebbels would be very proud of the folks who cooked up that piece of propaganda.

 

[ArmyRick]

9 December 2009, Meaford, Ontario, it ain't global warming today.

 

[Kat Stevens]

For the past week, the warmest it got in my little corner of the globe is -22.  Hope the frost doesn't hurt the pineapple patch out back.

 

[GAP]

-29 here this morning...not sure what the windchill was in the city, but outside of city it was -45..............heat is a wonderful thing.....

 

[Journeyman]

.......heat is a wonderful thing.....

To paraphrase Lord Christopher Monckton, from Apocalypse?No!, "and why do more species live in the tropics? Because if you live in the arctic, you freeze your balls off."  :nod:

 

[a_majoor]

What the warmists do their best to deny:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/12/j-storrs-hall-of-foresight-explains.html

J Storrs Hall of Foresight Explains the Medieval Warm Period and Global Warming

There was a Medieval Warm Period (900-1100 AD), in central Greenland at any rate. But we knew that — that’s when the Vikings were naming it Greenland, after all.

*the axis is degrees C. The Greenland ones are actual (yep, it’s cold there), the Vostok are delta of current temp

* CO2 can migrate in ice, but all that does is smooth out the CO2 record. But CO2 is not the temperature proxy — it’s the isotopic fractions of 18Oxygen and deuterium in the actual ice itself.

United Kingdom’s Met (Meteorological) Office announced that the 2000-2009 decade “has been, by far, the warmest decade on the instrumental record”, and that 2009 is on track to become the fifth warmest year in the past 160 years, continuing the warming trend that has accelerated since the 1970s

We’re pretty lucky to be here during this rare, warm period in climate history. But the broader lesson is, climate doesn’t stand still. It doesn’t even stand stay on the relatively constrained range of the last 10,000 years for more than about 10,000 years at a time.

Does this mean that CO2 isn’t a greenhouse gas? No.

Does it mean that it isn’t warming? No.

Does it mean that we shouldn’t develop clean, efficient technology that gets its energy elsewhere than burning fossil fuels? Of course not. We should do all those things for many reasons — but there’s plenty of time to do them the right way, by developing nanotech. (There’s plenty of money, too, but it’s all going to climate science at the moment. ) And that will be a very good thing to have done if we do fall back into an ice age, believe me.

For climate science it means that the Hockey Team climatologists’ insistence that human-emitted CO2 is the only thing that could account for the recent warming trend is probably poppycock.

If we want climate stability then we will the need the geoengineering and climate control technology to achieve that result.

Nanotechnology for global climate control

City scale climate engineering

FURTHER READING
There is a rundown from a climate skeptic who indicates why the historical numbers matter and why the slope of warming matters and why the amount of effect from CO2 matters and why accurate models matter and why the current models do not appear to be accurate.

1. The slope of recent temperature increases is used as evidence for the anthropogenic theory.

The more the warming falls into a documented natural range of temperature variation, the harder it is to portray it as requiring man-made forcings to explain. This is also the exact same reason alarmist scientists work so hard to eliminate the Medieval Warm Period and little ice age from the temperature record. Again, the goal is to show that natural variation is in a very narrow range, and deviations from this narrow range must therefore be man-made.

2. It is already really hard to justify the huge sensitivities in alarmist forecasts based on past warming — if past warming is lower, forecasts look even more absurd.

When projected back to pre-industrial CO2 levels, these future forecasts imply that we should have seen 2,3,4 or more degrees of warming over the last century, and even the flawed surface temperature records we are discussing with a number of upwards biases and questionable adjustments only shows about 0.6C.

Sure, there are some time delay issues, probably 10-15 years, as well as some potential anthropogenic cooling from aerosols, but none of this closes these tremendous gaps. Even with an exaggerated temperature history, only the no feedback 1C per century case is really validated by history. And, if one assumes the actual warming is less than 0.6C, and only a part of that is from anthropogenic CO2, then the actual warming forecast justified is one of negative feedback, showing less than 1C per century warming from manmade CO2 — which is EXACTLY the case that most skeptics make.

 

[Dennis Ruhl]

Last night on CBC late news was an item about the CO2 produced by the potash mines in Yellowhead County in Alberta.  Nope, there are none in Alberta.  Interestingly Yellowhead County has a lot of coal mines.  With such concise reporting is it no wonder they missed climategate - other than a Rex Murphy comment?  Rex is so un-CBC he must be on his way out.  I guess Marshall McLuhan was right - the medium is the message - because network news has lost its zest to report replacing it with a need to manage the message.  There must be some reporters at the networks who are getting pretty ashamed of themselves.

 

[a_majoor]

The same sort of people who report on "Global Warming" reported this:

http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/10648.html

Journalists and Rocket Scientists
Posted by David Foster on December 7th, 2009 (All posts by David Foster)

In 1920, Robert Goddard was conducting experiments with rockets. In an editorial, The New York Times sneered at Goddard’s work and particularly at the idea that a rocket could function in a vacuum:

That Professor Goddard, with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react – to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.

In 1969…the year of the Apollo moon mission…the NYT finally got around to issuing a correction for their 1920 mistake.

What is noteworthy about the original editorial is not just the ignorance, but the arrogance and the outright nastiness. As the AstronauticsNow post points out, “The enlightened newspaper not only ridiculed the idea that rocket propulsion would work in vacuum but it questioned the integrity and professionalism of Goddard.” The post goes on to say that “The sensationalism and merciless attack by the New York Times and other newspapers left a profound impression on Robert Goddard who became secretive about his work (to detriment of development of rocketry in the United States)…”

It appears that some of the attributes of the NYT which make it so untrustworthy and unlovable today are actually cultural characteristics of long standing.

Worth keeping in mind when reading NYT analyses of Climategate

I suppose we might read the global warming retraction in 2049

 

[a_majoor]

You know the best way to deal with questions of fact and logic? Armed force! Bring on the Brownshirts.

http://biggovernment.com/2009/12/11/un-security-stops-journalists-questions-about-climategate/

UN Security Stops Journalist’s Questions About ClimateGate
by Mike Flynn

A Stanford Professor has used United Nation security officers to silence a journalist asking him “inconvenient questions”  during a press briefing at the climate change conference in Copenhagen.

Professor Stephen Schneider’s assistant requested armed UN security officers who held film maker Phelim McAleer, ordered him to stop filming and prevented further questioning after the press conference where the Stanford academic was launching a book.

McAleer, a veteran journalist and film maker, has recently made a documentary “Not Evil Just Wrong’ which takes a sceptical look at the science and politics behind Global Warming concerns.

He asked Professor Schneider about his opinions on Climategate – where leaked emails have revealed that a senior British professor deleted data and encouraged colleagues to do likewise if it contradicted their belief in Global Warming.

Professor Phil Jones, the head of Britain’s Climate Research Unit, has temporarily stood down pending an investigation into the scandal.

Professor Schneider, who is a senior member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said he would not comment on emails that may have been incomplete or edited.

During some testy exchanges with McAleer, UN officials and Professor Schneider’s assistants twice tried to cut short McAleer’s question.

However as the press conference drew to a close Professor Schneider’s assistant called armed UN security guards to the room. They held McAleer and aggressively ordered cameraman Ian Foster to stop filming. The guard threatened to take away the camera and expel the film crew from the conference if they did not obey his instructions to stop filming Professor Schneider.

The guard demanded to look at the film crews press credentials and refused to allow them to film until Professor Schneider left the room.

McAleer said he was disappointed by Professor Schneider’s behaviour.

“It was a press conference. Climategate is a major story – it goes to the heart of the Global Warming debate by calling into question the scientific data and the integrity of many scientists involved.”

“These questions should be answered. The attempts by UN officials and Professor Schneider’s assistant to remove my microphone were hamfisted  but events took a more sinister turn when they called an armed UN security officer to silence a journalist.”

Two officers corralled the film crew and one officer can be seen on tape threatening the cameraman. The Guard can also be heard warning that if the crew did not stop filming their would seize the equipment and the journalists expelled from the conference.

McAleer says he has made an official complaint tabout the incident.

“I have met Mr Christopher Ankerson the UN’s head of security for the conference and he has confirmed it was Professor Schneider’s staff who asked the security guards to come corral us at the press conference. Mr Ankerson could not say what grounds the security guard had for ordering us to stop filming.”

“This is a blatant attempt to stop journalists doing journalism and asking hard questions. It is not the job of armed UN security officers to stop legitimate journalists asking legitimate questions of senior members of the UN’s IPCC.”

Professor Schneider was interviewed for McAleer’s “Not Evil Just Wrong” documentary but lawyers later wrote to McAleer saying he was withdrawing permission for the interview to be used.

McAleer, who is from Ireland, has gained quite a reputation for asking difficult questions of those who have been promoting the idea of man-made Global Warming.

His microphone was cut off after he asked former vice-president Al Gore about the British court case which found that An Inconvenient Truth had a nine significant errors and exaggerations. Almost 500,000 people have watched the incident on youtube.

 

[wannabe SF member]

Big fraud in Europe due to the carbon tax:

http://news.aol.ca/article/european-fraudsters-steal-7b-in-carbon-credit-scam/753741/?icid=main|canada-hp|dl1|link2|http%3A%2F%2Fnews.aol.ca%2Farticle%2Feuropean-fraudsters-steal-7b-in-carbon-credit-scam%2F753741%2F

 

[Haletown]

a must read . . .  I call it fraud when people organize to deceive

http://climateaudit.org/2009/12/10/ipcc-and-the-trick/

 

[Haletown]

and the keep telling us it s getting warmer, but they don't tell us that it is the adjusted data that shows what they want.


How do they "adjust" thew data. . .  the "homogenize" it. . . .  more like Pasteurize it.

Why does the adjusted data always raise the temperature ?

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/11/giss-raw-station-data-before-and-after/#more-14001

Blink 

 

[Haletown]

very good summary . . .

http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2009/12/trick-in-context.html#comments

"The "trick" in context is clearly an effort by activist scientists at the highest levels of the IPCC to misrepresent scientific complexity to policy makers and the public. "

'nuff said . . .