The latest release of e-mails among the prominent catastrophic man-made global warming scientists at the University of East Anglia and their like-minded scientific colleagues around the world has further established many scientific blunders, uncertainties, political maneuverings and biases among this cabal of scientists. There is evidence for each of the following shortcomings:
1) More uncertainty among these scientists than one would expect given their claim that the science is settled.
2) Admission that the global climate computer models are wrong about how they handle cloud cover. Since cloud cover effects are by themselves easily large enough to account for all the claimed global warming, this is a serious fault.
3) Acknowledgment that the global climate computer models are tuned to match the climate results on the ground claimed by the catastrophic man-made global warming advocates. This is a very serious charge, since if you have a data set of 100 data pairs, a 100th order polynomial will fit that set exactly. The computer models have thousands of adjustable parameters which provide huge leeway for tuning the desired outputs to past climate results over a few decades. The computer model advocates have explicitly met such criticisms in the past with denials. The fact that the models have claimed to match the results of the last few decades in many cases, but have failed to provide predictive matches to the last 12 years or so, is very telling as well as the admission in the e-mails. One also does not hear of studies for which a given computer model that has been tuned for recent times gives accurate climate results for say the Little Ice Age or the Roman Warm Period.
4) There is an admission that many studies have failed to find the computer model predicted warming of the troposphere at altitudes of 8 to 12 km or more and there is only one questionable study that claims to have observed such a warming. If this computer model prediction is wrong, then the science of the computer models is wrong.
5) There is a claim that the solar incident infra-red radiation is underplayed by the alarmists, who rely on one paper which is contrary to several other published papers. This is important because it is critical to know how much of the incoming solar radiation never reaches the ground due to absorption in the atmosphere. Increased water vapor and CO2 will also reduce incoming solar radiation thereby providing a cooling of the ground temperatures as explained in my analysis in a chapter of Slaying the Sky Dragon - Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory.
6) Admission that the long term temperature reconstructions by the catastrophic man-made global warming advocates were not on a solid footing. Errors were actually so large that comparisons of such data to computer models was of little help if the errors were acknowledged. The Little Ice Age, the Medieval Warm Period, the cool period of the Dark Ages, the Roman Warming and other periods of natural temperature changes are all awkward for those claiming that the recent warming is both unusual and caused by man's emissions of CO2.
7) Admission that Steve McIntyre may be right about how the statistical handling of the temperature data may have been the artifice source of the hockey stick temperature reconstruction of Mann.
8) Admission that none of the climate computer models performs adequately in predicting sea surface temperatures and water vapor concentrations. This is critical because water covers 71% of the Earth's surface and all of the supposed predictions of CO2 warming actually are supposed to cause more warming due to the inducement of higher water vapor concentrations. The water vapor increase will produce more water vapor warming than the CO2 causes warming by itself according to their theory.
9) There is no need for any one global climate computer model to be correct. Does this not admit that the science is not understood, since otherwise one would give a reason for why that model was incorrect and why its non-compliance with other models or reality was not important? The outlier model might be the only good one, if one does not really understand the science. It is interesting to note that when one of the models is run multiple times, it gives many different answers. One wonders how many outlier results are thrown out because they simply are not believed in. Many of the IPCC models were not run enough times to even understand how poor the reproducibility was.
10) There are many discussions of cherry-picking data sets or papers that showed more warming or more harmful effects to demonstrate a more alarming result. This was true of dramatic events such as storms, advice to emphasize iconic animals, plants, and geographic areas, ways to reconstruct past period temperatures, and advice to ignore some climate extremes of the Medieval Warm Period such as droughts.
11) Concerns that the effects of the sun were not given enough strength in the models and if they were, they would greatly reduce the claimed effects of greenhouse gases.
12) Concern that contrary to the models, water vapor over land in the tropics may not have actually increased as CO2 increased.
13) Admission that the melting of the Kilimanjaro glacier was not caused by global warming.
14) Concern that European forests are thriving as CO2 concentrations increase, rather than being harmed by acid rain caused by increased CO2 concentrations.
15) Puzzlement that there is a minimum in the temperature in the lower troposphere which cannot be duplicated in any computer model that allows surface warming.
16) Phil Jones whose paper on the urban heat island effect minimizes the size and variability of such an effect, though studies in the U.S. and China show it to be very large, claims that there is no change in the heat island effect in New York, London, and Vienna in the 20th century! He also claims the oceans have warmed at a rate consistent with the land warming, which is a claim many would say is false.
17) There is more discussion of seeing that only those friendly to the catastrophe hypothesis are chosen for significant positions in the writing of the U.N. IPCC reports and reviewing them.
18) There are more indications that politics is strongly driving the desired scientific outcomes and that those who are not so committed to the political and pro-government stand of the alarmist viewpoint are untrustworthy and to be generally excluded.
19) There is further discussion of the need to hide original and raw data from scientists and the public not deemed to be dependable to the cause even if publications and research based on such data was funded with government money by countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom that have freedom of information acts on the books.
20) There is a claim that officials at the U.S. Department of Energy are complicit in hiding original weather station data. This is important, because the primary claim to warming in the last few decades is mostly supported by land-based data from weather stations. The rural stations do not show such temperature rises as are claimed by various government agencies of the U.S., the United Kingdom, and many other countries around the world, however. The claims of warming are generated by massaged data by interpolation schemes over regions with no weather stations (or whose station data was ignored) or by large corrections made or not made to data from stations affected by urban and suburban sites and with sitings that do not meet required specifications. The urban sites tend to have rising temperatures due to man's local activities and structures. Scientifically, it is very important to be able to examine the raw data and to have independent scientists examine whether any adjustments are performed correctly. Of course, it may well be that an honest scientific assessment would conclude that there is no way to even use such data given the size of the temperature shifts for which one is looking. It is my contention that no data from any station that does not meet specifications should be used and no data from stations affected by urban heat island effects should be used.
21) Claims that the governments want them to tell a very strong story of climate change caused by man with no caveats. The team of advocates has a duty to see to it that this is the case and to serve as active proponents of the political message.
22) Discussions that advocates should talk up the desirability of stable climate and avoid discussing the costs of cutting back on the use of fossil fuels and the sacrifices people would have to make to do so.
I have been pointing out that the science behind catastrophic man-made global warming was largely wrong for years now. One of the most common rebuttals I am given by its proponents is that if the science were so wrong, then many conscientious and eager to prove themselves climate scientists would be aligned with me and making their careers in doing so. Many of these same critics of my viewpoint that the hypothesis of catastrophic man-made global warming science has failed, constantly claim that those who are skeptics and deniers are all in the pay of the fossil fuel companies. That claim is wrong, but catastrophic man-made global warming proponents establish the idea that they think scientists will deliver the desired results of their funders. This may be a projection of their own shortcomings upon others.
Let us use their claim that scientists are so vulnerable and apply it to the many climate scientists who support the hypothesis of catastrophic man-made global warming and ask who funds them. The answer is that they are all funded by governments and the U.N., all of which have a decided interest in having reasons to increase the powers of their governments or the U.N. and increase controls over the activities of individuals and companies. That the government of the U.S. is so biased in favor of this hypothesis and is so determined to declare it settled science, is backed by the e-mail referred to above in which the U.S. Department of Energy was noted to be happy not to make original station data available to scientists not under their funding control. There is huge pressure on all scientists in climate research to provide the results the funding governments want, or their funding will be cut off. There is no comparable replacement source of funds, so almost everyone toes the line or is simply naively influenced by the argument from authority because so many do toe the line.
The U.S. government is doing more harm to science than Stalin did with his Lysenko perversion. Contrary to what government would have you believe, there is no settled climate science on catastrophic man-made global warming, except that any possible warming is greatly exaggerated, as are its consequences. We must always remember that man has always prospered most when the Earth was warm. This has been most clearly the case since the Holocene period began.
No comments:
Post a Comment