- The exemptions contained within the provisions for a carbon levy vitiated the primary declared purpose of the levy, to combat carbon emissions and hence “global warming”
- The exemptions would cause the levy to fall disproportionately on gasoline and heating oils and not on other carbon emissions, thereby breaching the principle that taxation should be evenly and fairly borne.
31 December 2009
The French Carbon Tax Bill is Found Unconstitutional
The new French carbon tax was scheduled to go into law on 1 January 2010. The tax was 17 euros per ton of carbon dioxide (USD $24.40). In France, if at least 60 Deputies of the House and 60 Senators appeal to the Constitutional Council, it has the power to determine the constitutionality of a proposed law. The 2010 national budget of France, which contained enabling provisions for a carbon tax has been ruled unconstitutional on two grounds:
30 December 2009
The Fatal Missing Atmospheric Hotspot of CO2 Alarmist Theory
Dr. David Evans has written a very good summary of the fatal problem of the climate computer models that claim to provide a good match to the increasing temperatures of the late 20th Century based on atmospheric CO2 concentrations. What the modelers have done is taken a theory of greenhouse gases and added theories of sulfate aerosols, ozone, volcanic aerosols, and solar irradiance to plot the expected temperature changes as a function of altitude in the atmosphere and as a function of latitude over the Earth. In reality, they have tuned the many variables and theories to produce results which they claim are predictive of the land surface temperatures for the period from 1958 to 1999. If these theories are valid, then the predictions of temperatures at various altitudes and latitudes must also be correct. The following plots show changes relative to the baseline temperatures prior to 1958 as modeled by Santer et. al in 2000 and are taken from Fig. 1.3. of a report by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program in 2006, Chapter 1. This data was also used in the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007.
It should be noted that the upper left plot is for the measured increases in CO2 concentrations and those increases in water vapor which Santer and others believed would result from the warming caused by the CO2. Most of the actual warming in this model is actually provided by the increase in the amount of water vapor, which is greatest in the Earth's warmer areas. The warming of this extra water vapor over the Equator and nearby latitudes produces the hot spot over the equator and near it. The enhanced warming due to water vapor is what is termed a positive feedback and is a situation which is inclined to be susceptible to run-away events in which a vicious cycle of CO2 and water vapor in the atmosphere lead to more and more heating, then more and more CO2 and water in the atmosphere and more and more heating. This is an important assumption of this theory and forms its primary basis for the claim that catastrophe may result.
We should note that only direct changes in the solar irradiance are modeled here. The changing flux of cosmic rays as solar activity varies with changing affects on cloud formation and the ozone layers are not included. Many other natural effects are also not included since little was known about them in 2000 and not much more is known today, thanks to the misspending of most of the climate research funds due to the alarmist scare. But, if the factors modeled are the most important factors pertaining to climate change, such features as the very prominent hot spot near and above the equator at altitudes of 8 to 12 km with elevated temperatures of 1.0 to 1.2C should be measured by balloons equipped with transmitters to send back temperatures measured as the balloon ascends to high altitudes in the atmosphere. There are good records going back to the 1960s with hundreds of balloon flights having the ability to measure temperatures with an accuracy of better than 0.1C.
The actual measured warming from 1979 to 1999 in the atmosphere by balloons is shown below. This is Part E of Fig. 5.7 on page 116 of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program Report of 2006.
It should be noted that the upper left plot is for the measured increases in CO2 concentrations and those increases in water vapor which Santer and others believed would result from the warming caused by the CO2. Most of the actual warming in this model is actually provided by the increase in the amount of water vapor, which is greatest in the Earth's warmer areas. The warming of this extra water vapor over the Equator and nearby latitudes produces the hot spot over the equator and near it. The enhanced warming due to water vapor is what is termed a positive feedback and is a situation which is inclined to be susceptible to run-away events in which a vicious cycle of CO2 and water vapor in the atmosphere lead to more and more heating, then more and more CO2 and water in the atmosphere and more and more heating. This is an important assumption of this theory and forms its primary basis for the claim that catastrophe may result.
We should note that only direct changes in the solar irradiance are modeled here. The changing flux of cosmic rays as solar activity varies with changing affects on cloud formation and the ozone layers are not included. Many other natural effects are also not included since little was known about them in 2000 and not much more is known today, thanks to the misspending of most of the climate research funds due to the alarmist scare. But, if the factors modeled are the most important factors pertaining to climate change, such features as the very prominent hot spot near and above the equator at altitudes of 8 to 12 km with elevated temperatures of 1.0 to 1.2C should be measured by balloons equipped with transmitters to send back temperatures measured as the balloon ascends to high altitudes in the atmosphere. There are good records going back to the 1960s with hundreds of balloon flights having the ability to measure temperatures with an accuracy of better than 0.1C.
The actual measured warming from 1979 to 1999 in the atmosphere by balloons is shown below. This is Part E of Fig. 5.7 on page 116 of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program Report of 2006.
The lower atmosphere, or the troposphere, is relatively uniformly warmed compared to the Santer model results used in the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007. Note that the entire range of variation in the plot with altitude and latitude is much less than in the alarmist model plot. The cooling of the upper atmosphere, the stratosphere, is also less severe and is also more uniform. The hottest warm areas are mostly in the northern hemisphere and only reach up to about 0.3C warmings, not the 1.2C of the models touted as good matches to reality by the UN IPCC. Also, very notably, the major hot spot over the equator and latitudes nearby is missing. This area is largely warmed only about 0.1C and parts of this area are cooled by -0.1C! The warming is at least an order of magnitude less than in the alarmist model at 10 km altitude over the equator!
So, the UN IPCC model result, which is said by them to verify the theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming predicts much greater temperature changes due to their greenhouse gas theory in the atmosphere than is observed and the pattern of those changes is very different than that actually measured. It is inescapable that the UN IPCC and Santer theory is wrong. This is not a case of a theory that needs a bit of tuning yet. This is clearly a case of a very wrongheaded theory.
So, if this theory is wrong, then there is no reason to believe that the rise in temperatures of the late 20th Century was caused in significant part by the increased concentration of CO2 during that period. There is also no reason to believe that one of the affects of increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere must be an increase in water vapor which then causes more net warming than the CO2 increase itself did. This means that the claim that increases in CO2 concentrations may cause runaway global warming are without basis! In fact, this part of the model was clearly very dubious, since if it were correct, the Earth would have been likely to have had many such catastrophic run-ups of temperature in the past. There is no evidence of this in the geological record. In fact, recent work has established that the water vapor feedback to warming in general and to CO2 increases in particular is one of negative feedback. The water cycle is a moderating effect on climate.
It is clear that the warming effect of CO2 is much, much smaller than that predicted by the Santer and other climate models touted by the UN IPCC. In fact, it is very much more likely that it is not more than about a tenth as strong an effect as these models believed it to be. In fact, now that we know that the land surface temperature data Santer, the UN IPCC, and other alarmists have been trying to explain was inflated with urban heat island effects and data manipulations, the CO2 greenhouse effect had to be exaggerated to match that falsely higher temperature data at the ground. By manipulating data to create a sense of alarm due to large temperature increases, the alarmists also guaranteed that they could not explain real atmospheric temperature data with any theory that would match what they claimed the ground temperatures were.
Lies will always get you in the end. It is especially foolish to lie about science. Political lies may have a long lifetime, but science lies rarely do. It is shameful that this science lie had as long a life as it did though. It is painful that it has also had so much harmful impact on society and government. Scientists will be paying a price in lost respect for a long time due to the lie that man's emissions of CO2 have created what is likely to be or might be a catastrophic climate future. I know I am using strong language here, but any scientist worthy of the name should long ago have backed away from the embarrassing claims made by the anthropogenic global warming alarmists. This episode has borne a strong resemblance to Stalinist science.
The Skeptic's Handbook by Joanne Nova
There is a very nice summary of the issues of catastrophic man-made global warming claimed to be due to man adding CO2 to the atmosphere by Joanne Nova. It is very suitable for reasonably intelligent high school and college students. Apparently, she had believed in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming until 2007, when she understood why the theory or hypothesis was wrong. Her presentation is well-reasoned and cuts to the essentials.
27 December 2009
Summary of Reasons Why Man's CO2 Emissions Are Not Causing Catastrophic Global Warming
I was challenged to give my reasons for opposing the claims of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming on another website. I summarized them with the following list, with some additions within points since:
Reasons why CO2 emitted by man is not causing global warming:
1) The rise of atmospheric CO2 concentrations since 1850 to the level of 2008 made almost no difference in the infra-red radiation absorbed since almost all of the infra-red radiation was already being absorbed that CO2 can absorb in 1850. The temperature increase due to the CO2 increase since 1850 is about 0.12C.
2) The residence time of man's CO2 emissions in the atmosphere is about 5 years, not the 50 to 200 years claimed in one part of the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007, but in agreement with another part of the same report.
3) The portion of the CO2 in the atmosphere due to man is estimated to be about 1.2% to maybe a couple of % based on other reasonable assumptions. The seas and plants are the dominant factors determining the atmospheric concentration of CO2. Warming seas add to the atmospheric CO2, while plants use large amounts of it to grow. Warming causes CO2 to increase and is partially offset by more plant growth which uses more CO2. Warming will also cause land minerals to react with more CO2.
4) The hot spot from about 8 to 12 km altitude near the equator that should be found if CO2 is acting as strongly as a greenhouse gas and enhancing the greenhouse gas effect of water vapor as is claimed by the UN IPCC AR4 report has been searched for and it is not present. This is definitive proof that the UN IPCC computer models are wrong about the role of CO2.
5) The temperatures on other planets and moons in our solar system are also rising, which is consistent with measurements of the solar cycle.
6) Much of the claimed rise in land surface temperatures is due to the urban heat island effect, which has increased the reported temperatures in recent decades due to the closing down of more accurate rural weather stations around the world. Few station sites follow the rules for good siting. Urban stations should be entirely excluded when recording temperatures for global warming or cooling effects or assessing the effects of greenhouse gases such as CO2.
7) Much raw temperature data has recently been pried loose from national temperature archives, often thanks to dogged requests under Freedom of Information Acts. The rural stations in the U.S., Russia, Northern Europe, northern Australia, and New Zealand whose data has been examined carefully show little to no late 20th Century temperature increase. The data used in the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007 was heavily manipulated, in ways that make no scientific sense, to enhance a rapid rise of temperatures in the late 20th Century.
8) There is much evidence that the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warming, the Minoan Warming, and the Halocene Warmings b and a and other warmings were warmer than the present time.
9) The rate of the temperature increase at the start of the Medieval Warm Period was similar to that we had in the late 20th Century using even the inflated and manipulated temperature data. There was also a warming period around 1700 in which the temperature rose 2.2C in just 36 years, compared to the 0.7C temperature increase of the 20th Century.
10) The sea surface temperature data and the satellite temperature data for the late 20th Century show much smaller temperature increases than does the manipulated land surface data used by the alarmists. The oceans cover 70% of the Earth and the satellites read temperatures over the entire Earth.
11) The atmospheric concentrations of CO2 follow temperature increases rather than preceding them, consistent with dissolved CO2 being emitted upon the warming of the oceans or dissolved when the oceans cool. Due to high pressure, the deep ocean waters hold huge amounts of CO2, but it takes a long time to warm those waters in response to solar irradiance changes, so the rise in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere will lag general warming events by long times.
12) Despite a continued rapid rate of CO2 concentration increase in the atmosphere since 1998, the temperatures have not risen, which was noted as an embarrassment in the dumped CRU e-mails. The much touted computer models are baffled by this.
Of course one could add more on our recently improved understanding of the reasons why natural forces are the dominant players in the real climate outside of urban areas, but I had to keep the text within reasonable bounds, so I minimized that discussion.
Reasons why CO2 emitted by man is not causing global warming:
1) The rise of atmospheric CO2 concentrations since 1850 to the level of 2008 made almost no difference in the infra-red radiation absorbed since almost all of the infra-red radiation was already being absorbed that CO2 can absorb in 1850. The temperature increase due to the CO2 increase since 1850 is about 0.12C.
2) The residence time of man's CO2 emissions in the atmosphere is about 5 years, not the 50 to 200 years claimed in one part of the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007, but in agreement with another part of the same report.
3) The portion of the CO2 in the atmosphere due to man is estimated to be about 1.2% to maybe a couple of % based on other reasonable assumptions. The seas and plants are the dominant factors determining the atmospheric concentration of CO2. Warming seas add to the atmospheric CO2, while plants use large amounts of it to grow. Warming causes CO2 to increase and is partially offset by more plant growth which uses more CO2. Warming will also cause land minerals to react with more CO2.
4) The hot spot from about 8 to 12 km altitude near the equator that should be found if CO2 is acting as strongly as a greenhouse gas and enhancing the greenhouse gas effect of water vapor as is claimed by the UN IPCC AR4 report has been searched for and it is not present. This is definitive proof that the UN IPCC computer models are wrong about the role of CO2.
5) The temperatures on other planets and moons in our solar system are also rising, which is consistent with measurements of the solar cycle.
6) Much of the claimed rise in land surface temperatures is due to the urban heat island effect, which has increased the reported temperatures in recent decades due to the closing down of more accurate rural weather stations around the world. Few station sites follow the rules for good siting. Urban stations should be entirely excluded when recording temperatures for global warming or cooling effects or assessing the effects of greenhouse gases such as CO2.
7) Much raw temperature data has recently been pried loose from national temperature archives, often thanks to dogged requests under Freedom of Information Acts. The rural stations in the U.S., Russia, Northern Europe, northern Australia, and New Zealand whose data has been examined carefully show little to no late 20th Century temperature increase. The data used in the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007 was heavily manipulated, in ways that make no scientific sense, to enhance a rapid rise of temperatures in the late 20th Century.
8) There is much evidence that the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warming, the Minoan Warming, and the Halocene Warmings b and a and other warmings were warmer than the present time.
9) The rate of the temperature increase at the start of the Medieval Warm Period was similar to that we had in the late 20th Century using even the inflated and manipulated temperature data. There was also a warming period around 1700 in which the temperature rose 2.2C in just 36 years, compared to the 0.7C temperature increase of the 20th Century.
10) The sea surface temperature data and the satellite temperature data for the late 20th Century show much smaller temperature increases than does the manipulated land surface data used by the alarmists. The oceans cover 70% of the Earth and the satellites read temperatures over the entire Earth.
11) The atmospheric concentrations of CO2 follow temperature increases rather than preceding them, consistent with dissolved CO2 being emitted upon the warming of the oceans or dissolved when the oceans cool. Due to high pressure, the deep ocean waters hold huge amounts of CO2, but it takes a long time to warm those waters in response to solar irradiance changes, so the rise in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere will lag general warming events by long times.
12) Despite a continued rapid rate of CO2 concentration increase in the atmosphere since 1998, the temperatures have not risen, which was noted as an embarrassment in the dumped CRU e-mails. The much touted computer models are baffled by this.
Of course one could add more on our recently improved understanding of the reasons why natural forces are the dominant players in the real climate outside of urban areas, but I had to keep the text within reasonable bounds, so I minimized that discussion.
26 December 2009
The Unbearable Smugness of the Elitist Environmentalist/Socialist
My youngest daughter, Kate, has an interest in sustainable housing. This has grown out of her extensive work with the Habitat Club at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), of which she was the president last year. She continues to work with the club while working as a lab technician in medical research at the University of Rochester. RIT also has a Sustainability Center and the engineering departments have worked up inexpensive ways to build homes that use less energy and they are building such a home with the Habitat Club. So, Kate was watching a show on Green TV in which a woman had installed a large tub of water in her home as part of a low-energy use heating system. Now, I saw too little of this show to know whether this was a good idea or one of those half-baked and not yet ready for prime time ideas, but the show host asked the home owner how long it would take her to recover her initial investment in lowered energy costs. She thought it would be 10 years. The host smiled and said that she would also enjoy the smugness factor. She smiled in response and he smiled even broader, putting his thumb up. She responded with a thumbs up and an even broader smile.
Yes, the smugness factor is critical in the religion of environmentalism. Just as it used to be in religion and in some places still is today. It is the preservation of this wonderfully easy to attain smugness factor that causes the elite environmentalist to flare into such vicious anger when a scientist such as myself questions any part of the following thesis:
- The Earth is warming at an unusually high rate.
- This warming is caused by the greenhouse effect of CO2 in the atmosphere.
- Man has been putting more and more CO2 into the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Age in about 1850. This CO2 lingers in the atmosphere for 50 to 200 years, causing virtually all of the concentration increase measured since 1850.
- This increased atmospheric concentration has caused the greenhouse effect due to CO2 to increase greatly and caused the rapid temperature increases of the late 20th Century.
- There are further run-away effects which may well cause the CO2 greenhouse effect to heat the Earth catastrophically.
- We must use much less fossil fuel, indeed virtually none at all, if we are to avoid this catastrophe and we must stop using it very quickly.
Now, one might think that assessing these issues would be a matter for very rational scientific and economic thought. I have many times in the past disputed other ideas held widely among the college educated socialist-leaning elite. In the 1960s and early 1970s, I strongly opposed the urban bulldozing of the homes of the poor in the inner cities and I have long opposed the idea that government can be entrusted with the education of our children. I was called callous toward the poor for these reasons. I have opposed Affirmative Action as morally wrong and as an insult to those minorities who were said to be unable to compete without it. I was sometimes called a racist. But never have I been attacked with such vitriol has I have been for arguing against the tenets of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (AGW).
Let's review some of the things said about me for claiming the catastrophic man-made global warming argument above was wrong. Here are some examples in response to asking fellow alumni from Brown University and Case Western Reserve University on LinkedIn if they were aware of a faculty member at the university who was skeptical of catastrophic AGW and the ensuing discussion:
Ian Forrester said... "Solar induced cooling [my noting that water vapor and CO2 absorb solar insolation before it reaches the surface]? What evidence do you have of that nonsense. Please try and behave like a scientist if you are claiming to be one." Then later said: "You don't really have a Ph D do you? How anyone who has a real Ph D would refer to Plimer's book as "excellent" just shows what little knowledge of science you have."
Rick LeFauve said "Perhaps you need to check the NASCAR dept?
Michael Thomenius said "Dr. Anderson... you are currently engaging in a internet behavior known as trolling [apparently trolling my own posted question]. It is generally considered to be psychologically akin to flashing or putting shaving cream on someone's door knob." Later: "Perhaps your next post will use the phrase "the ethically questionable practice of abortion", "the controversial theory of evolution" or "the massive failings of the Bush White House"." Then still later: "It's just rude." Still later: "I am bent on making rants like your's unwelcome."
Lonnie Fogel: "And the world is flat!", using the common put-down of catastrophic AGW deniers as flat-earthers.
I was also called a racist for opposing Obama on his carbon cap and trade legislation, called a flat-earther on several other occasions, accused of believing that the Earth was only a few thousand years old, accused elsewhere of believing that women should not be allowed abortions, frequently accused of only listening to Fox News, and frequently informed that I was anti-science. And, of course, I was told that I should submit to the overwhelming consensus of other scientists that catastrophic AGW was real innumerable times, laying my own independent judgment aside.
The last time such homogeneity of belief was required was in a communist country such as North Korea, Cuba, Red China, or the USSR, or in many of the Muslim countries. In the Western European tradition, we have to go back to the times when small disagreements on elements of the Christian religion could subject men to death in earlier times and then still to complete ostracism in later times. Why is belief in catastrophic AGW so important to so many today?
As has been often observed, many of today's environmentalists are really socialists on the inside wrapped in a green cover. They are often described as watermelons. This is largely true. The failure of the USSR and the conversion of Red China into a strange mix of control and command economy with some encouragements to private enterprise, the failure of socialism to become thoroughly accepted by the American people, the phenomena of many Western European countries backing away from socialism to revive their economies, and the improvement of East European countries after they abandoned communism all left these socialists very dispirited. Environmentalism gave them a more acceptable cause to rally around.
Now if socialism was supposed to improve the condition of the common man, it was apparent very long ago that it was a failure. Those who continued to find socialism appealing in most cases had ulterior motives. Very often they were educated people who claimed they had an obligation to help those who were poor, discriminated against, or disabled because those people could not help themselves. These people were educated in government schools and government is always seeking to discover problems it can use to justify an expansion of government power, frequently in defiance of the constitutions which limit their power. These schools are pervaded by extensive propaganda designed for this purpose. The universities continue this program of propaganda because they are often funded mostly by government or their research programs are funded by government and their faculty chose a university environment often because they do not like private enterprise. Power and income for such faculty comes with being very cozy with government. Claiming that many people are downtrodden and in need of government help and hence the help of the educated elite furthers this goal, while allowing the educated elite to feel very superior and to gain a virtue easily earned by simply advocating many new government programs.
But, the clear failures of socialism put this program of moral smugness, power, and money self-aggrandizement for the educated elite in jeopardy. In earlier times, the socialists had often been impressed by the philosophical viewpoint of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who pictured the ideal state of man as that of primitive men in close touch with nature. The socialists mostly liked his opposition to the capitalist industrial age, while mostly opposing Rousseau in that they claimed they wanted the common man to have the benefit of many of the worldly goods then available to the middle class.
The modern frustrated socialists could hardly admit that the only way the common man was going to live like the middle class of old was for countries to turn whole-heartedly toward Capitalism. First, this would be to admit they had been wrong. Second, the Capitalist system inherently accepts the idea that most people are capable of managing their own lives in accordance with the values they have chosen for themselves. What would be the exalted function of the educated elite in such a system? My God, they would really have to work and actually become productive to be admired and to earn the comforts they felt entitled to by virtue of their many years of study. This would not do.
So, the only other direction they could see to turn in was that of Rousseau who viewed modern man as a destroyer of nature. This view they could adopt and claim that their knowledge and advice was essential to the government which would use its force to reign in the appetites of the people for more and more goods. People now, even poor people, were living better than the kings of 200 years ago. It would not be easy to get them to give up their newly acquired worldly goods in the name of protecting the environment and loving nature and Mother Earth. The development of a religious fervor for nature would be necessary. Man would have to be convinced that he was the destroyer of nature and with its destruction he, of course, was at risk. This promise of catastrophe would cause the now unbelievably wealthy poor and middle class all to join with these frustrated college-educated elitists in the common goal of saving Mother Earth.
But, most men are not altogether comfortable viewing themselves as destroyers. So, you logically enlist them as saviors of the Earth by getting them to recycle goods which are not economical to recycle and by convincing them that they are doing the Earth great good if they use less fossil fuel energy, even though there is no real scientific evidence that man's emissions of CO2 due to using fossil fuels are creating any catastrophic anthropogenic global warming at all. But, such a claim gives people a mission and makes them part of the cause.
Meanwhile, the educated elite still can believe they are essential and in control and morally superior because they are the priests of this new religion. They provide the scientific evidence that man is destroying the Earth, they get to rail against the Industrial Age of the Capitalists they have always hated, they get lots of money and prestige for developing the alternative energy, CO2 sequestration schemes, and sustainability advances in the universities, and they get to remain advisers to the governments on all the development of new government programs to address the overwhelmingly large issues due to man harming the environment. At the same time, that hated private sector can be diminished.
Unfortunately for our college-educated elite of socialists turned environmentalists, most people kinda like their many worldly goods, services, and their property. When, they do not have to give these up, or give up their jobs, or be much more heavily taxed, they are rather susceptible to the argument from authority provided by the league of college-educated elitist socialists/environmentalists. But, when the level of pain they are expected to bear becomes greater, they start to pay attention and, it turns out, their minds are not so feeble as the elitists thought they were. More and more begin to question the reality of such theses as catastrophic man-made global warming. The polls in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States are all showing this awakening phenomena of the common man.
You see, it turns out that the Capitalist idea that most men are capable of managing their own lives is right. They are not the dumb automatons the college-educated socialist elite often thinks they are. But, of course, it does help if some college-educated scientists and economists do help them to acquire the data and the arguments that counter those of the college-educated socialist/environmentalist elite. For one thing, the consensus they have so much argued exists begins to look a lot less monolithic. It becomes more and more acceptable to question the orthodoxy of the new religion. The college-educated dogma denier is now hated by the elite as a turncoat, a heretic, why even the devil himself.
So, the college-educated socialist/environmentalist elitist tries to shut up the dogma denier with assertions that since they mostly agree, he must be wrong. Or, they pretend it is his duty to prove them wrong, while they claim any argument he makes against their thesis is wrong because they do not agree with him and that is clear in the peer-reviewed journals they control. They say he is unscientific because he does not bow to the consensus of the many pro-catastrophic anthropogenic global warming articles in the college-dominated peer-reviewed literature. They call him rude for discussing the matter. They describe him as a mere internet personality. They assume that since he is a turncoat from their viewpoint, then he must have all the attributes they believe the non-elite have.
So, what are these non-elite attributes? Well, the non-elite love NASCAR. The non-elite do not think a woman has a right to an abortion. The non-elite believe the Earth is flat. The non-elite do not believe in evolution. The non-elite are racist. The non-elite watch Fox News.
I do not pay attention to NASCAR, though I have analyzed hard coatings used in their engines and drive-trains and I have a brother who enjoys NASCAR. I see nothing wrong with enjoying NASCAR. I do believe a woman has a right to an abortion, but I also believe taxpayer money cannot morally be used for the purpose. I know the earth to be round and I think the theory of evolution is well-founded. I am not a racist.
I do watch Fox News, since it is the only television news which is not biased against Capitalism. But I also read widely on the Internet, read The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, The Washington Examiner, Forbes, The Economist, many science and technology journals, and many books. But, I am at fault for not reading the New York Times or the Washington Post, though two copies of the latter are delivered to our home daily. Actually, I do read it, but mostly just the Sports section, showing my non-elitist true soul. The two copies are for the wealth of coupons my wife clips from them. She saves much more money a week than the cost of the two subscriptions and she likes to read about concerts and museum exhibits, as well as the news in them.
But, back to what this all shows us about the thinking of the college-educated socialist/environmentalist elitist. You see, when they were mostly just socialists, it really did not bother them that there was good evidence, which many behind the Iron Curtain knew all too well, that the common man was not faring well in those socialist utopias compared to the poor souls in those nasty sort-of Capitalist countries of the West. No, the western elitists were still enthusiastic socialists. How could this be? After all, they claimed they believed in socialism to help the poor and the common man. Well, the reality was they really did not much care about the poor or the common man. How could they? They really thought those people were to be looked down upon. How can you respect anyone you do not even think can manage their own lives? So, when they saw these common people loving NASCAR, then NASCAR became something to be sneered at. The claim of interest in the common man was disingenuous. It was really a lust for power and money and influence and that wonderful feeling of easily acquired moral smugness. They all agreed among themselves that they were wonderful, good, enlightened people.
The same is the case now that they have transformed into environmental/socialists. The fact that the only evidence for global warming by CO2 was a combination of excluding rural measurement stations giving true temperature readings in favor of sites with urban heat island effects or stations too close to homes, grills, air-conditioner vents, or newly applied coatings to hold in the heat of day into the evening, and absolutely crazy raw temperature data manipulations does not really matter to these people. This is no more important than the knowledge of decades of human suffering in the communist countries was. The only thing important is to keep the common man from becoming aware of this. Pure socialism only lost its public supportability when the common man saw its obvious failure with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the re-unification of Germany, and the rise of commerce and trade in China.
If it becomes known to the common people that the scientific theory the elitists backed so strongly that man was destroying the Earth by emitting CO2 from his use of fossil fuels is wrong, they do not know where to turn next for an easy route to smug moral superiority, to power, to wealth, influence, and respect. It has become absolutely vital to shut down those scientists who say the science of catastrophic CO2-induced global warming is wrong. I will not shut up. It is absolutely vital that every American becomes aware of the truth that the warming of the late 20th Century was much milder than the alarmists claimed, that it was not caused in any significant measure by man's use of fossil fuels, and that the declaration by the EPA that CO2 is a pollutant is nonsense, as is the idea that carbon cap and trade will accomplish anything to keep the world from overheating.
25 December 2009
Prince Charles Says the World is Doomed If We Do Not Act Within 7 Years
Prince Charles, the queen of England's husband, has declared that unless we drastically cut back within 7 years on man's use of fossil fuels which produce CO2, the Earth is doomed!
The situation is so bad that he flew to the Copenhagen Climate Summit in one of the Queen's jets on the same day that Gordon Brown flew on another, non-commercial flight. They could not share a plane or even take one of the 16 commercial flights scheduled into Copenhagen that day. Stephen Glover goes on to report:
The situation is so bad that he flew to the Copenhagen Climate Summit in one of the Queen's jets on the same day that Gordon Brown flew on another, non-commercial flight. They could not share a plane or even take one of the 16 commercial flights scheduled into Copenhagen that day. Stephen Glover goes on to report:
The Copenhagen summit, supposed to produce an agreement limiting greenhouse gases, has, according to experts, the same carbon footprint as a medium-sized African country such as Malawi.
It is wonderful to be a smug elitist saving the world from the energy use of the less fortunate masses!
There are an amazing 34,000 delegates attending the event, and the grander among them are forced, says my colleague Robert Hardman in Copenhagen, to park their private jets in Norway because Denmark has run out of Tarmac, and to procure their gas-guzzling limousines from Germany.
Another Cosmic Ray Effect on the Climate
I have previously discussed the variability of cosmic radiation incident upon the Earth and its effect upon climate through the formation of sunlight-reflecting clouds here, here, here, here, and here. Now there is a theory that the interaction of cosmic rays with chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and their effect upon the ozone layer have completely controlled the climate in the Arctic and Antarctic atmospheres since 1950. Qing-Bin Lu, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, was studying the depletion of the Earth's ozone layer, which was known to be a result of CFCs and of cosmic ray radiation. He has discovered that CO2 concentrations have no effect upon the Arctic and Antarctic surface temperatures. He says the concentration of CFCs, which are greenhouse gases, decreased in about 2000 and global temperatures have fallen since then.
Lu claims that the warming from 1950 to 2000 became cooling in 2002 and the cooling trend will continue for the next 50 years. He says from 1850 to 1950, global temperatures were nearly constant or rose by only 0.1C.
Lu claims that the warming from 1950 to 2000 became cooling in 2002 and the cooling trend will continue for the next 50 years. He says from 1850 to 1950, global temperatures were nearly constant or rose by only 0.1C.
In previously published work, Lu demonstrated that an observed cyclic hole in the ozone layer provided proof of a new ozone depletion theory involving cosmic rays, which was developed by Lu and his former co-workers at Rutgers University and the Université de Sherbrooke. In the past, it was generally accepted for more than two decades that the Earth's ozone layer is depleted due to the sun's ultraviolet light-induced destruction of CFCs in the atmosphere.
The depletion theory says cosmic rays, rather than the sun's UV light, play the dominant role in breaking down ozone-depleting molecules and then ozone. In his study, published in Physical Review Letters, Lu analyzed reliable cosmic ray and ozone data in the period of 1980-2007, which cover two full 11-year solar cycles.
In his latest paper, Lu further proves the cosmic-ray-driven ozone depletion theory by showing a large number of data from laboratory and satellite observations. One reviewer wrote: "These are very strong facts and it appears that they have largely been ignored in the past when modelling the Antarctic ozone loss."
New observations of the effects of CFCs and cosmic rays on ozone loss and global warming/cooling could be important to the Earth and humans in the 21st century. "It certainly deserves close attention," Lu wrote in his paper, entitled Cosmic-Ray-Driven Electron-Induced Reactions of Halogenated Molecules Adsorbed on Ice Surfaces: Implications for Atmospheric Ozone Depletion and Global Climate Change.
The paper, published Dec. 3 in Physics Reports, is available online at: dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.physrep.2009.12.002.My expectation is that Lu effect may be significant and may be particularly important in the Arctic and Antarctic regions, but the effect of cosmic rays on cloud nucleation and formation in the mid-latitudes and tropics is also important. In both cases, the flux of cosmic rays on Earth is largely controlled by the solar wind and therefore by the solar cycle. Of course the direct solar irradiance, which also changes with the solar cycle, is also important, as is the most important greenhouse gas, water vapor. These are the dominant factors affecting the net energy input to the Earth, with ocean cycles playing an important role in the transfer of long-stored energy to or from the atmosphere as well. Volcanoes, hot springs in the oceans, the interaction of the Sun's electromagnetic field with the Earth's, and the solar wind as a flux of incident particles itself, all play roles in the climate and its variations as well. The magnitude of each of these factors on the climate is as yet not well enough understood. One thing that is clear is that the effect of CO2 at present atmospheric concentrations or at those concentrations which are higher than at present, is a relatively unimportant effect upon climate change.
24 December 2009
The Socialist Core of the Copenhagen Climate Summit
The recently failed Copenhagen Climate Summit attempted to reach worldwide intergovernmental agreements on drastic fossil fuel energy use. No binding commitments were reached, much to my relief given the faulty science the whole idea of CO2 emissions reductions is based on and the huge damage to economic activity and individual expenses of the cheap energy use reductions. Given these problems, why does the catastrophic AGW thesis get so much uncritical support?
This article in The Australian contains a very important nugget of information on just this issue. The important part was the response of the Copenhagen Climate Summit delegates to Hugo Chavez of Venezuela:
This article in The Australian contains a very important nugget of information on just this issue. The important part was the response of the Copenhagen Climate Summit delegates to Hugo Chavez of Venezuela:
Then President Chavez brought the house down.
When he said the process in Copenhagen was “not democratic, it is not inclusive, but isn’t that the reality of our world, the world is really an imperial dictatorship…down with imperial dictatorships” he got a rousing round of applause.
When he said there was a “silent and terrible ghost in the room” and that ghost was called capitalism, the applause was deafening.
But then he wound up to his grand conclusion – 20 minutes after his 5 minute speaking time was supposed to have ended and after quoting everyone from Karl Marx to Jesus Christ - “our revolution seeks to help all people…socialism, the other ghost that is probably wandering around this room, that’s the way to save the planet, capitalism is the road to hell....let’s fight against capitalism and make it obey us.” He won a standing ovation.
Controlling Wikipedia's Articles on Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming
The close-knit group of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (AGW) zealots had a major problem: How were they going to make the Medieval Warm Period, well-known in the history books, scholarly publications, and encyclopedias disappear so the temperature rise in the late 20th Century would look remarkable and uniquely rapid? Indeed, it would be best if the temperatures of the last thousand years or so looked pretty stable and then the temperatures shot up. The hockey stick temperature proxy data of Michael Mann and Keith Briffa was so manipulated as to provide the thousand year flat and steady temperature history they desired. Weird additions to the late 20th Century land surface temperatures and the movement of weather stations into cities and metropolitan area suburbs provided the dramatic necessary temperature rises of the late 20th Century needed to spread the alarm that man was destroying the Earth with his use of fossil fuels and the resulting emissions of CO2, a supposedly viscous greenhouse gas.
But all of those already published books told everyone about the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age that ended about 1840. How might they spread the necessary misinformation quickly and get it into the hands of a public largely "educated" in government-run schools and therefore untutored in history and science? They set up a website called RealClimate.org to put out the party line. But then they still had to control the very popular source of easily searched information called Wikipedia. William Connolley, a member of the 9-person RealClimate.org team of bloggers, a United Kingdom scientist, and Green Party activist, took on the job of controlling Wikipedia and its message on catastrophic AGW.
Lawrence Solomon tells the story here. The important remaining part is given here:
Insidious, but it was all done so that the smug elitists could feel good about controlling the ignorant trailer park masses and save the Earth. It was absolutely wonderful how smug they felt. And it was great that they had the full backing of socialists and environmentalists almost to a man and woman. This meant they had the full cooperation of the governments and their government-run schools. The children were really well-indoctrinated, as were all college graduates.
But all of those already published books told everyone about the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age that ended about 1840. How might they spread the necessary misinformation quickly and get it into the hands of a public largely "educated" in government-run schools and therefore untutored in history and science? They set up a website called RealClimate.org to put out the party line. But then they still had to control the very popular source of easily searched information called Wikipedia. William Connolley, a member of the 9-person RealClimate.org team of bloggers, a United Kingdom scientist, and Green Party activist, took on the job of controlling Wikipedia and its message on catastrophic AGW.
Lawrence Solomon tells the story here. The important remaining part is given here:
Connolley took control of all things climate in the most used information source the world has ever known – Wikipedia. Starting in February 2003, just when opposition to the claims of the band members were beginning to gel, Connolley set to work on the Wikipedia site. He rewrote Wikipedia’s articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling. On Feb. 14, he began to erase the Little Ice Age; on Aug.11, the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned his attention to the hockey stick graph. He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band. Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world’s most distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets, followed by others that the band especially hated, such as Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, authorities on the Medieval Warm Period.
All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.
Insidious, but it was all done so that the smug elitists could feel good about controlling the ignorant trailer park masses and save the Earth. It was absolutely wonderful how smug they felt. And it was great that they had the full backing of socialists and environmentalists almost to a man and woman. This meant they had the full cooperation of the governments and their government-run schools. The children were really well-indoctrinated, as were all college graduates.
Claim that Half of Late 20th Century Temperature Rise is Caused by Land Use
Professor Brian Stone, City and Regional Planning Professor, of the Georgia Institute of Technology claims that half of the increase in temperature which has occurred since 1950 is due to land use changes, rather than due to greenhouse gas emissions. The land use changes are largely those of city creation and expansion and the clearing of forests for crops. His study is published in the journal of Environmental Science and Technology.
My expectation on this is that he is largely right, given that he is trying to explain land surface temperature data which shows temperature increases after 1950 which are half due to the fact that many weather stations are in urban and suburban areas and are therefore showing temperature increases due to the urban heat island effect and the remaining half is due to unfounded upward adjustments of the raw temperature measurements such as those we have discussed for the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Northern Europe, Russia, and Alaska. The impact on rural land surface temperatures of land use changes is modest, but perhaps not insignificant. The impact on sea surface temperatures will almost certainly be negligible. This is how I would lay my bets as a scientist deciding where to invest my own research efforts in any case.
My expectation on this is that he is largely right, given that he is trying to explain land surface temperature data which shows temperature increases after 1950 which are half due to the fact that many weather stations are in urban and suburban areas and are therefore showing temperature increases due to the urban heat island effect and the remaining half is due to unfounded upward adjustments of the raw temperature measurements such as those we have discussed for the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Northern Europe, Russia, and Alaska. The impact on rural land surface temperatures of land use changes is modest, but perhaps not insignificant. The impact on sea surface temperatures will almost certainly be negligible. This is how I would lay my bets as a scientist deciding where to invest my own research efforts in any case.
Some Examples of Serious AGW Problems Emphasized by the CRU E-mail Dump
The recent dump of e-mails, documents, and programs from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia by a probable whistle-blower has made the manufactured consensus and the problems of the science by the catastrophic AGW alarmists all the more apparent. Here are a few nuggets:
Much attention has been given to Michael Mann’s (Pennsylvania State University) and Keith Briffa's (CRU) proxy temperature data hockey stick data sets. Briffa was conflicted in this whole process, noting he “[tried] hard to balance the needs of the IPCC with science, which were not always the same. He felt “there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data.’”
Programmer Ian “Harry” Harris, in the Harry_Read_Me.txt file, commented about:
Date: Mon, 05 Oct 2009 03:57:57 -0600
From: Tom Wigley
To: Phil Jones Subject: Re: [geo] Re: CCNet: A Scientific Scandal Unfolds…
139.222.131.184
Phil,
It is distressing to read that American Stinker item. But Keith does seem to have got himself into a mess. As I pointed out in emails, Yamal is insignificant....
But, more generally, (even if it *is* irrelevant) how does Keith explain the McIntyre plot that compares Yamal-12 with Yamal-all? And how does he explain the apparent “selection” of the less well-replicated chronology rather that the later (better replicated) chronology?
Of course, I don’t know how often Yamal-12 has really been used in recent, post-1995, work. I suspect from what you say it is much less often that M&M [McIntyre and fellow sceptic Professor Ross McKitrick] say—but where did they get their information? I presume they went thru papers to see if Yamal was cited, a pretty foolproof method if you ask me.
Perhaps these things can be explained clearly and concisely—but I am not sure Keith is able to do this as he is too close to the issue and probably quite pissed of.
And the issue of with-holding data is still a hot potato, one that affects both you and Keith (and Mann). Yes, there are reasons—but many *good* scientists appear to be unsympathetic to these. The
trouble here is that with-holding data looks like hiding something, and hiding means (in some eyes) that it is bogus science that is being hidden.
I think Keith needs to be very, very careful in how he handles this. I’d be willing to check over anything he puts together.
Tom.
Wigley protested Michael Mann's sending a deceptive graph with a “fluke” result to back up Wigley’s contention that the recent cooling was still consistent with overall warming. He also claimed the IPCC and AGW scientists had made too many “dishonest presentations”.
Much attention has been given to Michael Mann’s (Pennsylvania State University) and Keith Briffa's (CRU) proxy temperature data hockey stick data sets. Briffa was conflicted in this whole process, noting he “[tried] hard to balance the needs of the IPCC with science, which were not always the same. He felt “there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data.’”
Programmer Ian “Harry” Harris, in the Harry_Read_Me.txt file, commented about:
[The] hopeless state of their (CRU) data base. … No uniform data integrity, it’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found. … I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar coordinates. I know it could be old and new stations, but why such large overlaps if that’s the case?Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. …Here is an e-mail from Tom Wigley, the former head of the CRU and now at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, to Phil Jones, the recent head of the CRU in which he expresses concern about Keith Briffa's work:
This whole project is SUCH A MESS. No wonder I needed therapy!!
I am seriously close to giving up, again. The history of this is so complex that I can’t get far enough into it before by head hurts and I have to stop. Each parameter has a tortuous history of manual and semi-automated interventions that I simply cannot just go back to early versions and run the updateprog. I could be throwing away all kinds of corrections – to lat/lons, to WMOs (yes!), and more. So what the hell can I do about all these duplicate stations?
Date: Mon, 05 Oct 2009 03:57:57 -0600
From: Tom Wigley
To: Phil Jones Subject: Re: [geo] Re: CCNet: A Scientific Scandal Unfolds…
139.222.131.184
Phil,
It is distressing to read that American Stinker item. But Keith does seem to have got himself into a mess. As I pointed out in emails, Yamal is insignificant....
But, more generally, (even if it *is* irrelevant) how does Keith explain the McIntyre plot that compares Yamal-12 with Yamal-all? And how does he explain the apparent “selection” of the less well-replicated chronology rather that the later (better replicated) chronology?
Of course, I don’t know how often Yamal-12 has really been used in recent, post-1995, work. I suspect from what you say it is much less often that M&M [McIntyre and fellow sceptic Professor Ross McKitrick] say—but where did they get their information? I presume they went thru papers to see if Yamal was cited, a pretty foolproof method if you ask me.
Perhaps these things can be explained clearly and concisely—but I am not sure Keith is able to do this as he is too close to the issue and probably quite pissed of.
And the issue of with-holding data is still a hot potato, one that affects both you and Keith (and Mann). Yes, there are reasons—but many *good* scientists appear to be unsympathetic to these. The
trouble here is that with-holding data looks like hiding something, and hiding means (in some eyes) that it is bogus science that is being hidden.
I think Keith needs to be very, very careful in how he handles this. I’d be willing to check over anything he puts together.
Tom.
Wigley protested Michael Mann's sending a deceptive graph with a “fluke” result to back up Wigley’s contention that the recent cooling was still consistent with overall warming. He also claimed the IPCC and AGW scientists had made too many “dishonest presentations”.
On Oct 14, 2009, at 5:57 PM, Tom Wigley wrote:Here is another matter discussed by Andrew Bolt:
Mike,
The Figure you sent is very deceptive. As an example, historical runs with PCM look as though they match observations—but the match is a fluke. PCM has no indirect aerosol forcing and a low climate sensitivity—compensating errors. In my (perhaps too harsh) view, there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC. This is why I still use results from MAGICC to compare with observed temperatures. At least here I can assess how sensitive matches are to sensitivity and forcing assumptions/uncertainties.
Tom.
The IPCC’s 2007 report made an allowance that drew heavily on a 1990 paper by Phil Jones that dismissed the UHI effect as largely trivial. That in turn drew heavily on a paper by Professor Wang Wei-Chyung of Albany, State University of New York, which presented data from China which both Wang and Jones claimed came from stations that had “few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location or observation times”, and so could be relied upon.
Mathematician Doug Keenan and others obtained the original Wang data and used it to track down the Chinese weather stations. They found that 49 of the 84 stations used actually had no records of station location, eight had inconsistent histories, 18 had been moved a considerable distance, and only seven were known not to have been relocated. One station had five different locations in 30 years as far as 41 km apart.
Wang seemed to have lied. His data was essentially worthless, and Jones’ (and the IPCC’s) claim that the Urban Heat Island effect was trivial now seemed unsupported by solid evidence.These and many more documents have served to make it ever clearer that the catastrophic AGW hypothesis is mighty dubious. The hockey stick data of Keith Briffa, the claim that the urban heat island effect is unimportant, and the reliability of the basic land surface temperature data sets are all key points undermined by these documents.
Thomas Sowell on AGW and Science
The wise and astute Thomas Sowell has had a few words to say on the subject of the global warming hysteria in a recent commentary.
There are a number of comments of interest in his piece, but I especially like these:
There are a number of comments of interest in his piece, but I especially like these:
People who talk about the corrupting influence of money seem to automatically assume that it is only private money that is corrupting. But, when governments have billions of dollars invested in the global warming crusade, massive programs underway and whole political careers at risk if that crusade gets undermined, do not expect the disinterested search for truth.
Among the intelligentsia, there have always been many who are ready to jump on virtually any bandwagon that will take them to the promised land, where the wise and noble few-- like themselves-- can take the rest of us poor dummies in hand and tell us how we had better change the way we live our lives.
Patrick Michaels on the Manufactured Climate Consensus
Patrick J. Michaels served as a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia from 1980 to 2007. He was also for a number of years the official Virginia state climatologist, before a Democrat governor decided to change that. However, he fell out of favor with the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming alarmist scientists when he published papers saying that while there was human-induced warming of the Earth, it was less than that produced by the climate models at the time. Feelings were so strong that a Ben Santer, a student of Tom Wigley then and now at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, offered to beat up Michaels if he encountered him at a scientific meeting in an e-mail to Phil Jones, the head of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia.
Patrick Michaels describes how the catastrophic AGW alarmists manufactured a so-called consensus of climate scientists by shutting out the skeptics and those who claimed this hypothesis was wrong.
Patrick Michaels describes how the catastrophic AGW alarmists manufactured a so-called consensus of climate scientists by shutting out the skeptics and those who claimed this hypothesis was wrong.
Comments on the Peer-Review Process
Over and over, the avid proponents of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (AGW) protest that I must be wrong in challenging the bad science backing this hypothesis, or theory in their terms. After all, the preponderance of published papers in the refereed climate journals back the idea of catastrophic AGW and I must honor the peer-review process, they argue. Yes, they are right that the majority of published journal papers back catastrophic AGW or at least the reasonable possibility of catastrophic AGW.
But, being a scientist, I have read many published scientific papers in fields much less politicized than that of climatology and I can tell you that there are many, many papers representing flat out bad science or mixtures of good and bad science which are published in peer-reviewed journals. In addition, I have refereed many papers submitted for publication and I have often been the only reviewer who raised serious issues against publication or who fought hard for changes as a condition of publication. Frankly, in our non-confrontational age, few want to confront paper authors with their slip-ups and any incompetency that may be revealed in a paper. We live in a society that really wants to give an A to every student.
What is more, the reviewer must often work very hard to be sure that he has valid points of contention. The scientists submitting the work probably spent at least a few months doing the research they are trying to describe and then spent a few weeks writing the article. No reviewer is likely to have so much time to devote to the same work, yet he is tasked with confirming it as valid or declaring it invalid or at least unproven. Being a good reviewer takes a lot of time and the rewards are very few.
Oftentimes, my objections have taken the form of this or that conclusion is unproven for this or that reason. But, surprisingly, I have also rejected many submissions on the grounds that data actually in the paper proves that some of the conclusions are wrong. It is amazing to me how often authors trip themselves up by either using faulty logic or even more often by having blinders on with respect to the conclusions they believe to be the right ones. In other words, even in non-politicized science, the authors often are able to ignore their own data and results which are in conflict with the conclusions they apparently wanted to reach. Frankly, in some cases, I have even wondered if they were not de-emphasizing results that were inconvenient in that they muddied the waters with respect to the conclusions they wanted to reach. This is dishonest. It is bad science. And, it is not unusual.
For young academic scientists, the pressure to publish is huge. It leads to hastily prepared papers and an attempt to publish as many papers as possible, even if the conclusions of the paper do little, if anything, to advance our knowledge of science. The reviewers, while nominally anonymous, nonetheless will in many cases be revealed by the nature of their objections or the knowledge they reveal in those objections. If the journal is associated with a particular professional scientific society, the number of fellow members you might anger over time may be appreciable. If you hope to become an elected officer of the society or a fellow of the society, it is not politic to take your duties as a reviewer very seriously. It is too risky. It is better to go along and get along. It is career-advancing to allow bad science to be published and then to count on critical readers to sort out the chaff from the wheat.
Frankly, I am not very trusting that a paper represents valid science simply since it was published. I read the paper and try to conclude from the argument made in the paper whether the science is good or not. Sometimes, I conclude that it is bad, sometimes that it is probably good, and sometimes that the situation is indeterminate. This indeterminate case may occur because while the author's conclusions appear consistent with the data and results presented and while those results may be useful in advancing the evidence for a theory, there is still much work that needs to be done before the theory is proven right. One might often say this represents good science because this is part of the proper process. However, such work may often be bad science in which the authors have selected only that part of their data and results which are consistent with the theory they are advancing as correct. There are many cases in which negative results are simply left out. This may be done because the author thinks the paper is more important if it purports to prove or advance a particular theory, or it may be because the author has already staked a substantial part of his reputation on a particular theory. Some scientists simply cannot admit to having been wrong.
But, being a scientist, I have read many published scientific papers in fields much less politicized than that of climatology and I can tell you that there are many, many papers representing flat out bad science or mixtures of good and bad science which are published in peer-reviewed journals. In addition, I have refereed many papers submitted for publication and I have often been the only reviewer who raised serious issues against publication or who fought hard for changes as a condition of publication. Frankly, in our non-confrontational age, few want to confront paper authors with their slip-ups and any incompetency that may be revealed in a paper. We live in a society that really wants to give an A to every student.
What is more, the reviewer must often work very hard to be sure that he has valid points of contention. The scientists submitting the work probably spent at least a few months doing the research they are trying to describe and then spent a few weeks writing the article. No reviewer is likely to have so much time to devote to the same work, yet he is tasked with confirming it as valid or declaring it invalid or at least unproven. Being a good reviewer takes a lot of time and the rewards are very few.
Oftentimes, my objections have taken the form of this or that conclusion is unproven for this or that reason. But, surprisingly, I have also rejected many submissions on the grounds that data actually in the paper proves that some of the conclusions are wrong. It is amazing to me how often authors trip themselves up by either using faulty logic or even more often by having blinders on with respect to the conclusions they believe to be the right ones. In other words, even in non-politicized science, the authors often are able to ignore their own data and results which are in conflict with the conclusions they apparently wanted to reach. Frankly, in some cases, I have even wondered if they were not de-emphasizing results that were inconvenient in that they muddied the waters with respect to the conclusions they wanted to reach. This is dishonest. It is bad science. And, it is not unusual.
For young academic scientists, the pressure to publish is huge. It leads to hastily prepared papers and an attempt to publish as many papers as possible, even if the conclusions of the paper do little, if anything, to advance our knowledge of science. The reviewers, while nominally anonymous, nonetheless will in many cases be revealed by the nature of their objections or the knowledge they reveal in those objections. If the journal is associated with a particular professional scientific society, the number of fellow members you might anger over time may be appreciable. If you hope to become an elected officer of the society or a fellow of the society, it is not politic to take your duties as a reviewer very seriously. It is too risky. It is better to go along and get along. It is career-advancing to allow bad science to be published and then to count on critical readers to sort out the chaff from the wheat.
Frankly, I am not very trusting that a paper represents valid science simply since it was published. I read the paper and try to conclude from the argument made in the paper whether the science is good or not. Sometimes, I conclude that it is bad, sometimes that it is probably good, and sometimes that the situation is indeterminate. This indeterminate case may occur because while the author's conclusions appear consistent with the data and results presented and while those results may be useful in advancing the evidence for a theory, there is still much work that needs to be done before the theory is proven right. One might often say this represents good science because this is part of the proper process. However, such work may often be bad science in which the authors have selected only that part of their data and results which are consistent with the theory they are advancing as correct. There are many cases in which negative results are simply left out. This may be done because the author thinks the paper is more important if it purports to prove or advance a particular theory, or it may be because the author has already staked a substantial part of his reputation on a particular theory. Some scientists simply cannot admit to having been wrong.
23 December 2009
Obama's Green Jobs in Solar Power
The prices of solar panels are falling quickly, which is good for making the presently very highly expensive solar power less expensive. However, even with the price drops, it is still very expensive compared to the electricity costs of coal-fired power plants. U.S. manufacturers of solar panels such as SunPower and First Solar are losing market share to Chinese solar panel makers. The Chinese panels are not as efficient, but they cost much less. The main Chinese companies are Suntech Power, Trina Solar, and Yingli Solar.
SunPower's market share has fallen from 22% last year to 17% this year. Suntech was the biggest winner, increasing its market share from 5% to 12%. It appears that the only green jobs in solar power Obama is going to produce are manufacturing jobs in China, unless the solar power facilities in the U.S. need lots of maintenance work. But if they do, that will only make the cost of the generated electricity very expensive and solar power will remain unable to compete with fossil fuel generated electric power.
SunPower's market share has fallen from 22% last year to 17% this year. Suntech was the biggest winner, increasing its market share from 5% to 12%. It appears that the only green jobs in solar power Obama is going to produce are manufacturing jobs in China, unless the solar power facilities in the U.S. need lots of maintenance work. But if they do, that will only make the cost of the generated electricity very expensive and solar power will remain unable to compete with fossil fuel generated electric power.
Checking the Alaska Temperature Record
Dr. Richard Keen of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences of the University of Colorado - Boulder has looked into the temperature records of NOAA's NCDC for central Alaska. There are 9 stations there with long-term temperature records, which he has used to set up a regional mean temperature record from 1900 to 2004. The raw temperature results he gets are shown in the plot below:
The temperatures of Alaska are heavily influenced by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). The same raw temperature data is shown with the average temperature over the period of the PDO for each PDO period. The periods plotted cover four alternating PDOs, starting with a cold PDO and ending with a warm PDO. This guarantees a general upward slope in temperature, just as starting with a warm PDO and ending with a cold PDO will produce a negative temperature slope.
If you are wondering, there are about 23 years in the first cold PDO and 23 years in the first warm PDO. Then the second cold PDO covers about 29 years, as does the second warm PDO. Given these starting and ending points, the upward slope of the average linear trend line in the first figure is 0.69 C/century in the raw temperature data for central Alaska. Now, let's examine the ever-trusty data from the NOAA GHCN adjusted temperature data set for the same region.
Our ever-reliable government NOAA NCDC has again adjusted the raw temperature record to produce an upward slope to the temperature data in support of a global warming catastrophe. This slope indicates a temperature increase of a whopping 2.83 C/century!!!! This is more than a 2 C per century higher rate of change than is found in the raw data!
Plotting Keen's calculated raw temperature data against that of the GHCN after averaging the years within a 10-year period to produce data directly comparable to the data as used in the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007, one can compare the Keen raw temperature data in blue with the IPCC AR4 adjusted data in black in the figure below:
The early year adjusted data used in the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007 has been adjusted downward and the data of the last couple of decades has been adjusted upward relative to the raw data reconstructed by Keen. The net difference across the century is about 1 C, which is the amount of the global warming claimed by the UN IPCC AR4 report generally. But, once again, there is no known scientific justification for the adjustments to the raw temperature data which have been made by the NOAA NCDC and used by the UN IPCC AR4 report.
What else could be going on here but an attempt to produce a man-made global warming catastrophe justifying drastic government action to control our individual and business use of fossil fuels?
The temperatures of Alaska are heavily influenced by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). The same raw temperature data is shown with the average temperature over the period of the PDO for each PDO period. The periods plotted cover four alternating PDOs, starting with a cold PDO and ending with a warm PDO. This guarantees a general upward slope in temperature, just as starting with a warm PDO and ending with a cold PDO will produce a negative temperature slope.
If you are wondering, there are about 23 years in the first cold PDO and 23 years in the first warm PDO. Then the second cold PDO covers about 29 years, as does the second warm PDO. Given these starting and ending points, the upward slope of the average linear trend line in the first figure is 0.69 C/century in the raw temperature data for central Alaska. Now, let's examine the ever-trusty data from the NOAA GHCN adjusted temperature data set for the same region.
Our ever-reliable government NOAA NCDC has again adjusted the raw temperature record to produce an upward slope to the temperature data in support of a global warming catastrophe. This slope indicates a temperature increase of a whopping 2.83 C/century!!!! This is more than a 2 C per century higher rate of change than is found in the raw data!
Plotting Keen's calculated raw temperature data against that of the GHCN after averaging the years within a 10-year period to produce data directly comparable to the data as used in the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007, one can compare the Keen raw temperature data in blue with the IPCC AR4 adjusted data in black in the figure below:
What else could be going on here but an attempt to produce a man-made global warming catastrophe justifying drastic government action to control our individual and business use of fossil fuels?
22 December 2009
Central Park Temperature Record Shenanigans
When a scientific fraud unravels, it can do so with remarkable rapidity. This is especially true when the fraud was massive and aimed at a huge power grab over the lives of others.
A comparison of raw temperature data of the NOAA National Climate Data Center (NCDC) with its adjusted data for Central Park in New York City has now been performed for the two extreme months of July and January. The NCDC keeps two major adjusted compilations of station by station temperature data. One is the HCSN Version 1 set and the other is the other is the GHCN Version 2 data set. The latter is used in the UN IPCC reports.
Let's first compare the raw temperature measurements for July with the HCSN Version 1 set. The data is shown below:
For some reason an increasing temperature was subtracted from the raw temperature data beginning after 1939 and this increased until it was a bit more than 6.5 F. Then in 2000, the temperature subtracted was decreased rapidly through 2007. The strange thing is that rapid changes in the urban heat island effect occur as a city expands and envelops rural areas. But Central Park has been surrounded by a very high population density throughout the period from 1939 to the present, so the heat island effect should not be changing so much. Furthermore, the rapid decrease in the temperature subtracted since the year 2000 should be due to a rapid depopulation of the city. In fact, NYC has been growing in population since 1990, so if anything, the temperature subtracted should have been slightly more, not much less! This is Voodoo Science!
As mentioned, there is also a temperature record (GHCN) provided to the UN IPCC and generally kept for world-wide temperature change comparisons. Remember, in such comparisons, we are interested in tracking very small changes of a few tenths of a degree, yet we have seen already that adjustments of more than 6 F are being applied to the raw data. This is always dicey science when small changes are to be detected on data being adjusted with large comparative adjustments. The raw data, the HCN adjusted data, and the GHCN adjusted data are all compared in the plot below.
Now note that the raw data is the middle plot in blue. The two NOAA NCDC adjusted July average temperature data sets are the most different. The hottest of the three sets of data is the global comparison data which went into the UN IPCC assessment data. For reasons unfathomable to rational man, the net effect of having a weather station in the middle of NYC, one of the world's larger cities, is an artificial cooling effect and it has to be adjusted with a general increase to the raw temperature data. Yes, the well-know urban heat island effect, is sometimes an urban cooling effect and sometimes and urban heating effect, by implication given the adjustments provided by our NOAA NCDC! The temperature difference between the two NOAA NCDC temperature data sets is as large as 11 F.
Basically, it looks as though the UN IPCC wanted data indicating high and rising temperatures. The upper green trace gave them high temperatures and the data mostly parallels the raw data, so essentially no urban heat island differential adjustment seems to have been made over time compared to the raw data. Of course, the raw data of 2007 surely already has a rise in it due to the increased population and bigger buildings in NYC since 1909, so leaving that effect in gave the global warming alarmists the temperature increase they needed, although little of the increase occurred in the late 20th Century in the Central Park data. Such increases could readily be found in the data from many other U.S. weather stations, however. What was important here was maintaining the fiction that the urban heat island effect is unimportant and no adjustment for it is needed over time. That way, all the rural stations which have become suburban stations need not be adjusted downward for the urban heat island effect.
This is the hand made visible of massive fraud, once again.
A comparison of raw temperature data of the NOAA National Climate Data Center (NCDC) with its adjusted data for Central Park in New York City has now been performed for the two extreme months of July and January. The NCDC keeps two major adjusted compilations of station by station temperature data. One is the HCSN Version 1 set and the other is the other is the GHCN Version 2 data set. The latter is used in the UN IPCC reports.
Let's first compare the raw temperature measurements for July with the HCSN Version 1 set. The data is shown below:
Note that the adjusted data has had its temperatures dropped everywhere, but in very different amounts over time. The upper raw temperature data curve has a polynomial fit with a maximum temperature in about 1971 or 1972, with a very small decline after that time. The adjusted temperature history of the HCN data set has a decided rise after about 1980. Let's look at the adjustment made here more carefully. The HCSN adjustment is plotted below:
As mentioned, there is also a temperature record (GHCN) provided to the UN IPCC and generally kept for world-wide temperature change comparisons. Remember, in such comparisons, we are interested in tracking very small changes of a few tenths of a degree, yet we have seen already that adjustments of more than 6 F are being applied to the raw data. This is always dicey science when small changes are to be detected on data being adjusted with large comparative adjustments. The raw data, the HCN adjusted data, and the GHCN adjusted data are all compared in the plot below.
Now note that the raw data is the middle plot in blue. The two NOAA NCDC adjusted July average temperature data sets are the most different. The hottest of the three sets of data is the global comparison data which went into the UN IPCC assessment data. For reasons unfathomable to rational man, the net effect of having a weather station in the middle of NYC, one of the world's larger cities, is an artificial cooling effect and it has to be adjusted with a general increase to the raw temperature data. Yes, the well-know urban heat island effect, is sometimes an urban cooling effect and sometimes and urban heating effect, by implication given the adjustments provided by our NOAA NCDC! The temperature difference between the two NOAA NCDC temperature data sets is as large as 11 F.
Basically, it looks as though the UN IPCC wanted data indicating high and rising temperatures. The upper green trace gave them high temperatures and the data mostly parallels the raw data, so essentially no urban heat island differential adjustment seems to have been made over time compared to the raw data. Of course, the raw data of 2007 surely already has a rise in it due to the increased population and bigger buildings in NYC since 1909, so leaving that effect in gave the global warming alarmists the temperature increase they needed, although little of the increase occurred in the late 20th Century in the Central Park data. Such increases could readily be found in the data from many other U.S. weather stations, however. What was important here was maintaining the fiction that the urban heat island effect is unimportant and no adjustment for it is needed over time. That way, all the rural stations which have become suburban stations need not be adjusted downward for the urban heat island effect.
This is the hand made visible of massive fraud, once again.
Rural US Sites Show No Temperature Increase Since 1900
Using data downloaded from NASA GISS and picking rural sites near, but not too near, to urban sites, a comparison has been made of the temperature trend over time of the rural sites compared to those of the urban sites. 28 pairs of sites across the U.S. were compared. The paired rural site is from 31 to 91 km from the urban site in each pair. The result is that urban and rural sites were similar in 1900, with the urban sites slightly higher. The urban sites have shown an increase in temperatures since then. The rural sites show no such temperature increase and appear to be generally unchanging with only ups and downs localized in time. Over a 111 year time span, the urban sites temperatures have risen to be about 1.5C warmer than the rural sites. So, the much touted rising temperatures in the U.S. are due to the urban heat island effect and not due to a global warming such as has been proposed to be caused by human emissions of CO2 due to the combustion of fossil fuels.
You should find this video very interesting:
I find myself wondering how the scientists at NASA GISS have been such proponents of the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming hypothesis given this temperature data. It sure seems insane that the EPA has declared CO2 a pollutant, which it will suppress vigorously with command and control tactics. It is clear that there is no problem caused by CO2 emissions to be addressed. Waxman-Markey carbon cap and trade type bills and EPA regulations on CO2 as a pollutant are nothing but the politics of Mass Destruction leveled upon American industries and households by the party of massive power lust, the Socialist Democrat Party.
As the fable of man-made global warming due to man's CO2 emissions from the use of fossil fuels continues to unravel, the American People are going to become ever more untrusting of the Democrats, the print and non-cable media, and, unfortunately, scientists. Those who have failed to earn our trust generally have some common characteristics. They are elitists, socialists, and man-hating environmentalists. When these same people propose to overhaul our health care system, to regulate the financial industry, increase the minimum wage rate, promote labor unions, increase deficit spending, and increase taxes, we should be sure to remember how unreliable their judgment was on the issue of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. Not only is there no looming catastrophe, but there is no such problem at all! They have created a phantom problem to justify a huge power grab.
There is a dirty secret behind the scientific side of this scandal. As the universities have become more and more hotbeds of socialism and political correctness, the scientists who receive federal funding for their research at those socialist/environmentalist/elitist/political correctness hotbeds have not wanted to be left out. Once, they were more objective and more scientific than the so-called social scientists and the humanities faculty. Most of this difference has now disappeared because we have so long allowed the lunatic left to run our universities and our government funding agencies. The scientists are now about as engaged in the cause of advancing socialism/elitism/radical environmentalism/political correctness as is the rest of the faculty at our universities and our government-run laboratories and institutions.
Many say this catastrophic man-made global warming conspiracy could not possibly happen, but they greatly underestimate the power of the socialist control of our once proud institutions of objective learning and study. They are massively corrupt now. When we clean house of the politicians in Washington and most of our state capitals, we also need to find a way to clean house in our universities and government laboratories and institutions. We need real scientists, not socialist pretenders.
Postscript added on 29 January 2010:
Some people have assumed that I made the video above. This is not the case. I was impressed by the effort and I thought it was most likely a science fair project which was unlikely to be blemished by artifices and was probably a fairly straightforward treatment of readily available data, so others could readily check up on these results. It was a challenge to others to see if they could show the same thing as was claimed in this video. I wish I could tell everyone who did make this video. They deserve credit for it.
My own assessment of the bad science backing the theory of catastrophic global warming due to man's emissions of CO2 is very broad-based and is not dependent upon the reproducibility of the results in this video. However, analyses of temperature data from many other areas of the world are showing similar results and I am more inclined to believe than not that if unbiased scientists examine the data as this father and son did, they will find that any increase in U.S. temperatures in rural areas is much less than the alarming results claimed by the advocates of catastrophic AGW. The urban heat island effect is large and most of the data in the U.S. database is heavily affected by that. I live and work between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, where the temperature is higher due to the urban heat island effect. Nonetheless, the temperatures recorded at Baltimore-Washington International Airport and at Reagan Washington National Airport are commonly 2 or 3 degrees Fahenheit higher than those at my laboratory or home.
You should find this video very interesting:
I find myself wondering how the scientists at NASA GISS have been such proponents of the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming hypothesis given this temperature data. It sure seems insane that the EPA has declared CO2 a pollutant, which it will suppress vigorously with command and control tactics. It is clear that there is no problem caused by CO2 emissions to be addressed. Waxman-Markey carbon cap and trade type bills and EPA regulations on CO2 as a pollutant are nothing but the politics of Mass Destruction leveled upon American industries and households by the party of massive power lust, the Socialist Democrat Party.
As the fable of man-made global warming due to man's CO2 emissions from the use of fossil fuels continues to unravel, the American People are going to become ever more untrusting of the Democrats, the print and non-cable media, and, unfortunately, scientists. Those who have failed to earn our trust generally have some common characteristics. They are elitists, socialists, and man-hating environmentalists. When these same people propose to overhaul our health care system, to regulate the financial industry, increase the minimum wage rate, promote labor unions, increase deficit spending, and increase taxes, we should be sure to remember how unreliable their judgment was on the issue of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. Not only is there no looming catastrophe, but there is no such problem at all! They have created a phantom problem to justify a huge power grab.
There is a dirty secret behind the scientific side of this scandal. As the universities have become more and more hotbeds of socialism and political correctness, the scientists who receive federal funding for their research at those socialist/environmentalist/elitist/political correctness hotbeds have not wanted to be left out. Once, they were more objective and more scientific than the so-called social scientists and the humanities faculty. Most of this difference has now disappeared because we have so long allowed the lunatic left to run our universities and our government funding agencies. The scientists are now about as engaged in the cause of advancing socialism/elitism/radical environmentalism/political correctness as is the rest of the faculty at our universities and our government-run laboratories and institutions.
Many say this catastrophic man-made global warming conspiracy could not possibly happen, but they greatly underestimate the power of the socialist control of our once proud institutions of objective learning and study. They are massively corrupt now. When we clean house of the politicians in Washington and most of our state capitals, we also need to find a way to clean house in our universities and government laboratories and institutions. We need real scientists, not socialist pretenders.
Postscript added on 29 January 2010:
Some people have assumed that I made the video above. This is not the case. I was impressed by the effort and I thought it was most likely a science fair project which was unlikely to be blemished by artifices and was probably a fairly straightforward treatment of readily available data, so others could readily check up on these results. It was a challenge to others to see if they could show the same thing as was claimed in this video. I wish I could tell everyone who did make this video. They deserve credit for it.
My own assessment of the bad science backing the theory of catastrophic global warming due to man's emissions of CO2 is very broad-based and is not dependent upon the reproducibility of the results in this video. However, analyses of temperature data from many other areas of the world are showing similar results and I am more inclined to believe than not that if unbiased scientists examine the data as this father and son did, they will find that any increase in U.S. temperatures in rural areas is much less than the alarming results claimed by the advocates of catastrophic AGW. The urban heat island effect is large and most of the data in the U.S. database is heavily affected by that. I live and work between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, where the temperature is higher due to the urban heat island effect. Nonetheless, the temperatures recorded at Baltimore-Washington International Airport and at Reagan Washington National Airport are commonly 2 or 3 degrees Fahenheit higher than those at my laboratory or home.
UN IPCC Head Makes Big Money from Global Warming Fears
Dr. Rajendra Pachauri was a railway engineer, who earned a Ph.D. in economics and became the director of the Tata Energy Research Institute in Delhi, India in 1981. This institute was set up in 1974 by India's largest privately owned business, the Tata Group. He headed the UN IPCC as its chairman when the AR4 report of 2007 was produced and claimed that catastrophic man-made global warming was a certainty. As is the case with Al Gore, Dr. Pachauri is making many millions of dollars a year off of his status as a leading catastrophic anthropogenic global warming "expert." He sits on dozens of company boards of directors or acts as an adviser to them. He advises carbon traders and industries with an interest in sustainability or being perceived as "green."
When people oppose the idea of catastrophic man-made global warming, they are often said to be in the employ of oil and coal firms, whether they are or are not. Conservatives and libertarians are aware that Al Gore is making money from his advocacy of man-made global warming, but they have said little about Dr. Pachauri making many millions per year from his advocacy.
When people oppose the idea of catastrophic man-made global warming, they are often said to be in the employ of oil and coal firms, whether they are or are not. Conservatives and libertarians are aware that Al Gore is making money from his advocacy of man-made global warming, but they have said little about Dr. Pachauri making many millions per year from his advocacy.
21 December 2009
Biasing the Surface Land Temperature Record with Big Cities
Willis Eschenbach has been doing some great digging into the UN IPCC AR4 surface land temperature record. He notes that the UN IPCC AR4 says:
He checked into this:
Additional warming occurs in cities and urban areas (often referred to as the urban heat island effect), but is confined in spatial extent, and its effects are allowed for both by excluding as many of the affected sites as possible from the global temperature data and by increasing the error range.
To check this claim, I took the list of temperature stations used by CRU (which I had to use an FOI to get), and checked them against the GISS list. The GISS list categorizes stations as “Urban” or “Rural”. It also uses satellite photos to categorize the amount of light that shows at night, with big cities being brightest. It puts them into three categories, A, B, and C. C is the brightest.
It turns out that there are over 500 cities in the CRU database that the GISS database categorizes as “Urban C”, the brightest of cities. These include, among many others:
AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND
BANGKOK METROPOLIS, THAILAND
BARCELONA, SPAIN
BEIJING, CHINA
BRASILIA, BRAZIL
BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA
BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA
CHRISTCHURCH, NEW ZEALAND
DHAKA, BANGLADESH
FLORENCE, ITALY
GLASGOW, UK
GUATEMALA CITY, GUATEMALA
HANNOVER, GERMANY
INCHON, KOREA
KHARTOUM, SUDAN
KYOTO, JAPAN
LISBON, PORTUGAL
LUXOR, EGYPT
MARRAKECH, MOROCCO
MOMBASA, KENYA
MOSKVA, RUSSIAN FEDERA
MOSUL, IRAQ
NAGASAKI, JAPAN
NAGOYA, JAPAN
NICE, FRANCE
OSAKA, JAPAN
PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA
RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA
SAO PAULO, BRAZIL
SEOUL, KOREA
SHANGHAI, CHINA
SINGAPORE, SINGAPORE
STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN
TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS
TOKYO, JAPAN
VALENCIA, SPAIN
VOLGOGRAD, USSR
It is utter nonsense to include data from weather stations in large, medium, or even small cities to produce a record of temperature which might address whether there are human effects of note on the global climate. Indeed, if you want to bias the results in that direction, the best way to do it is to drop rural weather stations and leave a large number of city stations in your database of temperatures. This has clearly been done in the U.S. and, according to the Institute of Economic Analysis in Moscow, in Russia. This list makes it very clear that such warming as has not been added simply by changing recent measurements upward and dropping the measurements of earlier decades, has been strongly biased in an upward direction by using data from many cities and dropping many rural stations. The only useful data is from rural stations in actual fact. That this is occurring is a very blatant scientific fraud.
So the CRU is using Tokyo? Beijing? Seoul? Shanghai? Moscow? Their claim is entirely false. In other words, once again the good folk of the CRU are blowing smoke. I can understand why it took me a Freedom of Information request to get the station list.
20 December 2009
The Northern Europe Land Surtace Temperature Fraud
Prof. Wibjorn Karlen, Professor Emeritus of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology of Stockholm University, has questioned much of the land surface temperature data providing the primary basis for the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007. His questions in e-mails to Kevin Trenberth and Phil Jones were among those in the recent dump of e-mails, documents, and programs of ClimateGate. He has painstakingly sought out the raw temperature data from many regions of the world and found large discrepancies with the data used in the UN IPCC AR4 report in region after region. One of these areas is that of Northern Europe including the Scandinavian countries and Finland.
Here is what he says in an e-mail in 2008 [Al Gore, you are very wrong that all of the e-mails were more than 10 years old.]:
Note that despite not correcting for an increasing urban heat island effect, the recent temperatures are no higher than those of the 1930s. The recent rate of temperature increase from about 1980 does not look very different than say 1915 to the mid-1930s. In terms of the extent of change, the increase from the early 1880s to the mid-1930s looks more remarkable than that at the end of the 20th Century. This result is very much like that described by Prof. Karlen when he examined the data.
Now, let's examine the Northern Europe land surface temperature data used in the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007:
Eschenbach comments:
Prof. Karlen has also raised objections about the UN IPCC AR4 data used for arctic areas and in Africa, in addition to his objections about Australia, which I discussed in an earlier post. Prof. Karlen is a hero we should all admire.
As we have now seen, the raw temperature data for Russia, Australia, and Northern Europe does not look at all like the data the UN IPCC AR4 claims and says supports a major climate effect due to man's use of fossil fuels and the CO2 generated by that use. We also know that much of the data from the U.S. is corrupted by bad siting of the smaller and smaller number of weather stations being used to produce the temperature record.
Here is what he says in an e-mail in 2008 [Al Gore, you are very wrong that all of the e-mails were more than 10 years old.]:
In my letter to Klass V I included diagram showing the mean annual temperature of the Nordic countries (1890-ca 2001) presented on the net by the database NORDKLIM, a joint project between the meteorological institutes in the Nordic countries. Except for Denmark, the data sets show an increase after the 1970s to the same level as in the late 1930s or lower. None demonstrates the distinct increase IPCC indicates. The trends of these 6 areas are very similar except for a few interesting details.Taking this cue from Prof. Karlen, Willis Eschenbach, sought out the raw temperature data for the Nordic countries and Finland. He says:
I cannot find the NORDKLIM graphic he refers to, so I have calculated it myself. I used the NORDKLIM dataset available at http://www.smhi.se/hfa_coord/nordklim/data/Nordklim_data_set_v1_0_2002.xls. I removed the one marine record from “Ship M”. To avoid infilling where there are missing records, I took the “first difference” of all of the available records for each year and averaged them. Then I used a running sum to calculate the average anomaly. I did not remove cities or adjust for the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect. Here is the result:
Note that despite not correcting for an increasing urban heat island effect, the recent temperatures are no higher than those of the 1930s. The recent rate of temperature increase from about 1980 does not look very different than say 1915 to the mid-1930s. In terms of the extent of change, the increase from the early 1880s to the mid-1930s looks more remarkable than that at the end of the 20th Century. This result is very much like that described by Prof. Karlen when he examined the data.
Now, let's examine the Northern Europe land surface temperature data used in the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007:
Eschenbach comments:
This claims that there is a full degree temperature rise from 1970 to 2000, ending way warmer than the 1930s. You can see why Professor Karlen is wondering how the IPCC got such a different answer.It has become very clear that the reason the land surface temperature data shows temperature increases much larger in the late 20th Century according to the UN IPCC and CRU, NOAA, and NASA GISS is due to heavy handed manipulation of the raw data to make it tell a story of man-made global warming. In reality, there is no evidence for this in the raw temperature data in area after area around the world, now that inquiring scientists are carefully examining this data.
Prof. Karlen has also raised objections about the UN IPCC AR4 data used for arctic areas and in Africa, in addition to his objections about Australia, which I discussed in an earlier post. Prof. Karlen is a hero we should all admire.
As we have now seen, the raw temperature data for Russia, Australia, and Northern Europe does not look at all like the data the UN IPCC AR4 claims and says supports a major climate effect due to man's use of fossil fuels and the CO2 generated by that use. We also know that much of the data from the U.S. is corrupted by bad siting of the smaller and smaller number of weather stations being used to produce the temperature record.