Patrick Michaels on the Manufactured Climate Consensus

Patrick J. Michaels served as a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia from 1980 to 2007.  He was also for a number of years the official Virginia state climatologist, before a Democrat governor decided to change that.  However, he fell out of favor with the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming alarmist scientists when he published papers saying that while there was human-induced warming of the Earth, it was less than that produced by the climate models at the time.  Feelings were so strong that a Ben Santer, a student of Tom Wigley then and now at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, offered to beat up Michaels if he encountered him at a scientific meeting in an e-mail to Phil Jones, the head of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia.

Patrick Michaels describes how the catastrophic AGW alarmists manufactured a so-called consensus of climate scientists by shutting out the skeptics and those who claimed this hypothesis was wrong.

Patrick Michaels: The Dog Ate Global Warming

The title of Patrick J. Michaels' article is so good, I had to mention it here, even though I have already written on this subject on 19 August 2009 in an entry called Global Surface Temperature Data Lost.  The Dog Ate Global Warming is a very interesting account of the efforts of many scientists to get the original surface temperature data from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia, which was originally funded by the U.S. Dept. of Energy and has received funds from the EPA as well.  Michaels also has knowledge of the foolishness of the CRU claim that they could not keep the data because they did not have enough data storage capacity in the 1980s.  His account is quite entertaining.  He concludes that this episode of shoddy science casts even more doubt on the claims of the global warming alarmists who are pushing the EPA to claim CO2 is a pollutant, with the consequence that the government will be forcing huge increases in energy costs, a reduction in power reliability, and massive increases in unemployment.

Yes, the Dog ate the primary data basis for the claim of catastrophic man-made global warming!  So, what are the consequences?  Our intrepid friend at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) has come up with a great response.  CEI's general counsel, Sam Kazman, has had CEI file a petition to force the EPA to reopen a major global warming proceeding.  This account finishes with:

CEI’s petition, filed late Monday with EPA, argues that CRU’s disclosure casts a new cloud of doubt on the science behind EPA’s proposal to regulate carbon dioxide.  EPA stopped accepting public comments in late June but has not yet issued its final decision.  As CEI’s petition argues, court rulings make it clear that agencies must consider new facts when those facts change the underlying issues.

CEI general counsel Sam Kazman stated, “EPA is resting its case on international studies that in turn relied on CRU data.  But CRU’s suspicious destruction of its original data, disclosed at this late date, makes that information totally unreliable.  If EPA doesn’t reexamine the implications of this, it’s stumbling blindly into the most important regulatory issue we face.”

You may recall that Sam Kazman filed the Freedom of Information Act request for the Alan Carlin and John Davidson report from within the EPA which questioned the EPA's evidence that CO2 was a pollutant.  This report was suppressed by the EPA management.  I discussed this in an entry called EPA Suppression of Endangerment Analysis of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on 1 July 2009.

Global Warming Implies Warming and Cooling in the Same Place

Global warming alarmists have been focusing media attention for several years on some warming of the Antarctic peninsula and the ice shelves around it. This penisula juts northward toward the southern tip of South America, so it is strongly influenced by the local ocean currents. It represents a much smaller fraction of the land mass of Antarctica than the East Antarctica area where the ice mass has been increasing for many years. Computer modelers who claimed the earth was warming rapidly due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions were convinced that a cooling trend in the bulk of Antarctica was consistent with man-made global warming.

Patrick Michaels just wrote an article called Climate Scientists Blow Hot and Cold pointing out that a recent study of the temperature record in Antarctica by Eric Steig of the University of Washington used satellite observations to provide a means to track temperatures across wider areas of Antarctica than ever before. Most thermometer recording sites were on the coasts and very few were in the interior of the huge continent. The result is that relative to the temperatures of the 1950s and 1960s, there has been a slight warming of Antarctica as a whole, though almost all of it occurred in the early part of the time-frame from then to now. This indicates an earlier warming effect than has been claimed elsewhere for the man-made global warming by CO2 emissions proponents, which is puzzling.

Computer modelers have been delighted, however. Even though they claimed that a non-warming or a slightly cooling Antarctica was consistent with their global warming models, they are happier with a slight warming and are now claiming that that is consistent with their models.

Apparently all observed results are consistent with their models. If it warms for the next 10 years in Siberia, that is consistent. If it cools for the next 10 years in Siberia, that is consistent. If the higher altitude atmosphere warms, that is consistent. This is indeed a prediction that it should be warmer than the earth surface temperatures. But in fact, there has been no warming of these higher altitude air temperatures, let alone to higher temperatures than the earth's surface. But this gives the CO2 emissions global warmers no pause. It appears that there is no observation which will give them pause.

No matter what, man-made CO2 emissions are going to cause a disaster sometime in the future. So, stop exhaling now, so you will be morally pure and not responsible for this catastrophe! Then, there will be no need to force you to stop using coal or natural gas generated electricity or heating your home or business with gas, oil, or coal, using products manufactured with fossil fuel energy, or moving about in cars and trucks and planes.