The Socialist Core of the Copenhagen Climate Summit

The recently failed Copenhagen Climate Summit attempted to reach worldwide intergovernmental agreements on drastic fossil fuel energy use.  No binding commitments were reached, much to my relief given the faulty science the whole idea of CO2 emissions reductions is based on and the huge damage to economic activity and individual expenses of the cheap energy use reductions.  Given these problems, why does the catastrophic AGW thesis get so much uncritical support?

This article in The Australian contains a very important nugget of information on just this issue.  The important part was the response of the Copenhagen Climate Summit delegates to Hugo Chavez of Venezuela:

Then President Chavez brought the house down.

When he said the process in Copenhagen was “not democratic, it is not inclusive, but isn’t that the reality of our world, the world is really an imperial dictatorship…down with imperial dictatorships” he got a rousing round of applause.

When he said there was a “silent and terrible ghost in the room” and that ghost was called capitalism, the applause was deafening.

But then he wound up to his grand conclusion – 20 minutes after his 5 minute speaking time was supposed to have ended and after quoting everyone from Karl Marx to Jesus Christ - “our revolution seeks to help all people…socialism, the other ghost that is probably wandering around this room, that’s the way to save the planet, capitalism is the road to hell....let’s fight against capitalism and make it obey us.”  He won a standing ovation.

Controlling Wikipedia's Articles on Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming

The close-knit group of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (AGW) zealots had a major problem:  How were they going to make the Medieval Warm Period, well-known in the history books, scholarly publications, and encyclopedias disappear so the temperature rise in the late 20th Century would look remarkable and uniquely rapid?  Indeed, it would be best if the temperatures of the last thousand years or so looked pretty stable and then the temperatures shot up.  The hockey stick temperature proxy data of Michael Mann and Keith Briffa was so manipulated as to provide the thousand year flat and steady temperature history they desired.  Weird additions to the late 20th Century land surface temperatures and the movement of weather stations into cities and metropolitan area suburbs provided the dramatic necessary temperature rises of the late 20th Century needed to spread the alarm that man was destroying the Earth with his use of fossil fuels and the resulting emissions of CO2, a supposedly viscous greenhouse gas.

But all of those already published books told everyone about the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age that ended about 1840.  How might they spread the necessary misinformation quickly and get it into the hands of a public largely "educated" in government-run schools and therefore untutored in history and science?  They set up a website called RealClimate.org to put out the party line.  But then they still had to control the very popular source of easily searched information called Wikipedia.  William Connolley, a member of the 9-person RealClimate.org team of bloggers, a United Kingdom scientist, and Green Party activist, took on the job of controlling Wikipedia and its message on catastrophic AGW.

Lawrence Solomon tells the story here.  The important remaining part is given here:

Connolley took control of all things climate in the most used information source the world has ever known – Wikipedia. Starting in February 2003, just when opposition to the claims of the band members were beginning to gel, Connolley set to work on the Wikipedia site. He rewrote Wikipedia’s articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling. On Feb. 14, he began to erase the Little Ice Age; on Aug.11, the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned his attention to the hockey stick graph. He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band. Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world’s most distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets, followed by others that the band especially hated, such as Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, authorities on the Medieval Warm Period.

All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.

Insidious, but it was all done so that the smug elitists could feel good about controlling the ignorant trailer park masses and save the Earth.  It was absolutely wonderful how smug they felt.  And it was great that they had the full backing of socialists and environmentalists almost to a man and woman.  This meant they had the full cooperation of the governments and their government-run schools.  The children were really well-indoctrinated, as were all college graduates.

Claim that Half of Late 20th Century Temperature Rise is Caused by Land Use

Professor Brian Stone, City and Regional Planning Professor, of the Georgia Institute of Technology claims that half of the increase in temperature which has occurred since 1950 is due to land use changes, rather than due to greenhouse gas emissions.  The land use changes are largely those of city creation and expansion and the clearing of forests for crops.  His study is published in the journal of Environmental Science and Technology.

My expectation on this is that he is largely right, given that he is trying to explain land surface temperature data which shows temperature increases after 1950 which are half due to the fact that many weather stations are in urban and suburban areas and are therefore showing temperature increases due to the urban heat island effect and the remaining half is due to unfounded upward adjustments of the raw temperature measurements such as those we have discussed for the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Northern Europe, Russia, and Alaska.  The impact on rural land surface temperatures of land use changes is modest, but perhaps not insignificant.  The impact on sea surface temperatures will almost certainly be negligible.  This is how I would lay my bets as a scientist deciding where to invest my own research efforts in any case.

Some Examples of Serious AGW Problems Emphasized by the CRU E-mail Dump

The recent dump of e-mails, documents, and programs from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia by a probable whistle-blower has made the manufactured consensus and the problems of the science by the catastrophic AGW alarmists all the more apparent.  Here are a few nuggets:

Much attention has been given to Michael Mann’s (Pennsylvania State University) and Keith Briffa's (CRU) proxy temperature data hockey stick data sets. Briffa was conflicted in this whole process, noting he “[tried] hard to balance the needs of the IPCC with science, which were not always the same.  He felt “there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data.’”

Programmer Ian “Harry” Harris, in the Harry_Read_Me.txt file, commented about:

[The] hopeless state of their (CRU) data base. … No uniform data integrity, it’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found. … I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar coordinates. I know it could be old and new stations, but why such large overlaps if that’s the case?Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. …
This whole project is SUCH A MESS. No wonder I needed therapy!!
I am seriously close to giving up, again. The history of this is so complex that I can’t get far enough into it before by head hurts and I have to stop. Each parameter has a tortuous history of manual and semi-automated interventions that I simply cannot just go back to early versions and run the updateprog. I could be throwing away all kinds of corrections – to lat/lons, to WMOs (yes!), and more. So what the hell can I do about all these duplicate stations?

Here is an e-mail from Tom Wigley, the former head of the CRU and now at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, to Phil Jones, the recent head of the CRU in which he expresses concern about Keith Briffa's work:

Date: Mon, 05 Oct 2009 03:57:57 -0600
From: Tom Wigley
To: Phil Jones Subject: Re: [geo] Re: CCNet: A Scientific Scandal Unfolds…
139.222.131.184
Phil,
It is distressing to read that American Stinker item. But Keith does seem to have got himself into a mess. As I pointed out in emails, Yamal is insignificant....
But, more generally, (even if it *is* irrelevant) how does Keith explain the McIntyre plot that compares Yamal-12 with Yamal-all? And how does he explain the apparent “selection” of the less well-replicated chronology rather that the later (better replicated) chronology?
Of course, I don’t know how often Yamal-12 has really been used in recent, post-1995, work. I suspect from what you say it is much less often that M&M [McIntyre and fellow sceptic Professor Ross McKitrick] say—but where did they get their information? I presume they went thru papers to see if Yamal was cited, a pretty foolproof method if you ask me.
Perhaps these things can be explained clearly and concisely—but I am not sure Keith is able to do this as he is too close to the issue and probably quite pissed of.
And the issue of with-holding data is still a hot potato, one that affects both you and Keith (and Mann). Yes, there are reasons—but many *good* scientists appear to be unsympathetic to these. The
trouble here is that with-holding data looks like hiding something, and hiding means (in some eyes) that it is bogus science that is being hidden.
I think Keith needs to be very, very careful in how he handles this. I’d be willing to check over anything he puts together.
Tom.


Wigley protested Michael Mann's sending a deceptive graph with a “fluke” result to back up Wigley’s contention that the recent cooling was still consistent with overall warming. He also claimed the IPCC and AGW scientists had made too many “dishonest presentations”.

On Oct 14, 2009, at 5:57 PM, Tom Wigley wrote:
Mike,
The Figure you sent is very deceptive. As an example, historical runs with PCM look as though they match observations—but the match is a fluke. PCM has no indirect aerosol forcing and a low climate sensitivity—compensating errors. In my (perhaps too harsh) view, there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC. This is why I still use results from MAGICC to compare with observed temperatures. At least here I can assess how sensitive matches are to sensitivity and forcing assumptions/uncertainties.
Tom.

Here is another matter discussed by Andrew Bolt:

The IPCC’s 2007 report made an allowance that drew heavily on a 1990 paper by Phil Jones that dismissed the UHI effect as largely trivial. That in turn drew heavily on a paper by Professor Wang Wei-Chyung of Albany, State University of New York, which presented data from China which both Wang and Jones claimed came from stations that had “few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location or observation times”, and so could be relied upon.

Mathematician Doug Keenan and others obtained the original Wang data and used it to track down the Chinese weather stations. They found that 49 of the 84 stations used actually had no records of station location, eight had inconsistent histories, 18 had been moved a considerable distance, and only seven were known not to have been relocated. One station had five different locations in 30 years as far as 41 km apart.

Wang seemed to have lied. His data was essentially worthless, and Jones’ (and the IPCC’s) claim that the Urban Heat Island effect was trivial now seemed unsupported by solid evidence.

These and many more documents have served to make it ever clearer that the catastrophic AGW hypothesis is mighty dubious.  The hockey stick data of Keith Briffa, the claim that the urban heat island effect is unimportant, and the reliability of the basic land surface temperature data sets are all key points undermined by these documents.

Thomas Sowell on AGW and Science

The wise and astute Thomas Sowell has had a few words to say on the subject of the global warming hysteria in a recent commentary.

There are a number of comments of interest in his piece, but I especially like these:

People who talk about the corrupting influence of money seem to automatically assume that it is only private money that is corrupting. But, when governments have billions of dollars invested in the global warming crusade, massive programs underway and whole political careers at risk if that crusade gets undermined, do not expect the disinterested search for truth.

Among the intelligentsia, there have always been many who are ready to jump on virtually any bandwagon that will take them to the promised land, where the wise and noble few-- like themselves-- can take the rest of us poor dummies in hand and tell us how we had better change the way we live our lives.

Patrick Michaels on the Manufactured Climate Consensus

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

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

Comments on the Peer-Review Process

Over and over, the avid proponents of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (AGW) protest that I must be wrong in challenging the bad science backing this hypothesis, or theory in their terms.  After all, the preponderance of published papers in the refereed climate journals back the idea of catastrophic AGW and I must honor the peer-review process, they argue.  Yes, they are right that the majority of published journal papers back catastrophic AGW or at least the reasonable possibility of catastrophic AGW.

But, being a scientist, I have read many published scientific papers in fields much less politicized than that of climatology and I can tell you that there are many, many papers representing flat out bad science or mixtures of good and bad science which are published in peer-reviewed journals.  In addition, I have refereed many papers submitted for publication and I have often been the only reviewer who raised serious issues against publication or who fought hard for changes as a condition of publication.  Frankly, in our non-confrontational age, few want to confront paper authors with their slip-ups and any incompetency that may be revealed in a paper.  We live in a society that really wants to give an A to every student.

What is more, the reviewer must often work very hard to be sure that he has valid points of contention.  The scientists submitting the work probably spent at least a few months doing the research they are trying to describe and then spent a few weeks writing the article.  No reviewer is likely to have so much time to devote to the same work, yet he is tasked with confirming it as valid or declaring it invalid or at least unproven.  Being a good reviewer takes a lot of time and the rewards are very few.

Oftentimes, my objections have taken the form of this or that conclusion is unproven for this or that reason.  But, surprisingly, I have also rejected many submissions on the grounds that data actually in the paper proves that some of the conclusions are wrong.  It is amazing to me how often authors trip themselves up by either using faulty logic or even more often by having blinders on with respect to the conclusions they believe to be the right ones.  In other words, even in non-politicized science, the authors often are able to ignore their own data and results which are in conflict with the conclusions they apparently wanted to reach.  Frankly, in some cases, I have even wondered if they were not de-emphasizing results that were inconvenient in that they muddied the waters with respect to the conclusions they wanted to reach.  This is dishonest.  It is bad science.  And, it is not unusual.

For young academic scientists, the pressure to publish is huge.  It leads to hastily prepared papers and an attempt to publish as many papers as possible, even if the conclusions of the paper do little, if anything, to advance our knowledge of science.  The reviewers, while nominally anonymous, nonetheless will in many cases be revealed by the nature of their objections or the knowledge they reveal in those objections.  If the journal is associated with a particular professional scientific society, the number of fellow members you might anger over time may be appreciable.  If you hope to become an elected officer of the society or a fellow of the society, it is not politic to take your duties as a reviewer very seriously.  It is too risky.  It is better to go along and get along.  It is career-advancing to allow bad science to be published and then to count on critical readers to sort out the chaff from the wheat.

Frankly, I am not very trusting that a paper represents valid science simply since it was published.  I read the paper and try to conclude from the argument made in the paper whether the science is good or not.  Sometimes, I conclude that it is bad, sometimes that it is probably good, and sometimes that the situation is indeterminate.  This indeterminate case may occur because while the author's conclusions appear consistent with the data and results presented and while those results may be useful in advancing the evidence for a theory, there is still much work that needs to be done before the theory is proven right.  One might often say this represents good science because this is part of the proper process.  However, such work may often be bad science in which the authors have selected only that part of their data and results which are consistent with the theory they are advancing as correct.  There are many cases in which negative results are simply left out.  This may be done because the author thinks the paper is more important if it purports to prove or advance a particular theory, or it may be because the author has already staked a substantial part of his reputation on a particular theory.  Some scientists simply cannot admit to having been wrong.

Obama's Green Jobs in Solar Power

The prices of solar panels are falling quickly, which is good for making the presently very highly expensive solar power less expensive.  However, even with the price drops, it is still very expensive compared to the electricity costs of coal-fired power plants.  U.S. manufacturers of solar panels such as SunPower and First Solar are losing market share to Chinese solar panel makers.  The Chinese panels are not as efficient, but they cost much less.  The main Chinese companies are Suntech Power, Trina Solar, and Yingli Solar.

SunPower's market share has fallen from 22% last year to 17% this year.  Suntech was the biggest winner, increasing its market share from 5% to 12%.  It appears that the only green jobs in solar power Obama is going to produce are manufacturing jobs in China, unless the solar power facilities in the U.S. need lots of maintenance work.  But if they do, that will only make the cost of the generated electricity very expensive and solar power will remain unable to compete with fossil fuel generated electric power.

Checking the Alaska Temperature Record

Dr. Richard Keen of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences of the University of Colorado - Boulder has looked into the temperature records of NOAA's NCDC for central Alaska.  There are 9 stations there with long-term temperature records, which he has used to set up a regional mean temperature record from 1900 to 2004.  The raw temperature results he gets are shown in the plot below:

The temperatures of Alaska are heavily influenced by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO).  The same raw temperature data is shown with the average temperature over the period of the PDO for each PDO period.  The periods plotted cover four alternating PDOs, starting with a cold PDO and ending with a warm PDO.  This guarantees a general upward slope in temperature, just as starting with a warm PDO and ending with a cold PDO will produce a negative temperature slope.

If you are wondering, there are about 23 years in the first cold PDO and 23 years in the first warm PDO.  Then the second cold PDO covers about 29 years, as does the second warm PDO.  Given these starting and ending points, the upward slope of the average linear trend line in the first figure is 0.69 C/century in the raw temperature data for central Alaska.  Now, let's examine the ever-trusty data from the NOAA GHCN adjusted temperature data set for the same region.

Our ever-reliable government NOAA NCDC has again adjusted the raw temperature record to produce an upward slope to the temperature data in support of a global warming catastrophe.  This slope indicates a temperature increase of a whopping 2.83 C/century!!!!  This is more than a 2 C per century higher rate of change than is found in the raw data!

Plotting Keen's calculated raw temperature data against that of the GHCN after averaging the years within a 10-year period to produce data directly comparable to the data as used in the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007, one can compare the Keen raw temperature data in blue with the IPCC AR4 adjusted data in black in the figure below:

The early year adjusted data used in the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007 has been adjusted downward and the data of the last couple of decades has been adjusted upward relative to the raw data reconstructed by Keen.  The net difference across the century is about 1 C, which is the amount of the global warming claimed by the UN IPCC AR4 report generally.  But, once again, there is no known scientific justification for the adjustments to the raw temperature data which have been made by the NOAA NCDC and used by the UN IPCC AR4 report.

What else could be going on here but an attempt to produce a man-made global warming catastrophe justifying drastic government action to control our individual and business use of fossil fuels?

Central Park Temperature Record Shenanigans

When a scientific fraud unravels, it can do so with remarkable rapidity.  This is especially true when the fraud was massive and aimed at a huge power grab over the lives of others.

A comparison of raw temperature data of the NOAA National Climate Data Center (NCDC) with its adjusted data for Central Park in New York City has now been performed for the two extreme months of July and January.  The NCDC keeps two major adjusted compilations of station by station temperature data.  One is the HCSN Version 1 set and the other is the other is the GHCN Version 2 data set.  The latter is used in the UN IPCC reports.

Let's first compare the raw temperature measurements for July with the HCSN Version 1 set. The data is shown below:

Note that the adjusted data has had its temperatures dropped everywhere, but in very different amounts over time.  The upper raw temperature data curve has a polynomial fit with a maximum temperature in about 1971 or 1972, with a very small decline after that time.  The adjusted temperature history of the HCN data set has a decided rise after about 1980.  Let's look at the adjustment made here more carefully.  The HCSN adjustment is plotted below:

For some reason an increasing temperature was subtracted from the raw temperature data beginning after 1939 and this increased until it was a bit more than 6.5 F.  Then in 2000, the temperature subtracted was decreased rapidly through 2007.  The strange thing is that rapid changes in the urban heat island effect occur as a city expands and envelops rural areas.  But Central Park has been surrounded by a very high population density throughout the period from 1939 to the present, so the heat island effect should not be changing so much.  Furthermore, the rapid decrease in the temperature subtracted since the year 2000 should be due to a rapid depopulation of the city.  In fact, NYC has been growing in population since 1990, so if anything, the temperature subtracted should have been slightly more, not much less!  This is Voodoo Science!

As mentioned, there is also a temperature record (GHCN) provided to the UN IPCC and generally kept for world-wide temperature change comparisons.  Remember, in such comparisons, we are interested in tracking very small changes of a few tenths of a degree, yet we have seen already that adjustments of more than 6 F are being applied to the raw data.  This is always dicey science when small changes are to be detected on data being adjusted with large comparative adjustments.  The raw data, the HCN adjusted data, and the GHCN adjusted data are all compared in the plot below.

Now note that the raw data is the middle plot in blue.  The two NOAA NCDC adjusted July average temperature data sets are the most different.  The hottest of the three sets of data is the global comparison data which went into the UN IPCC assessment data.  For reasons unfathomable to rational man, the net effect of having a weather station in the middle of NYC, one of the world's larger cities, is an artificial cooling effect and it has to be adjusted with a general increase to the raw temperature data.  Yes, the well-know urban heat island effect, is sometimes an urban cooling effect and sometimes and urban heating effect, by implication given the adjustments provided by our NOAA NCDC!  The temperature difference between the two NOAA NCDC temperature data sets is as large as 11 F.

Basically, it looks as though the UN IPCC wanted data indicating high and rising temperatures.  The upper green trace gave them high temperatures and the data mostly parallels the raw data, so essentially no urban heat island differential adjustment seems to have been made over time compared to the raw data.  Of course, the raw data of 2007 surely already has a rise in it due to the increased population and bigger buildings in NYC since 1909, so leaving that effect in gave the global warming alarmists the temperature increase they needed, although little of the increase occurred in the late 20th Century in the Central Park data.  Such increases could readily be found in the data from many other U.S. weather stations, however.  What was important here was maintaining the fiction that the urban heat island effect is unimportant and no adjustment for it is needed over time.  That way, all the rural stations which have become suburban stations need not be adjusted downward for the urban heat island effect.

This is the hand made visible of massive fraud, once again.

Rural US Sites Show No Temperature Increase Since 1900

Using data downloaded from NASA GISS and picking rural sites near, but not too near, to urban sites, a comparison has been made of the temperature trend over time of the rural sites compared to those of the urban sites.  28 pairs of sites across the U.S. were compared.  The paired rural site is from 31 to 91 km from the urban site in each pair.  The result is that urban and rural sites were similar in 1900, with the urban sites slightly higher.  The urban sites have shown an increase in temperatures since then.  The rural sites show no such temperature increase and appear to be generally unchanging with only ups and downs localized in time.  Over a 111 year time span, the urban sites temperatures have risen to be about 1.5C warmer than the rural sites.  So, the much touted rising temperatures in the U.S. are due to the urban heat island effect and not due to a global warming such as has been proposed to be caused by human emissions of CO2 due to the combustion of fossil fuels.

You should find this video very interesting:



I find myself wondering how the scientists at NASA GISS have been such proponents of the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming hypothesis given this temperature data.  It sure seems insane that the EPA has declared CO2 a pollutant, which it will suppress vigorously with command and control tactics.  It is clear that there is no problem caused by CO2 emissions to be addressed.  Waxman-Markey carbon cap and trade type bills and EPA regulations on CO2 as a pollutant are nothing but the politics of Mass Destruction leveled upon American industries and households by the party of massive power lust, the Socialist Democrat Party.

As the fable of man-made global warming due to man's CO2 emissions from the use of fossil fuels continues to unravel, the American People are going to become ever more untrusting of the Democrats, the print and non-cable media, and, unfortunately, scientists.  Those who have failed to earn our trust generally have some common characteristics.  They are elitists, socialists, and man-hating environmentalists.  When these same people propose to overhaul our health care system, to regulate the financial industry, increase the minimum wage rate, promote labor unions, increase deficit spending, and increase taxes, we should be sure to remember how unreliable their judgment was on the issue of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.  Not only is there no looming catastrophe, but there is no such problem at all!  They have created a phantom problem to justify a huge power grab.

There is a dirty secret behind the scientific side of this scandal.  As the universities have become more and more hotbeds of socialism and political correctness, the scientists who receive federal funding for their research at those socialist/environmentalist/elitist/political correctness hotbeds have not wanted to be left out.  Once, they were more objective and more scientific than the so-called social scientists and the humanities faculty.  Most of this difference has now disappeared because we have so long allowed the lunatic left to run our universities and our government funding agencies.  The scientists are now about as engaged in the cause of advancing socialism/elitism/radical environmentalism/political correctness as is the rest of the faculty at our universities and our government-run laboratories and institutions.

Many say this catastrophic man-made global warming conspiracy could not possibly happen, but they greatly underestimate the power of the socialist control of our once proud institutions of objective learning and study.  They are massively corrupt now.  When we clean house of the politicians in Washington and most of our state capitals, we also need to find a way to clean house in our universities and government laboratories and institutions.  We need real scientists, not socialist pretenders.

Postscript added on 29 January 2010:

Some people have assumed that I made the video above.  This is not the case.  I was impressed by the effort and I thought it was most likely a science fair project which was unlikely to be blemished by artifices and was probably a fairly straightforward treatment of readily available data, so others could readily check up on these results.  It was a challenge to others to see if they could show the same thing as was claimed in this video.  I wish I could tell everyone who did make this video.  They deserve credit for it.

My own assessment of the bad science backing the theory of catastrophic global warming due to man's emissions of CO2 is very broad-based and is not dependent upon the reproducibility of the results in this video.  However, analyses of temperature data from many other areas of the world are showing similar results and I am more inclined to believe than not that if unbiased scientists examine the data as this father and son did, they will find that any increase in U.S. temperatures in rural areas is much less than the alarming results claimed by the advocates of catastrophic AGW.  The urban heat island effect is large and most of the data in the U.S. database is heavily affected by that.  I live and work between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, where the temperature is higher due to the urban heat island effect.  Nonetheless, the temperatures recorded at Baltimore-Washington International Airport and at Reagan Washington National Airport are commonly 2 or 3 degrees Fahenheit higher than those at my laboratory or home.

UN IPCC Head Makes Big Money from Global Warming Fears

Dr. Rajendra Pachauri was a railway engineer, who earned a Ph.D. in economics and became the director of the Tata Energy Research Institute in Delhi, India in 1981.  This institute was set up in 1974 by India's largest privately owned business, the Tata Group.  He headed the UN IPCC as its chairman when the AR4 report of 2007 was produced and claimed that catastrophic man-made global warming was a certainty.  As is the case with Al Gore, Dr. Pachauri is making many millions of dollars a year off of his status as a leading catastrophic anthropogenic global warming "expert."  He sits on dozens of company boards of directors or acts as an adviser to them.  He advises carbon traders and industries with an interest in sustainability or being perceived as "green."

When people oppose the idea of catastrophic man-made global warming, they are often said to be in the employ of oil and coal firms, whether they are or are not.  Conservatives and libertarians are aware that Al Gore is making money from his advocacy of man-made global warming, but they have said little about Dr. Pachauri making many millions per year from his advocacy.

Biasing the Surface Land Temperature Record with Big Cities

Willis Eschenbach has been doing some great digging into the UN IPCC AR4 surface land temperature record.  He notes that the UN IPCC AR4 says:

Additional warming occurs in cities and urban areas (often referred to as the urban heat island effect), but is confined in spatial extent, and its effects are allowed for both by excluding as many of the affected sites as possible from the global temperature data and by increasing the error range.

He checked into this:

To check this claim, I took the list of temperature stations used by CRU (which I had to use an FOI to get), and checked them against the GISS list. The GISS list categorizes stations as “Urban” or “Rural”. It also uses satellite photos to categorize the amount of light that shows at night, with big cities being brightest. It puts them into three categories, A, B, and C. C is the brightest.

It turns out that there are over 500 cities in the CRU database that the GISS database categorizes as “Urban C”, the brightest of cities. These include, among many others:

AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND
BANGKOK METROPOLIS, THAILAND
BARCELONA, SPAIN
BEIJING, CHINA
BRASILIA, BRAZIL
BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA
BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA
CHRISTCHURCH, NEW ZEALAND
DHAKA, BANGLADESH
FLORENCE, ITALY
GLASGOW, UK
GUATEMALA CITY, GUATEMALA
HANNOVER, GERMANY
INCHON, KOREA
KHARTOUM, SUDAN
KYOTO, JAPAN
LISBON, PORTUGAL
LUXOR, EGYPT
MARRAKECH, MOROCCO
MOMBASA, KENYA
MOSKVA, RUSSIAN FEDERA
MOSUL, IRAQ
NAGASAKI, JAPAN
NAGOYA, JAPAN
NICE, FRANCE
OSAKA, JAPAN
PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA
RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA
SAO PAULO, BRAZIL
SEOUL, KOREA
SHANGHAI, CHINA
SINGAPORE, SINGAPORE
STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN
TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS
TOKYO, JAPAN
VALENCIA, SPAIN
VOLGOGRAD, USSR

So the CRU is using Tokyo? Beijing? Seoul? Shanghai? Moscow? Their claim is entirely false. In other words, once again the good folk of the CRU are blowing smoke. I can understand why it took me a Freedom of Information request to get the station list.

It is utter nonsense to include data from weather stations in large, medium, or even small cities to produce a record of temperature which might address whether there are human effects of note on the global climate.  Indeed, if you want to bias the results in that direction, the best way to do it is to drop rural weather stations and leave a large number of city stations in your database of temperatures.  This has clearly been done in the U.S. and, according to the Institute of Economic Analysis in Moscow, in Russia.  This list makes it very clear that such warming as has not been added simply by changing recent measurements upward and dropping the measurements of earlier decades, has been strongly biased in an upward direction by using data from many cities and dropping many rural stations.  The only useful data is from rural stations in actual fact.  That this is occurring is a very blatant scientific fraud.

The Northern Europe Land Surtace Temperature Fraud

Prof. Wibjorn Karlen, Professor Emeritus of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology of Stockholm University, has questioned much of the land surface temperature data providing the primary basis for the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007.  His questions in e-mails to Kevin Trenberth and Phil Jones were among those in the recent dump of e-mails, documents, and programs of ClimateGate.  He has painstakingly sought out the raw temperature data from many regions of the world and found large discrepancies with the data used in the UN IPCC AR4 report in region after region.  One of these areas is that of Northern Europe including the Scandinavian countries and Finland.

Here is what he says in an e-mail in 2008 [Al Gore, you are very wrong that all of the e-mails were more than 10 years old.]:

In my letter to Klass V I included diagram showing the mean annual temperature of the Nordic countries (1890-ca 2001) presented on the net by the database NORDKLIM, a joint project between the meteorological institutes in the Nordic countries. Except for Denmark, the data sets show an increase after the 1970s to the same level as in the late 1930s or lower. None demonstrates the distinct increase IPCC indicates. The trends of these 6 areas are very similar except for a few interesting details.

Taking this cue from Prof. Karlen, Willis Eschenbach, sought out the raw temperature data for the Nordic countries and Finland.  He says:

I cannot find the NORDKLIM graphic he refers to, so I have calculated it myself. I used the NORDKLIM dataset available at http://www.smhi.se/hfa_coord/nordklim/data/Nordklim_data_set_v1_0_2002.xls. I removed the one marine record from “Ship M”. To avoid infilling where there are missing records, I took the “first difference” of all of the available records for each year and averaged them. Then I used a running sum to calculate the average anomaly. I did not remove cities or adjust for the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect. Here is the result:

Note that despite not correcting for an increasing urban heat island effect, the recent temperatures are no higher than those of the 1930s.  The recent rate of temperature increase from about 1980 does not look very different than say 1915 to the mid-1930s.  In terms of the extent of change, the increase from the early 1880s to the mid-1930s looks more remarkable than that at the end of the 20th Century.  This result is very much like that described by Prof. Karlen when he examined the data.

Now, let's examine the Northern Europe land surface temperature data used in the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007:

Eschenbach comments:

This claims that there is a full degree temperature rise from 1970 to 2000, ending way warmer than the 1930s. You can see why Professor Karlen is wondering how the IPCC got such a different answer.

 It has become very clear that the reason the land surface temperature data shows temperature increases much larger in the late 20th Century according to the UN IPCC and CRU, NOAA, and NASA GISS is due to heavy handed manipulation of the raw data to make it tell a story of man-made global warming.  In reality, there is no evidence for this in the raw temperature data in area after area around the world, now that inquiring scientists are carefully examining this data.

Prof. Karlen has also raised objections about the UN IPCC AR4 data used for arctic areas and in Africa, in addition to his objections about Australia, which I discussed in an earlier post.  Prof. Karlen is a hero we should all admire.

As we have now seen, the raw temperature data for Russia, Australia, and Northern Europe does not look at all like the data the UN IPCC AR4 claims and says supports a major climate effect due to man's use of fossil fuels and the CO2 generated by that use.  We also know that much of the data from the U.S. is corrupted by bad siting of the smaller and smaller number of weather stations being used to produce the temperature record.

Falsified New Zealand Land Surface Temperature Measurements

Recently I have posted on the falsification of the land surface temperature record in the United States (here and here), in Australia, and in Russia.  Now I will discuss the intentional manipulations of the raw temperature data for New Zealand to make it appear that there has been a substantial temperature increase there since 1900!  In posts to follow, I will discuss the manipulations of the land surface temperature data for the Nordic countries and then also return to the US to discuss some further discrepancies.  In short, we are rapidly learning that none of the world's surface land temperature data as reported by the major climate research centers can be trusted.

The UN IPCC 2007 report (AR4) claimed that New Zealand has been warming for 100 years.  New Zealand's National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research (NIWA) keeps the New Zealand National Climate Database.  The record goes back to 1850.  The official NIWA graph of temperatures from 1853 through 2008 after subtracting the average temperature from 1971 to 2000 is:

The dashed line is the linear trend from 1909 to 2008, with a rate of temperature change of 0.92C/100 years.  The New Zealand unadjusted average temperature record is quite different:

Any large temperature increase since 1900 has now disappeared.  One might see a small increase starting from 1932 or from 1947, but considering the entire data set, one is not really justified in picking just those starting times.  And we should remember that New Zealand's population has increased since those times, so the unadjusted temperatures should have some urban heat island effect wrapped up in them, which has increased over the years.

Many requests for the raw data and the adjustments made to the data were made to the head of the NIWA, Dr. Salinger, for years with no response.  But the data for each of the New Zealand stations recently became available from one of Dr. Salinger's colleagues.  Examination of the data revealed that strong adjustments had been made to the data to create a strong warming trend.

The shocking truth is that the oldest readings have been cranked way down and later readings
artificially lifted to give a false impression of warming, as documented below. There is nothing
in the station histories to warrant these adjustments and to date Dr Salinger and NIWA have
not revealed why they did this.

One station, Hokitika, had its early temperatures reduced by a huge 1.3°C, creating strongwarming from a mild cooling, yet there’s no apparent reason for it.

We have discovered that the warming in New Zealand over the past 156 years was indeed
man-made, but it had nothing to do with emissions of CO2—it was created by man-made
adjustments of the temperature. It’s a disgrace.

NIWA claim their official graph reveals a rising trend of 0.92ºC per century, which means (they
claim) we warmed more than the rest of the globe, for according to the IPCC, global warming
over the 20th century was only about 0.6°C.

The purveyors of the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming theory are once again proving to be highly immoral and dishonest.

A Snipet of the Copenhagen AGW Meeting

For your pleasure, I bring you this brief observation from Watts Up With That? on the Copenhagen Conference posted on 17 December 2009:

Today the gloves came off and the true purpose of the “global warming” scare became nakedly visible. Hugo Chavez, the Socialist president of Venezuela, blamed “global warming” on capitalism – and received a standing ovation from very nearly all of the delegates, lamentably including those from those of the capitalist nations of the West that are on the far Left – and that means too many of them.
Previously Robert Mugabe, dictator of Rhodesia, who had refused to leave office when he had been soundly defeated in a recent election, had also won plaudits at the conference for saying that the West ought to pay him plenty of money in reparation of our supposed “climate debt”.

I wonder how much of our aid money to these and other such nations will disappear into the personal bank accounts of such leaders and their country-looting henchmen?