Hiding the Decline - Not Since 1997, Since 1921

I have concentrated on revealing the mistakes in the physics that is used to explain the so-called greenhouse effect of infra-red active gases in recent times, because Tony Heller at the blog Real Science has done an excellent job revealing the massive data manipulations in the temperature data.  His plot of the raw thermometer data since 1921 and the highly manipulated and published data since then is shown here:

The raw temperature data over this time shows a decline in the average temperature, while the manipulated data shows a large increase, especially since 1977.  Most of the discussion of a "Pause in the Temperature Increase" is simply addressing the highly manipulated data of the last 17 years, during which time the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has increased, but the temperature has not.

The thermometer readings come from the USHCN stations across the USA shown on the map below:

The temperature data manipulators claim that much of the earlier 20th Century data has to be shifted downward because the stations reported the same high temperature two days in a row.  Now this assumes that the station managers were incredibly dumb and failed to notice that there was an unbelievable incidence of daily high temperatures that were the same due to the time of day at which they reset the temperature recorders to report the high temperature of that daily time period.  Assuming such overwhelming stupidity of Americans lies at the core to the Progressive Elitist ideology and justifies strong and intrusive rule by politicians and bureaucrats of elevated intelligence and who have been well-indoctrinated in our Progressive education system.

Tony Heller has also revealed that increasing portions of the temperature data record have no actual thermometer temperature reading behind them at all.  More and more often, it is said that the stations do not report the data and so a program runs an algorithm to generate a replacement temperature.  The reason for the failure to report the temperature data is unknown, as is the nature of the algorithm that replaces the missing data with some calculated number.  Tony Heller has provided the following horrifying plot of the rapidly increasing percentage of missing temperature data replaced by the algorithm of our most untrustworthy bureaucrats.

Tony Heller also says that almost all of the temperature increase claimed since 1990 is the result of the temperature data added to the record to replace the missing raw data.  Frankly, I would not be surprised if there was not a concerted effort on the part of the catastrophic man-made warming alarmists to throw out station data that does not fit their agenda of rising temperatures.  In addition, it would not be surprising to find out that the algorithm to replace the missing data is biased to generate hotter temperatures.  In fact, the fact that almost all of the temperature increase since 1990 is due to the algorithm-produced data is proof that the algorithm does have such a bias.

The physics of the catastrophic man-made warming alarmists is dishonest.  The temperature data they publish is dishonest.  Honest temperature data would provide the experimental proof that the theory of catastrophic greenhouse warming was wrong.  The physics knowledge needed to understand why their explanations for the physical basis of catastrophic man-made global warming are wrong is beyond most scientists, let alone the general public.  That fact keeps the alarmist somewhat protected on the theory side of this equation.  But, without the massive fraudulent manipulation of the temperature data on the experimental side of the equation, the massive fraud would be immediately exposed to a much larger fraction of the People.

Obama and much of his Democrat Socialist Party base are still very determined to use this fraud to provide a basis for a massive invasion against individual rights, especially economic rights.  It allows them a reason for further expansion of the control of the People and a rich mother lode for extortion and pilfering of businesses.  Similar special interests are found in countries around the world and the latest Synthesizing Report of the latest IPCC report of the UN shows how committed they are to continuing the fraud.  That fraud is unraveling rapidly now.

One of the many things the new Republican majority in the Senate should make possible is a renewed effort to push along and promote the unraveling of the catastrophic man-made global warming fraud.  I hope the newly re-elected Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma will continue to promote reason and science with respect to man-made global warming, energy, and environmental policies as he has and that he will have many more active allies in the Senate and the House of Representatives.  It is critical to keep the US from signing international treaties on these issues and to maintain our sovereignty and our constitutional management of our internal affairs.  We must not be sucked into UN claims that we must aim toward zero carbon dioxide emissions or the planet is doomed!

American Carbon Trading Exchange Dies

The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), which received start-up funding from the socialist Joyce Foundation on whose board Barack Obama served, announced on 21 October that it was ending its carbon trading mission.  The CCX has provided voluntary, but legally binding, greenhouse gas reduction pledges or offsetting carbon emissions permits.  CCX was an investment of Al Gore's Generation Investment Management and the political clout machine at Goldman Sachs.  While voluntary at first, the CCX was anticipating the massive theft of wealth from Americans upon the Waxman-Markey cap and trade law being passed to make carbon trading mandatory.  Steve Milloy noted on 6 November that the media has completely ignored the failure of the CCX, which they had done so much to promote.

The failure of the Copenhagan meeting to set up a greenhouse gas emissions reduction commitment to follow the Kyoto Protocol which is ending in 2012, the refusal of the U.S. Senate to pass cap and trade legislation, the Great Socialist Recession, ClimateGate, the scientific failure of the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis, the surge of the Tea Party movement, and the upcoming Republican control of the House of Representatives, a renewed balance in the Senate, and the Republican control of most state governorships and legislatures have finally slowed down the momentum of the wrongheaded crusade against the use of fossil fuels with requirements to substitute unreliable and very expensive so-called "sustainable energy."

GM, Ford, IBM, American Electric Power, Chevron Oil, Intel, Bank of America, GE, BP, Alcoa, Caterpillar, and FP&L are among many companies who have bought carbon offsets or pledged reductions instead of investing in new equipment or keeping long-time employee Joe on during the Great Socialist Recession.  Not to be too cavalier, there are some cases in which energy use reductions actually did make economic sense, though buying carbon emissions credits never did.  Overall, political and environmental pressures certainly did distort the market and did cause many Joe's to be let go and other young David's to never be offered their first job.  GM, American Electric Power, and Chevron were buying trees in Brazil in order to get emissions credits.  Each of these companies has laid people off during the recession, while they played the ruse of being environmentally conscious.  Indeed, there are many claims that two-thirds of the carbon emissions reductions claimed on the exchanges are bogus, but they still cost money to play the game.

The value of Greenhouse Gas Emissions credits traded in the U.S. dropped 47% to $387.4 in 2009.  The volume of trades of CO2 tons fell by 26% to 93.7 million tons, though that was a volume 39% higher than in 2007.  The fact the value of trades fell more than did the volume shows that the value of a ton of CO2 was lower in 2009.  It is now much lower in 2010!  The HSBC climate index follows companies making at least 10% of their total revenues from selling goods and services related to climate change and dropped CCX and Trading Emissions from their index when the value of their market capitalization fell below $400 million as the share prices of these firms fell 37% between 1 September 2009 and 19 March 2010.  The CCX was bought by the IntercontinentalExchange Inc. or ICE, along with the European Climate Exchange and the Chicago Climate Futures Exchange, in April 2010 for about $634.5 million.  The European Climate Exchange is still bolstered by mandatory carbon trading requirements due to the Kyoto Protocol.


While mandatory carbon trading requirements do not have a national basis in the U.S., they are required in some regions of the U.S.  The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in the Northeast and Middle Atlantic states has Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine as members.  This group of masochistic states is committed to the following state economy mass destruction goals for the region:

2009 - 2014, 188,076,976 short tons of CO2 Emissions, 0% growth
2015, 183,375,052 tons, 2.50% reduction, 1 and one-third years of the output of the Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii, of one many tens of thousands of volcanic vents on land and underwater
2016, 178,673,127 tons, 2.56% reduction
2017, 173,971,203 tons, 2.63% reduction
2018, 169,269,278 tons, 2.70% reduction

Now using energy efficiently is wise, but the entire purpose of the state mandates is to drive companies to make energy use reductions that do not make economic sense.  This Northeast - Middle Atlantic alliance is not the only regional alliance requiring member states or provinces to commit Hari Kari.  The Western Climate Initiative is another.  A wise investor would bet against energy-intensive companies with major operations in either set of states.  Those in the Western Climate Initiative are California, Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, Utah, Montana, British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec.  These state based requirements are providing business for the European Climate Exchange.

Kristel Dorion who has worked for 10 years on carbon offset projects under the United Nation's Clean Development Mechanisms program says that investors are looking elsewhere than carbon offsets.  It is about time.

Water, Not CO2, Controls Earth IR Emissions

The catastrophic man-made global warming alarmists have produced the temperature record shown below and claimed that the reason for the temperature increase since the mid-1970s is an increased concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere due to man's use of fossil fuels. 

Of course, we also know that the short-wave solar radiation reaching the Earth's surface over the period of 1983 to 2001 was increasing due to an active sunspot period.  This solar radiation plot is given below:

Despite the increase in solar irradiance during these years of increased global temperatures, it is commonly claimed by the CO2 greenhouse gas advocates to be too small an effect to account for the claimed observed temperature rise. They claim the major contributor to the warming is increased CO2, which decreases the cooling of the Earth by decreasing the amount of energy radiated out into space as outgoing long-wave IR radiation.  Here is a plot of the outgoing IR long-wave radiation from 1948 to 2009:

Ordinarily, one expects the outgoing long-wave IR radiation to be proportional to the incoming solar short-wave radiation.  From about 1979 to 2009, the outgoing long-wave radiation was increasing, as was the incoming solar radiation.  But from 1948 to 1975, the average temperature was flat according to the first graph above.  This suggests that the incoming solar short-wave radiation was not greatly increasing in that time-frame.  Contrary to that, the period from 1948 to the mid-1970s shows a big increase in the outgoing long-wave IR radiation, especially between 1950 and 1966.  No big increase in incoming solar radiation and increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere should preclude such a large increase in outgoing long-wave radiation if the standard CO2-induced catastrophic warming hypothesis were correct.  The increasing CO2 concentrations should be causing the outgoing long-wave radiation to decrease as CO2 molecules re-emit half of the long-wave radiation they absorbed back toward the Earth's surface.  Increased concentrations of CO2 in the upper atmosphere, where radiative cooling dominates over convective processes, should allow the very energetically excited CO2 molecule which has absorbed incoming short wave radiation from the sun to efficiently re-emit that short-wave energy back into space.  Still more mysterious in terms of this CO2 hypothesis is the sudden jump in outgoing long-wave radiation from 1976 to 1981!  Basically, the overall strong increase in outgoing long-wave IR radiation from 1950 to 2009 should correspond to a major decrease in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.  There was no such decrease, but was instead a steady increase in CO2 concentrations, at least according to the data popularly presented by the advocates of catastrophic CO2-induced warming.

So, the low concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere do not account for the temperature record constructed by the advocates of a strong CO2 warming effect.  What phenomena are then causing both the increased outgoing long-wave IR radiation and the broadly rising temperature?  For one thing, during the same period from 1983 to 2009 that the incoming solar radiation was increasing as shown above, the global cloud cover was decreasing.  This is consistent with the theory of Henrik Svensmark that when the Sun has an increase in solar activity, the sun projects its electromagnetic field further and that protects the Earth more from cosmic rays.  The decreased flux of cosmic rays is said to allow for the nucleation of fewer clouds, consistent with the decreased cloud cover in the plot below as the Earth warmed in its last warming cycle.

But, it turns out that this is not the only effect affecting global temperatures.  The following graphs show the atmospheric humidity at various pressures, which drop as the altitude increases.  I will also give an altitude, which is that of the U.S. Standard Atmosphere of 1976, for which the sea level temperature was 288.15 K or 15 C.  The time history of the humidity at 1000 mbar (1 bar) pressure or sea level is:

As the temperature has increased since the mid-1970s, the sea level humidity has increased.  This is expected.  Increased temperature causes increased water evaporation from the oceans and land.  This also causes a counterbalancing cooling effect since it takes a huge amount of energy to cause water to warm up and still more to cause the phase change into a gas as water vapor.

At the atmospheric pressure of 925 mbar, or about 750 meters altitude, the history of water vapor is shown in the following graph:

The humidity at this altitude may be said to have fallen from the 1950s a bit, then held steady from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s.  After the mid-1990s, the concentration of water vapor increased.  The increase at this altitude lagged that at sea level by about two decades.  At this altitude, cooling of the Earth's near surface is dominated by convection processes and molecular collisions.  The historical trend is very different when we examine the humidity record at 600 mbar (4170 meters) as shown below:

Basically, the humidity fell from 1948 to the mid-1960s at this higher altitude and then has remained pretty steady ever since.  Energy transfer at this altitude is dominated by IR radiation.  The story at the pressure of 400 mbar or about 7200 meters altitude shows a steady decline from 1948 to 2009:

Thus, we see that at the higher altitudes, where radiative cooling dominates, water vapor has become rather less common in the upper atmosphere.  As I have previously discussed, the effect of either CO2 or water vapor on temperatures at the Earth's surface depends both on their absorption of incoming short-wave radiation and on outgoing long-wave radiation.  Increased IR-absorbing gases, often called greenhouse gases, cause the absorption of more of the sun's incoming radiation well above sea level.  This has a cooling effect upon the Earth's surface.  An increase in water vapor, the primary IR-absorbing gas, in the higher altitudes of the last two graphs would have a considerable cooling effect on the Earth at sea level.  The IR radiation absorbed by water vapor molecules would be very quickly and effectively radiated back into space. Conversely, the observed decrease in water vapor in these higher altitudes means more solar radiation reaches the ground or that part of the atmosphere where convection dominates as the mechanism for transferring energy.  Because convection moves energy into the upper atmosphere where it can be effectively radiated out into space rather slowly, increased solar energy absorbed in the lower atmosphere or at the ground level lingers longer. 

We see that the history of lower water vapor in the upper atmosphere is consistent with global warming, while increased CO2 is not.  This lowered humidity of the upper altitudes combines with the increased incoming solar radiation and the decreased cloud cover to cause an increase in the amount of solar energy reaching the ground and sea level.  The result is warming of the Earth's surface.  Furthermore, the absorption of more solar radiation at sea level results in more long-wave IR radiation into space since the added energy delivered to the surface is partitioned among many molecules very quickly due to the very short mean free path length in the dense atmosphere near the ground and the many molecular collisions to divide that energy among many gas molecules, especially the most prevalent nitrogen and oxygen molecules. The smaller energy per molecule means they emit at longer wavelength, so outgoing long-wave IR radiation increases.  Back in 1950, with higher humidity at higher altitudes, water molecules absorbed large amounts of energy and simply re-emitted that shorter wavelength radiation since at those altitudes the time between collisions is greater.  The so-called greenhouse effect of CO2 is clearly not a major factor, being inconsistent with the data discussed above.  This is consistent with many other arguments made on this blog that the catastrophic man-made CO2 emissions hypothesis is a failed hypothesis.

Given that socialists and Progressives have strongly advocated this hypothesis for many years and seen to it that climate change research was focused on the effects of increased atmospheric CO2 for many years with tens of billions of dollars of funding, it is incredible that so many fatal problems with this hypothesis have been documented.  It is a wonder to behold that so much contradictory data has not long since caused this hypothesis to be abandoned in failure.  It has become impossible to believe that the explanation for the continued backing for this hypothesis and the many claims that it is accepted science has any basis but a religious adherence to its usefulness to socialist elitists, radical environmentalists, and some crony businesses.

The data used was borrowed from a talk by Dr. Ir. Noor van Andel, the former head of research at Akzo Nobel, to the Dutch Meteorological Institute KNMI.  The arguments I have used differ somewhat from his and they are simpler.  Compared to his talk, this presentation is nearly free of climate jargon. 

House of Commons Investigates ClimateGate - Institute of Physics Comments

In the United Kingdom, the House of Commons is investigating the ClimateGate issues out of the CRU at the University of East Anglia and the use of unscientific sources for many claims made in the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007. The Institute of Physics of the U.K. has submitted a memorandum to the Science and Technology Committee of the House of Commons Parliament on 5 March 2010. It reads:

The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia

The Institute of Physics is a scientific charity devoted to increasing the practice, understanding and application of physics. It has a worldwide membership of over 36,000 and is a leading communicator of physics-related science to all audiences, from specialists through to government and the general public. Its publishing company, IOP Publishing, is a world leader in scientific publishing and the electronic dissemination of physics.

The Institute is pleased to submit its views to inform the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee's inquiry, 'The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia'.

The submission details our response to the questions listed in the call for evidence, which was prepared with input from the Institute's Science Board, and its Energy Sub-group.

What are the implications of the disclosures for the integrity of scientific research?

1. The Institute is concerned that, unless the disclosed e-mails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context.

2. The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law. The principle that scientists should be willing to expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others, which requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials, is vital. The lack of compliance has been confirmed by the findings of the Information Commissioner. This extends well beyond the CRU itself - most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other international institutions who are also involved in the formulation of the IPCC's conclusions on climate change.

3. It is important to recognise that there are two completely different categories of data set that are involved in the CRU e-mail exchanges:

• those compiled from direct instrumental measurements of land and ocean surface temperatures such as the CRU, GISS and NOAA data sets; and
• historic temperature reconstructions from measurements of 'proxies', for example, tree-rings.

4. The second category relating to proxy reconstructions are the basis for the conclusion that 20th century warming is unprecedented. Published reconstructions may represent only a part of the raw data available and may be sensitive to the choices made and the statistical techniques used. Different choices, omissions or statistical processes may lead to different conclusions. This possibility was evidently the reason behind some of the (rejected) requests for further information.

5. The e-mails reveal doubts as to the reliability of some of the reconstructions and raise questions as to the way in which they have been represented; for example, the apparent suppression, in graphics widely used by the IPCC, of proxy results for recent decades that do not agree with contemporary instrumental temperature measurements.

6. There is also reason for concern at the intolerance to challenge displayed in the

e-mails. This impedes the process of scientific 'self correction', which is vital to the integrity of the scientific process as a whole, and not just to the research itself. In that context, those CRU e-mails relating to the peer-review process suggest a need for a review of its adequacy and objectivity as practised in this field and its potential vulnerability to bias or manipulation.

7. Fundamentally, we consider it should be inappropriate for the verification of the integrity of the scientific process to depend on appeals to Freedom of Information legislation. Nevertheless, the right to such appeals has been shown to be necessary. The e-mails illustrate the possibility of networks of like-minded researchers effectively excluding newcomers. Requiring data to be electronically accessible to all, at the time of publication, would remove this possibility.

8. As a step towards restoring confidence in the scientific process and to provide greater transparency in future, the editorial boards of scientific journals should work towards setting down requirements for open electronic data archiving by authors, to coincide with publication. Expert input (from journal boards) would be needed to determine the category of data that would be archived. Much 'raw' data requires calibration and processing through interpretive codes at various levels.

9. Where the nature of the study precludes direct replication by experiment, as in the case of time-dependent field measurements, it is important that the requirements include access to all the original raw data and its provenance, together with the criteria used for, and effects of, any subsequent selections, omissions or adjustments. The details of any statistical procedures, necessary for the independent testing and replication, should also be included. In parallel, consideration should be given to the requirements for minimum disclosure in relation to computer modelling.

Are the terms of reference and scope of the Independent Review announced on 3 December 2009 by UEA adequate?

10. The scope of the UEA review is, not inappropriately, restricted to the allegations of scientific malpractice and evasion of the Freedom of Information Act at the CRU. However, most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other leading institutions involved in the formulation of the IPCC's conclusions on climate change. In so far as those scientists were complicit in the alleged scientific malpractices, there is need for a wider inquiry into the integrity of the scientific process in this field.

11. The first of the review's terms of reference is limited to: "...manipulation or suppression of data which is at odds with acceptable scientific practice..." The term 'acceptable' is not defined and might better be replaced with 'objective'.

12. The second of the review's terms of reference should extend beyond reviewing the CRU's policies and practices to whether these have been breached by individuals, particularly in respect of other kinds of departure from objective scientific practice, for example, manipulation of the publication and peer review system or allowing pre-formed conclusions to override scientific objectivity.

How independent are the other two international data sets?

13. Published data sets are compiled from a range of sources and are subject to processing and adjustments of various kinds. Differences in judgements and methodologies used in such processing may result in different final data sets even if they are based on the same raw data. Apart from any communality of sources, account must be taken of differences in processing between the published data sets and any data sets on which they draw.

The Institute of Physics

February 2010

The Institute of Physics is clearly responding more rationally to events regarding the scientific conduct of many major proponents of catastrophic man-made global warming than is the American Physical Society. I am very disappointed yet in the American Physical Society's response to more than 250 present and past members of that society for a review of its thoughtless backing of catastrophic AGW back in 2007. I will be discussing this more in the future.

Gore The Bore Resurfaces on Climate Change

Al Gore, the pontificater, the bore, the Yale elitist with the gentleman C grades in easy courses, has risen from the dead with an Op-Ed to the New York Times on 28 February 2010. It had seemed he was keeping a low profile due to the many revelations of bad science and outright fraud being the real source of the claims for the catastrophic man-made global warming due to CO2 emissions alarm. While he is about to make many assertions that man needs to take action to prevent global warming, there are some very interesting evasions of offering any evidence that global warming is occurring or that it is in fact caused by man's use of fossil fuels. He also hedges his bets on the reality of man-made catastrophic global warming in effect by saying that we must

deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil. And we would still trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy — the most important sources of new jobs in the 21st century.

Let us examine this energy and alternative energy job claim for a moment and then I will move on the global warming issues.  He complains that we have a growing dependence on oil from the most unstable region of the world.  Well, Iraq is embarking on an ambitious program to expand its oil production to exceed that of Saudi Arabia [The Economist, 20-26 Feb 2010].  It may not accomplish this quickly, but if it even comes close to matching the output of Saudi Arabia, the cost of oil will remain very reasonable for many years to come and the alternative energy companies Al Gore has invested heavily in will not be able to compete, even with much larger government subsidies than our government drowning in debt can provide.  OK, yes, Iraq is still in this volatile region, but every additional supply of oil adds to our energy security.  Of course, one can also ask Gore why he and his Progressive friends who care so much about energy security and who do not want to pay for oil abroad will not allow us to explore, drill, and develop oil fields in our own off-shore waters and in the ridiculously innumerable acres of government-held land in the U.S.  Neither does he explain why taxing the oil companies more heavily will help them to find more oil in the U.S. and abroad.  Neither does he explain why sending money abroad to buy oil is somehow worse than sending money abroad to buy any other goods, services, or resources.  We live in a global economy, which he seems to disparage with his fear of depending upon a global oil market, which in fact is a great advantage to us in stabilizing the price of oil and assuring its availability.

Next he makes the outrageous claim that we trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy.  I really do not know what he is basing these claims on.  It is true that China is rapidly increasing its output of cheap, inefficient solar panels largely for sales to countries with mandates requiring that they generate power with expensive solar power plants.  The technology is more advanced in the U.S., but our costs of production are rather high.  Perhaps Al Gore should call for a steep reduction in our absurdly high corporate income tax which makes it very difficult for American companies to compete in the global markets Al so fears.  After all, the U.S. and Japan, whose economy has not been able to get out of the starting blocks for the last 15 years, have the highest corporate taxes in the world today and Obama wants to make them higher!  Of course, Al would probably want a tax reduction only for his solar power companies, being a crony capitalist.  Then he also claims that he has enumerated the most important sources of jobs for the 21st Century.  What do you suppose the track record Teddy Roosevelt would have had for predicting the main sources of jobs in the 20th Century in 1910?  Or, you may substitute the name of any politician of that time you might prefer.

Al Gore goes on to say:

I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.
It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.

 I have dealt enough with the scientific scandal of the claims made by the catastrophic man-made global warming alarmists that I will not lay out the magnitude of the problems here again, though I will continue to discuss those problems in other posts.  I am just going to say that this attempt to minimize the scientific problems of the global warming alarmists has not held up in Australia or now in the United Kingdom and is beginning to collapse on the heads of such alarmists in the U.S. also.  Many comedians are now picking up on this fraud and that is usually the end of any theory being taken seriously!  So, Al Gore shows himself here as an ostrich with his head in the sand.  Perhaps this is a delaying tactic, so he will have time to unload his alternative energy stocks on other Progressive suckers.

By the way, when I tried to warn other alumni of Brown University and Case Western Reserve University of how the scientific argument for man-made global warming had fallen apart and that the alternative energy companies were going to have a very hard time of it as a result a couple of months ago, I was called rude, trailer trash, a flat-earther, and many other names by a great many alumni.  Some of them had invested in alternative energy, one planned to work for such a company when he finished his graduate studies, one was an associate professor whose research grants depended upon the scare, and many others were just being good religious Progressives.

Al goes on to say:

the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.

The record of the UN IPCC reports has been to consistently overestimate the sea level rise and there is no reason known to me to think that more recently they have underestimated sea level rise to come.  The Arctic ice cap expands and contracts mostly due to winds and not due to melting, so it is rather insensitive to any modest warming, such as that since the end of the Little Ice Age.  In any case, if sea ice melts, it does not change the sea level!  The ice on Baffin Island and on Greenland can cause the sea level to rise, but there is no reason to think all that ice is going to melt either.  This is just more groundless alarmism perhaps issued to help his stocks hold value until he can unload them.  As for Antarctica, most of the continent has been experiencing ice expansion, not contraction, in recent times and again there is no reason for alarm.  Furthermore, there is no link to man's CO2 emissions here.

Then he makes the claim that

January was seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. Yet from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.

And this is almost certainly nonsense also.  The official NOAA land surface temperature data has been so badly manipulated to make it seem as though the world has been warming that we now know that data is useless for establishing whether a given month or year is one of the warmer months or years in the last 130 years.  Absolutely a meaningless claim.  This is the word of an inveterate liar, so that everything such a liar has to say must be taken as meaningless.  How naive does Gore think the American People are?

Now let us examine a perfectly illogical statement Al made:

Similarly, even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.

Prof. Phil Jones, the former head of the CRU at the University of East Anglia and a stalwart alarmist, recently stated that there has been no significant global warming since 1995.  Since 2001, there has been a slight cooling, if anything, though this may also be regarded as insignificant.  Now, if there was warming from 1990 to 1995 and then the warming stopped, the decade from 2000 to 2010 would be the warmest decade in recent history, even though no warming had occurred since 1995.  But, Al wants us to believe that the claim that the last decade was the warmest means that warming has not stopped.  This does not logically follow Al.  You should have taken a philosophy course in remedial logic at Yale, Al.  The claim that the last decade has been the hottest since modern records have been kept is also based on the warming manipulated surface temperature records, which disagree with the satellite temperature records which are more accurate and have not been tampered with to try to create an exaggerated warming.

Al goes on to make the argument that the recent heavy snowfalls are the result of global warming causing an increase in winter humidity.  I have already debunked this argument in an earlier post.

Al's specious claims continue:

Here is what scientists have found is happening to our climate: man-made global-warming pollution traps heat from the sun and increases atmospheric temperatures. These pollutants — especially carbon dioxide — have been increasing rapidly with the growth in the burning of coal, oil, natural gas and forests, and temperatures have increased over the same period. Almost all of the ice-covered regions of the Earth are melting — and seas are rising. Hurricanes are predicted to grow stronger and more destructive, though their number is expected to decrease. Droughts are getting longer and deeper in many mid-continent regions, even as the severity of flooding increases. The seasonal predictability of rainfall and temperatures is being disrupted, posing serious threats to agriculture. The rate of species extinction is accelerating to dangerous levels.

The global warming pollutant is primarily CO2 and it is not a pollutant any more than water vapor is.  By far the most ice is in the Antarctic and it is not melting as claimed.  Other ice-covered areas are growing and contracting from year to year as they usually do, but perhaps with a very slight tendency to melt due to the recent end of the Little Ice Age.  But, the seas are actually rising at a very slow rate compared to the average rise since the end of the last major Ice Age.  While some have rashly predicted that hurricanes will become stronger, there is no evidence in history to support this and the likelihood is disputed by the best experts on violent storms.  Last I knew, there was also no reason to believe that flooding and drought were significantly worse than at other times in history.  I have no idea where Gore got that claim.  As for the seasonal predictability of rainfall and temperatures, these go through cycles historically and there is no link to the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.  Where does Al get all of this nonsense?  Probably from his day dreams, which he spent so much time doing when he got a D in the course of the global warming advocating professor he now claims was so important to him when he was at Yale.

Gore now ramps up the scale of human misery to be caused by global warming:

the displacement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees, civil unrest, chaos and the collapse of governance in many developing countries, large-scale crop failures and the spread of deadly diseases.

If the world were to become slightly warmer, life in most of the world would become easier, not harder.  There might be some civil unrest in Florida and Arizona, since fewer people from New England, New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota would choose to move there upon retirement!  Any slight extension to the growing season would be welcomed, not feared, in those cooler places which the greatest warming has been occurring, if you could actually believe the claims that it has, which you cannot.  The increase in deadly diseases idea does not hold water either.  For instance, it is claimed malaria will spread north.  Nonsense, malaria was widely in the north in the 1800s when it was colder than now.  It moved south mostly because swamps and marshes in the north were drained and because DDT was widely used there in earlier decades.

Next Al Gore informs us about his political, ethical, and human race assessments.  This is interesting.  He bemoans the fact that the economy is now largely global, that the industrial countries do not want to lose their jobs, and that the emerging economies have rising expectations.  He goes on:

The decisive victory of democratic capitalism over communism in the 1990s led to a period of philosophical dominance for market economics worldwide and the illusion of a unipolar world. It also led, in the United States, to a hubristic “bubble” of market fundamentalism that encouraged opponents of regulatory constraints to mount an aggressive effort to shift the internal boundary between the democracy sphere and the market sphere. Over time, markets would most efficiently solve most problems, they argued. Laws and regulations interfering with the operations of the market carried a faint odor of the discredited statist adversary we had just defeated.

Apparently, he thinks the world should be bipolar and that communism somehow made it more properly bipolar.  He thinks a strong belief in market economics is hubris.  He claims that government is the democracy sphere and that it is in opposition to the market sphere.  This is really weird.  Government, even when largely democratic, does not allow everyone the freedom to buy whatever goods and services they choose individually or allow them to start their own business or allow them to work freely for anyone who wishes to hire them.  Government, even so-called democratic government, always tends to interfere with these personal decisions.  There is no more democratic way for a free People to live than in a free market economy.  Yet, Gore tries to make us think that the one-size-fits-all-decrees of government make for a more democratic society than does a free market society.  Hogwash.

Next, Gore sets out on a tirade against television:

Simultaneously, changes in America’s political system — including the replacement of newspapers and magazines by television as the dominant medium of communication — conferred powerful advantages on wealthy advocates of unrestrained markets and weakened advocates of legal and regulatory reforms. Some news media organizations now present showmen masquerading as political thinkers who package hatred and divisiveness as entertainment. And as in times past, that has proved to be a potent drug in the veins of the body politic. Their most consistent theme is to label as “socialist” any proposal to reform exploitive behavior in the marketplace.

This is a bit strange too.  The heyday of television for the news was prior to the recent period when Gore wanted carbon cap and trade and restrictions on energy use.  Pretty much all but one news network (Fox) have been touting the Progressive line on global warming and the nefarious role of the industrialized humans, anyway.  One would think he might be railing against the Internet, which he invented, for its role in helping to expand opposition to the Democrats cap and trade schemes, disseminating the evidence that the catastrophic global warming claims were false, enlarging the Tea Party revolt, and getting out the information in the Democrat bills they did not want the People to know about until after they became law.  Oh, but of course, he cannot rail against the Internet, because he invented it!  Then, it is curious that he talks about exploitation of the ignorant and easily victimized People in the same sentence in which he tells us that calling the Progressive program "socialist" is unfair.  I still find the very words exploitation and solidarity sickening after decades of hearing them pour out of the mouths of socialists, Marxists, and communists!

Now the elitist Progressive comes forth strongly again:

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.

Yes, of course, we cannot allow the People to make their own choices in the free market, because we must use the force of government to redeem these sorry sinners.  We, the elitist Progressives, must use the force of government to enforce myriad laws to make the People do what they will not choose to do individually in their own lives.  Of course, many of them are not college educated and many who are did not go to Ivy League quality universities, so we brilliant and well-studied elite will so manipulate the government that these unwashed peasants will do as we tell them to, while we all pretend this was democratically decided.  The People will not make the right personal choices, so we will deceive them into thinking they made the very laws which they would not obey except for the fact that the government will force them to do so.  Government must constrain the private sector to redeem the sinning People.  Government is the Messiah or the elitists who manipulate its levers are the Messiahs.

This sort of manipulation has been going on for a long time.  For most of this time, this caused many people simply to feel disenfranchised.  But, finally, the people became angry about it and they decided they had to do something about being taken advantage of by those who manipulated the levers of government in order to redeem them from the things and actions they loved.  The People have responded with the Tea Party movement.  It is now clear that very many of the People have seen through the Al Gores, John Kerrys, Obamas, Pelosis, Reids, Waxmans, and their ilk.

Perhaps the day of big government redeeming the People will finally come to an end and the People will finally redeem their government.  To do that, they must force it to obey the Constitution, which will take some doing.  But once you see through the obscurantism of the Gores, this becomes a lot easier.  The man behind the curtain has finally been seen and he is not impressive at all.

The Agenda is Primary, Not the Science or the Facts

I have repeatedly pointed out that the government mandates and subsidies for ethanol production from corn and other plant sources were based on claims that net energy would be produced and air pollution would be reduced.  These were false claims and this is now well-known.  Nonetheless, Congress has not enacted new legislation to repeal the bad mistake and eliminate the mandates for ethanol use in gasoline mixtures and the subsidies for its production.  This has not happened even though this situation has driven up food prices, in addition to fuel prices, as another bad consequence.  The reason no needed reform has occurred is because the ethanol laws were actually passed to purchase the votes and to gain campaign money from many farmers and from ethanol producers.  It was a way for politicians to increase their control over parts of the private sector.

The total scientific collapse of the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis, has not caused Obama and the progressives (fascist socialists) to back off on promoting alternative energy sources with mandates and subsidies at all.  Obama called for a big push to increase government controls on energy in his State of the Union address.  The EPA still seems bent upon putting draconian controls on CO2 emissions and the use of fossil fuels under the Clean Air Act as well.  The progressive machine moves forward, despite the knowledge that man's CO2 emissions have no more than a trivial effect upon climate.  Why?

The very reason that NOAA dropped out hundreds of temperature reporting stations from the surface temperature records, which reported cooler temperatures than other retained stations did, to make it falsely appear that the earlier warming cycle of the late 1970s and 1980s was continuing, makes it very clear that an agenda was long dominant over any issues of science.  The agenda of the catastrophic man-made global warming scheme was a great desire to gain massive new control over the energy sector of our economy and over all users of energy.  Basically, all American businesses are highly dependent upon energy, which is why sudden price hikes in oil have set off 10 of the 11 recessions since WWII, including the present one.  Those Americans who do not own a company dependent upon energy costs, work for one or still have a residence they must heat and cool.  The power grab by the progressives to take over the control of energy is huge.  That goal remains, whether the science of catastrophic man-made global warming has become laughable or not.

So, the fascist socialist left is not giving up.  They are attempting to make another transition in their claim on power over the American people.  They used to base it entirely on fairness and economic equality, but the fall of the USSR made the claims of central economic planning look pitiful.  Their hollowness was too easily seen in the rapid movement of Eastern Europeans away from communism and socialism.  They had lived in socialism's depressing and deadening grasp.  They fled with elation to Capitalism.  Even the Chinese Communist government realized they had to drop much of their central economic planning.  The fascist socialists in the West adopted environmentalism and global warming as the agenda that would allow them to increase their power over the People.  Now that rationale has fallen apart on the global warming side and the environmental harm exaggerations on many other fronts are more and more being questioned also.  Where can they turn?

The new approach is rather desperate.  The claim is we will run out of fossil fuels, they are dirty, and alternative energy can produce more jobs.  Someday, we will run out of fossil fuels, but they are plentiful and cheap still.  This gives us plenty of time to develop alternative energy and there is no reason for pell-mell crash programs.  The free market will develop the new energy as it is needed.  Let companies drill in the American waters and in national forests and allow them to develop oil shale, as it makes sense.  Let them also use wind generation, solar, and geothermal power as they can find and develop markets for them.  There is no need for huge, wasteful government programs.  The evolution of technology will be much more efficient at its private sector pace.  As for cleanliness, we have already made huge strides in cleaning up our fossil fuel use.  A rationally paced program to continue such work will be wiser again than any crash program.  The real problems with pollution are in the poorer countries of the world and the solution is to bring the highly efficient Capitalist system to them, so they can afford to clean up their countries, as we have cleaned up the U.S.  Will alternative energy produce new jobs?  Yes, but we want it to produce net new jobs.  A government policy of killing coal miners, oil drillers, railroad, and energy-using industry jobs in massive numbers to create a pittance of new alternative energy jobs, is a fool's errand.

But, of course, I am treating the claims of the progressive fascist socialists as though they are motivated by a respect for reason.  They are not.  They are motivated by a desire to control the lives of others.  They want to tell every American what his values should be and then give him a strict set of rules to manage his life.  We are all to be the slaves of the college-educated elite of progressive fascist socialists who want to control us.  They are to be our rulers, our tyrants supreme.  Are we going to allow this?  I do not think so.  I think we are about to start throwing these rascals out of government in droves!  But, it is clear that they will never stop seeking to rule us and if we are to be free, we must never stop fighting this ravenous beast of fascist socialism.

Petition for Reconsideration of Endangerment Decision of EPA of Greenhouse Gases

The EPA ruled on 7 December 2009 that the public health and welfare was threatened by greenhouse gases, including CO2.  Therefore, it would make up rules for regulating the emissions of such gases under the Clean Air Act.  The EPA ruling was based heavily upon UN IPCC documents and the testimony of a number of prominent advocates of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming due to CO2 emissions and other greenhouse gases.  The recent revelations of systematic scientific shenanigans to manipulate temperature data, the failure to record the data manipulations, the failure to produce data under freedom of information act requests, the claims of lost data, the revelation of efforts to keep contrary scientific viewpoints from being published, while the alarmists papers were given stacked reviews, have caused a petition for the reconsideration of the EPA endangerment ruling of December 2009.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, and the Science and Environmental Policy Project petitioned the EPA on 12 February 2010 to reconsider this foolish ruling that CO2 and five other greenhouse gases should be regulated under the Clean Air Act.  They have now added a 16 February 2010 supplement to that petition based on more recent findings in contradiction to those cited by the EPA in its ruling in December.  In particular, these include the recent recantations by Prof. Phil Jones which I reviewed here and the false UN IPCC claims about hurricanes and severe storms which I reviewed here.

Some Companies are Becoming Less Green -- With Caution

The scientific unraveling of the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming hypothesis, is now allowing some companies to become less its proponents.  BP PLC and ConocoPhillips, both large oil firms, and Caterpillar Inc., the heavy equipment manufacturer, have pulled out of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) according to today's Wall Street Journal.  This alliance of companies and environmental groups was formed in 2007 when many businesses decided it was better to be at the table making greenhouse gas restrictive legislation than to be on the table to be eaten.  The widening disillusionment with the Democrat policies to drive up the costs of energy and to cripple the economy with CO2 emissions restrictions and the scientific failure of the catastrophic greenhouse gas global warming theory have given these companies some cover to cautiously reduce their support for any such controls.  Royal Dutch Shell PLC, GE, and Honeywell International Inc. remain in the evil coalition with the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

ConocoPhillips, BP, and Caterpillar had previously opposed the legislation before Congress on various grounds.  The oil companies wanted all energy producers to be treated equally.  Caterpillar did not want tariffs to be imposed on other countries which did not match U.S. efforts to cut back on the minor greenhouse gases, the major one being water vapor, which is uncontrollable for sure.  Caterpillar is a heavy exporter of equipment and does not want to see tariff wars develop.  Now that gas emissions restrictions to deal with the fabled global warming are unlikely to happen via legislation before the 2010 elections, companies no longer have a great need to pretend their differences of opinion are unimportant compared to that goal.  The cautious play for these departing companies lies in their stated support for some kind of restrictions on the minor greenhouse gases and for some green causes.

In other news on the political front relating to greenhouse gases, Texas is taking legal action against the EPA's attempt to restrict greenhouse gases under the decades old Clean Air Act.  It is arguing that the EPA based its decision on the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007 and that report has now been shown to be seriously defective.  The Virginia Attorney General, Kenneth Cuccinelli asked the EPA to delay its finding that it could and should regulate CO2 and other greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act while new information is considered that the temperature increases have been exaggerated and that natural causes may have caused most of the temperature rise.

The Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming Bandwagon Plunges Off Cliff

Most people have a strong desire to fit in with a group and to be accepted by that group.  We see this in high school aged children, where numerous cliques abound, with the criteria for membership in one or another being often quite superficial.  We see it in that most of the people of a given area are of the same general religion.  If you are American, you are much more likely to be Christian than anything else.  If you are Egyptian or Iranian, you are much more likely to Muslim.  If you are from southern India, you are most likely Hindu.  If you are from the Northeast or the Left Coast, you are more likely to be a Democrat.  If you are from the Rocky Mountain states,  the Great Plains, or the South, you are more likely a Republican.  If you are an Ivy League or other top college graduate, you are more likely to think well of socialism and want America to be more like socialist western Europe.  People want to belong and they cluster into groups of similar belief.  This process often defies all observation of the facts of reality and it often means believing in things with effects very different than those the believers claim is their intention.  Of course, there are also usually group members whose intention is to accomplish the aims which will be accomplished.  There usually are those who are happy to take advantage of the delusions of crowds.

In recent times, one of those bandwagon ideas one just had to accept in order to belong to the Democrat faction or to the well-educated college graduate clique, was that man is destroying the Earth in a number of ways, but mostly because man has developed an excessively industrialized and consumer-driven way of life.  The fact that we lived much more secure, longer, and richer lives than ever before, was in various ways ignored or denied.  In effect, all that we had done to raise ourselves from the status of the Noble Savage was a mistake.  In particular, our use of relatively inexpensive, convenient, and reliable fossil fuels was destroying the Earth by overheating it with emissions of carbon dioxide.  We were told that polar ice caps would melt and parts of New York City, much of Florida, much of the Netherlands, and much of Bangladesh, not to mention many sea islands, would go underwater.  We were told that polar bears, penguins, butterflies, and toads would suffer.  We were told there would be more droughts and wildfires and that hurricanes would be more frequent and more destructive.  We were told the oceans would become acidic and shells would be dissolved and coral reefs would die.  We were told that if we did not cut back on our fossil fuel use almost immediately by at least 80% the Earth was doomed and with that doom, so was mankind doomed.

Let me remind you all of what John Galt said in his speech to the nation in Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand:

"But to think is an act of choice." ..... "In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival -- so that for you, who are a human being, the question 'to be or not to be" is the question 'to think or not to think.'

The fallacy of those who unthinkingly jump on a popular bandwagon has been familiar to mankind for a very long time. I read a post today by a friend who compared catastrophic anthropogenic global warming theory to the phlogiston theory of fire and combustion, before he noted that perhaps it was even more like the scientific hoax of Peltsdown Man.  He closed with an interesting quote from Buddha:

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

UN IPCC 2007 Report Hurricane Claims Wrong

Les Hatton has worked on weather models at the Meteorology Office of the United Kingdom, studied mathematics at Cambridge, and earned a Ph.D. in meteorology.  He is a fellow of the Royal Meteorology Society, teaches at the University of Kingston, and an expert in critical systems analysis.  He has examined the raw data on severe storms from NOAA in order to test several statements made in the IPCC AR4 report of 2007.  He performed a z-test statistical analysis of the 1999-2009 period for comparison to the entire 1946 - 2009 period.  He found no significant change in the number of storms or their severity.

The more detailed results were:

• North Atlantic hurricane activity increased significantly, mostly due to an especially active year in 2005.
• Hurricane-strength storms in the East Pacific diminished.  There are 50% more such storms there commonly than in the North Atlantic.
• There was no difference in storms of the West Pacific.
• There was no net difference in severe storms globally.

Interestingly enough, the IPCC report did say "there is no clear trend in the annual numbers of tropical cyclones."  Yet it goes on to say "There are also suggestions of increased intense tropical cyclone activity in some other regions where concerns over data quality are greater."  Hatton claims the data from those areas is of similar quality to all the other data.  The IPCC makes the claim that "It is more likely than not (> 50%) that there has been some human contribution to the increases in hurricane intensity."  Hatton says they concluded this from computer models, which were at variance with the observational data!

Hatton is not the first scientist with expertise in severe storms to refute the UN IPCC AR4 report claims of 2007.  Dr. Chris Landsea, the chief scientist of the National Hurricane Center in the U.S., resigned in 2005 from his activities as a contributor to the UN IPCC reports in protest to the poor science of Dr. Kevin Trenberth who was a Lead Author for the AR4 of 2007.  Landsea claimed publicly that the Dr. Kevin Trenberth's claims that severe storms were more intense and frequent due to man-made global warming were wrong, since they were not more intense and more frequent.  Dr. Kevin Trenberth is one of the inner circle of global warming alarmists whose unethical advocacy activities were made more public by the recent ClimateGate e-mail and document dump from the CRU of the University of East Anglia.

Some global warming alarmists note that there has been an increase in low-intensity storms in the record.  This, however, appears to be because radar and satellites are observing these storms now, which often went unobserved before.

Prof. Phil Jones Admits No Significant Warming since 1995

Following the ClimateGate e-mail and documents dump scandal, the then director of the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, was asked to step down while an investigation of such things as his refusal to provide data requested under a freedom of information act was underway.  Phil Jones was a principal author on the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007.

In an interview on the BBC on 13 February 2010, Phil Jones admitted that (here and here):

• There has been no "statistically significant" warming since 1995.
• The warming periods of 1860 to 1880, 1910 to 1940, and 1975 to 1998 were very similar and could all be explained by natural forces.
• The data and papers the hockey stick graph used prominently in the last two UN IPCC reports is based on has been lost.  The hockey stick temperature record was the basis for a claim of unprecedented warming recently, which was attributed to man's CO2 emissions due to using fossil fuels.
• The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) may have been warmer than now and recently, but there is insufficient data from the tropics and the southern hemisphere to be sure of that.  He says the MWP is best expressed in North America, the North Atlantic and Europe, and parts of Asia.

Wow, is Phil Jones' fall from being a top global warming alarmist scientist amazing evidence of the collapse of this scientific foolishness, or what?

Strangely enough, though Phil Jones concedes that the warmings from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to 1998 are remarkably similar and may be entirely natural events and he says that no statistically significant warming has occurred since 1995, he also claims that only man-made warming effects can explain the warming since 1998!  Now this is a simple breakdown of logic and reveals how strongly the religion of man-made global warming has its claws sunk into him.

Note also that the warmth of the MWP can hardly be ignored for the North Atlantic,  Europe, and parts of Asia, because there are plentiful human records of the crops grown, the extent of glaciers, and the natural flora and fauna of the time from those areas.  North America and many of those areas have been particularly subject to scientific studies as well.  But, there is much less land in the Southern Hemisphere, especially if the unpopulated Antarctica is discounted, and none of it was settled by advanced civilizations that kept significant written records.  His claim that warming in the tropics should also be shown before the MWP is thought of as a global warming is actually showing ignorance of the science of the Earth's climate.  When the Earth warms from temperatures similar to those we have now, the temperature in the tropics is hardly changed at all.  The reason is that water evaporates so much more quickly there with any warming.  In evaporation, the absorption of heat from the environment to turn liquid water into vapor has a counteracting cooling effect.  This effect is large, since it takes a lot of heat to vaporize water.  As a result, the temperature of the tropics tends to be quite stable even when the warming at higher latitudes is significant.

Prof. Phil Jones wrote in a dumped e-mail that he would destroy the temperature data before he would turn it over in response to freedom of information act requests.  Is losing the data the same as destroying it?  Maybe he lost it in a trash dumpster in Northumberland.  He claimed in the interview that his office was so piled with papers that maybe it was lost there.  He admitted that he was not a good record-keeper.

Dr. Benny Pieser, director of the skeptical Global Warming Policy Foundation, noted that Prof. Phil Jones had shared his data with colleagues and 'mates', so the claim that he had lost the data did not ring true.  He went on to say that this was Phil Jones' first admission that the science of global warming was not settled.

Folks, it is much worse than that.  Phil Jones was one of the most cited scientists in the scientific literature as an authority on catastrophic man-made global warming.  Now, he clearly has no evidence for any warming since 1995 and he has said the earlier warming from 1975 to 1998 was no different than that from 1910 to 1940, so there is simply no longer any late 20th Century warming that can be claimed to be unprecedented and/or due to man's use of fossil fuels!  Whether he lost the hockey stick data or not is now irrelevant with respect to the catastrophic man-made global warming argument.  He has already logically admitted that the hockey stick temperature graph is wrong!  And prior to this, every effort was made by the scientists in his alarmist cabal to erase the Medieval Warm Period, but now we have his confession that he is not at all sure that it can be erased!

The catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (AGW) science house of cards has collapsed very rapidly.  Unfortunately, it is hanging in there in much of the media and in the Democrat Party.  The Economist and even Forbes Magazine have had recent articles assuming its truth.  The EPA has failed to reopen consideration of its foolish recent declaration that CO2 is a pollutant which it must regulate tightly under the Clean Air Act.  The Obama administration has announced the formation of a new department under NOAA to serve as a central government advocate for catastrophic man-made global warming, though they name it as simply a climate research and study department.  The momentum of the religious movement for catastrophic AGW rumbles on, even after its obvious scientific collapse.

But, fewer independents and fewer Republicans now believe in it.  Even among Democrats, some have now become atheists or agnostics.  It will take time for the media and the politicians to correct themselves, but most of them will either do so or simply stop advocating it.  I am sure the latter option will be the more popular.  We can expect to hear few apologies from those who so strongly advocated shutting off our inexpensive fuel supplies, making our electricity system much less reliable and much more expensive, causing coal miners and oil refinery and pipeline workers to lose their jobs, many a manufacturing industry to move abroad, and many homes and workplaces to be cold in the winter and hot in the summer.  The false claims of catastrophic AGW will simply fade away.  Eventually.

We should remember who took the wrong side on this very important issue.  People such as Obama, Biden, Pelosi, Reid, Markey, Waxman, McCain, Lieberman, Bayh, Boxer, Feingold, Gillibrand, Inouye, Leahy, Mikulski, Murray, Schumer, Specter, Wyden, Edwards, Hoyer, Kratovil, and Van Hollen should all be thrown out of office as soon as possible.  Meanwhile, Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma has been a long-time foe of the hypothesis of catastrophic AGW and this should be remembered to his advantage.

A Record Snowfall in Washington, DC and Baltimore

 

The second blizzard of February, in progress, after extensive snow removal, at my home between Baltimore and Washington, D.C.

Both Baltimore and Washington, D.C. set new winter snowfall records this winter as a result of the third blizzard of this season on 9 and 10 February 2010.  The previous winter record was the winter of 1898-1899.  Time magazine and the NY Times have claimed that this new record snowfall is probably due to global warming.  If that followed so simply, then should it not be likely that the previous winter record was also due to global warming?  In other words, that simple logic would imply that the winter of 1898-1899 was an equally warm period.  Hmmm......last I knew the catastrophic man-made global warming alarmists were saying that the warming which occurred in the late 20th Century was unprecedented.  I do not think they want us to think the Time and NY Times logic through to the conclusion that 1898-1899 were equally warm!

The claim they made is essentially that the warmer air due to global warming will hold more moisture and therefore can provide more snow in the winter.  They overlook the fact that the Washington and Baltimore areas are near the Atlantic and generally have plenty of precipitation in the winters.  Most of that precipitation is in the form of rain and sleet most winters.

Let us consider the case for Washington, D.C.:  The only month with an average temperature below freezing is January and its average temperature is barely below freezing, being 30.6 degrees F.  February at an average temperature of 33.6 degrees F and December at an average of 35.4 degrees F are the next coldest months.  It is hardly a wonder that most winters have more rain and sleet than snow.  But, the December relative humidity in the morning is 79%, January averages 77%, and February averages 78%.  There is hardly a lack of humidity to turn into snow or rain.  This humidity is lower than the summer humidity, which in June is 84%, 86% in July, and 89% in August.  The afternoon humidity in December is 58%, in January it is 59%, and in February it is 54%.  The December and January afternoon humidities are the highest of the year!  December and January have the highest number of cloudy days in the year, followed by February and March.  December averages 3.2 inches of precipitation, January 2.7 inches, and February 2.8 inches.

Commonly, 1 inch of rain is about 6.25 inches of snow.  If all December average precipitation were in the form of snow, D.C. would have 20.0 inches.  The average January snow would be 16.9 inches and the average February snow would be 17.5 inches.  In fact, from 1971 to 2000, Washington, DC averaged 15.2 inches of snow each year, which is less than the potential of any of our winter months.  The limit on snow in DC is not the humidity of the air.  It is the temperature of the air!  Global warming would not make the winter air temperatures colder!  In fact, the falsified land surface temperature records usually indicate the greatest amount of the claimed recent warming occurs in the winter.

The amount of annual snowfall is very highly variable.  Before this winter, the snowiest winter in Washington D.C. was that of 1898-1899.  But, the previous winter of 1897-1898 had only 0.1 inch of snow!  That winter tied the winter of 1997-1998 for the record for least snow.  Note that in 1997 and 1998 we were already being told that these were years of unprecedented warmth.  If global warming causes heavy snowfall, why was that winter tied for the least snow since 1870?

The blame-it-on-mankind global warming alarmists never miss a chance to blame uncommon weather on mankind.  But, if they had only examined their assumptions a little bit, they would have seen the foolishness of the argument they put forth as the explanation for the heavy snowfall of the winter of 2009-2010 in Washington, D.C. and Baltimore.

UN IPCC Falsely Says 55% of Netherlands Endangered by Global Warming Flooding

The UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007 erred in saying that 55% of the Netherlands was in danger of being flooded due to global warming.  They arrived at this figure by adding the 20% of the country that consists of below sea level polders that are pumped dry to all areas which are subject to flooding.  However, the area subject to flooding includes most of the 20% of the land below sea level already.  The Dutch Environment Minister has ordered an investigation into the quality of the climate reports they use to base Dutch climate policy on.

Even though much less than 55% of the Netherlands is subject to flooding, it is also not at all clear that all of that land subject to flooding is endangered by the rising sea levels as claimed in the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007 either.  There is some more sloppy thinking being revealed here.  But, it no doubt seemed such a dramatic story at the time.  Not only was this dire tale likely to scare many a Dutchman into supporting the theory of catastrophic man-made global warming, but it was likely to cause many another sympathetic soul to have visions of poor little Dutch boys in wooden clogs valiantly manning every hole in every dike with a finger or an arm plugging the hole even as the water rose past his knees, then his waist, then his chest, then his neck, ........

Mountaineer Anecdotes in the UN IPCC AR4 Report of 2007

How many times have those of us who think the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming hypothesis based on man's emissions of CO2 is wrong been told that the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007, based on 2,500 or more of the best climate scientists and peer-reviewed journal articles, could not be wrong?  Of course, there were not 2,500 scientists involved and we are now discovering that many of the citations of authority are to publications of little authority and sometimes are actually cited for a viewpoint at odds with the viewpoint of the published article.  See my earlier posts about citations on Himalayan glaciers, natural disasters, Amazon rainforest damage, fish welfare, glacier retreat, mud flows, and more issues referencing World Wildlife Fund reports, and Greenpeace reports on coral reef damage and alternative power issues.

Still another instance has turned up.  In this case, the ultimate authority on all things pertaining to man-made global warming cites a popular climbing magazine and an unpublished master's thesis by a student who interviewed mountain guides in the Alps as the authoritative references for a decrease in mountain snow cover.  The Telegraph of the UK discusses this here.  Of course, good science starts with good observations of reality and there is some reason to believe mountaineers would be a good anecdotal source for a possible research project on mountain snow cover.  In recent times, many of them have probably been sucked into the environmentalist and global warming camp and may be inclined to help them along with their stories.  Many may have little knowledge of the snow cover of several decades ago, so they may not have a long time-frame viewpoint.  But, others may be familiar with old tales and old maps made by previous generations of mountaineers.  They are worth listening to.  But if no scientist has checked this issue out and published on the matter, what are these references doing in the "authoritative" IPCC report treated as ordinary scientific citations?

The UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007 was touted as the state of scientific knowledge of man's effects upon global climate.  The report appeared to say that there were scientifically determined net reductions in mountain snow and ice in the Andes, Alps, and in Africa.  It is now clear that no such science backs its claim.

Clearly, the United Nations is a political entity, not a scientific entity.  It has an agenda which is based on the politics of hundreds of nation states, most of which care at most marginally or not at all for the rights of the individual.  Many of them must deny truth and suppress understanding for their leaders to remain in power.  Supporting ignorance and providing misinformation is the name of their game.  Even in the United States, we see a lot of that coming from our political leaders.  They use the public school system to spread and inculcate propaganda and they use the sound bite to try to mislead the American People.  They give a bill a nice-sounding name which hides the real intent and the real outcomes of the legislation.  They pretend to care about the People when all they care about is getting more campaign donations from special interests and getting re-elected.  Politicians and country leaders are the last people to turn to for good science.

Chairman Pachauri of the UN IPCC AR4 Report Lied

We live in a world that seems to accept lies very readily, at least if they are made by someone whose politics is approved by the progressive (socialist) elitists.  Examples of constant liars are Presidents Clinton and Obama.  So, Chairman Pachauri's lies about when he learned about the error in the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007 being very badly wrong about a prediction that the glaciers of the Himalayan Mountains would be gone by 2035 may not do him the damage it ought to.  Nonetheless, the story of his lie is recited here.

ExtinctionGate and the UN IPCC AR4 Report

Among the many unjustified claims of the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007 is a claim that man's emissions of CO2 are causing and will cause unprecedented rates of extinctions of plant and animal life on Earth.  Climate Change Reconsidered, a report by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), does a good summary of the problems with the UN IPCC argument.

A Host of Unscientific References in the UN IPCC AR4 Report

Donna Laframboise on her blog NOconcensus.org has turned up a host of unscientific references in the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007.  Many of them are World Wildlife Fund reports and others of a similar level of objectivity.  Apparently, this is the result of looking into just a small fraction of the many references.

Thanks for your work on checking these references out, Donna Laframboise!  Donna also notes that the NASA website had claimed the Himalayan glaciers might be gone by 2030, five years earlier than their disappearance according to the discredited claim in the UN IPCC AR4 report!

AmazonGate Follows on the Heels of GlacierGate

The UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007 makes this claim:

Up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state, not necessarily producing gradual changes between the current and the future situation (Rowell and Moore, 2000).  It is more probable that forests will be replaced by ecosystems that have more resistance to multiple stresses caused by temperature increase, droughts and fires, such as tropical savannas.

In a report by James Delingpole, Dr. Richard North discovered that the reference to Rowell and Moore is to a report by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature.  Rowell is a journalist and environmental activist and Dr. Moore is a policy analyst with an interest in fires in Australia and Southeast Asia.  Neither is a specialist in the Amazon rain forests.  And even the cited report has no mention of the 40% figure!  No one knows where that 40% may have come from.

Once again, the UN IPCC AR4 report has been found to quote unscientific reports, as it did with respect to the glaciers of the Himalaya Mountains, to hype the claims of impending disaster due to man's use of fossil fuels.  The politics of the UN is more important than the science.