Death knell for AGW

[coldstream]

Record temps in Seattle & Portland.

Looks like GW is for real.

I take it this was sarcasm, but really it is what AGW has descended to. Anecdotes that support their cause. That's the modus of the AGW lobby, wrapped in fear mongering, appeals to sentiment and guilt.

Anything that supports their cause is fair game. That includes any transient increase in temperature. We have a situation now where the Pacific Coast has had a week of above average temperatures and the rest of the country is in the midst of the coldest summer in two decades. And yet you'll watch news that picks up on the mantra of AGW Doom for temperatures in Vancouver, with blissful ignorance of what is happening in the rest of the country.

If we have real Warming, temperatures should be rising. Even a consistent average increase of a degree or two in the World should be producing predictable results with consistent heat waves around the Globe. None of it is happening. And it is not happening for a reason. AGW is fraud, and an industry now, with trillions of dollars invested in calamitous economic adventures like Carbon Credits, or highly inefficient and expensive 'alternative energy'.

 

[AnnaG]

I take it this was sarcasm, but really it is what AGW has descended to. Anecdotes that support their cause. That's the modus of the AGW lobby, wrapped in fear mongering, appeals to sentiment and guilt.

Anything that supports their cause is fair game. That includes any transient increase in temperature. We have a situation now where the Pacific Coast has had a week of above average temperatures and the rest of the country is in the midst of the coldest summer in two decades. And yet you'll watch news that picks up on the mantra of AGW Doom for temperatures in Vancouver, with blissful ignorance of what is happening in the rest of the country.

Sorry, coldstream, but people convinced that the climate is changing only took the cue from people like Walter, who I think may finally have stopped using spontaneous instances of localised weather to support his position. Just making fun of him basically.

If we have real Warming, temperatures should be rising. Even a consistent average increase of a degree or two in the World should be producing predictable results with consistent heat waves around the Globe. None of it is happening. And it is not happening for a reason. AGW is fraud, and an industry now, with trillions of dollars invested in calamitous economic adventures like Carbon Credits, or highly inefficient and expensive 'alternative energy'.

And you are using which model to be able to say this with any certainty?
ALL the long term anomaly graphs I have seen have shown the temperature change of the world as being chiefly on the positive end. And those would include graphs from NASA, The Climactic Research Unit, the UK Meteorological Office of Hadley Center, various universities, etc.

Perhaps you should take your evidence and go show those people why they are wrong about their data.

 

[Tonington]

If we have real Warming, temperatures should be rising. Even a consistent average increase of a degree or two in the World should be producing predictable results with consistent heat waves around the Globe. None of it is happening. And it is not happening for a reason. AGW is fraud, and an industry now, with trillions of dollars invested in calamitous economic adventures like Carbon Credits, or highly inefficient and expensive 'alternative energy'.

This shows how fundamental your ignorance of the climate system really is. Real global warming does not mean the entire planet warms equally, and monotonically. All real global warming means is that when you increase the radiative forcing imposed on the Earth's climate, then the planet warms as a whole as it moves towards radiative equilibrium at the top of the atmosphere. Your body can have a elevated temperature, even though your hand is sitting in a glass of ice water...

There is no uniform response, and any suggestion that this should be the case is a fundamental error. The southern hemisphere warms much slower, due to the larger volume of water. The North polar region warms faster, as the poleward migration of heat necessitates. The South pole, is a tale of two modes. The peninsula, the fastest warming area on the planet, and the Eastern plateau which shows very modest warming, and a slight cooling in the autumn due largely to stratospheric ozone changes.

These results, by the way, are all predicted by standard theories of thermodynamics and radiative transfer. Models produce these fingerprints and more, such as stratospheric cooling.

Also, the cheapest source of energy is in energy efficiency. Read McKinsey and Company's reports:
McKinsey & Company - Unlocking energy efficiency in the U.S. economy

 

[AnnaG]

Guest Post By William DiPuccio

Albert Einstein once said, “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.” Einstein’s words express a foundational principle of science intoned by the logician, Karl Popper: Falsifiability. In order to verify a hypothesis there must be a test by which it can be proved false. A thousand observations may appear to verify a hypothesis, but one critical failure could result in its demise. The history of science is littered with such examples.
A hypothesis that cannot be falsified by empirical observations, is not science. The current hypothesis on anthropogenic global warming (AGW), presented by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is no exception to this principle. Indeed, it is the job of scientists to expose the weaknesses of this hypothesis as it undergoes peer review. This paper will examine one key criterion for falsification: ocean heat
The Global Warming Hypothesis and Ocean Heat « Watts Up With That?

lol I just spotted this. I noticed that it's only indicative of the period between 2003 and 2008 (I think the dotted line means projected temperature). Well, look at this graph below. It has a couple spots that indicate ocean temp anomalies went down for a few years too but the general tendency is an increase over a long period of time. See around 1950 there were a couple fairly sharp drops in temperature anomalies, but for the most part the anomalies are still in the positive aspect.

 

[gopher]

Publics Want More Government Action on Climate Change: Global Poll


Publics Want More Government Action on Climate Change: Global Poll - World Public Opinion=


The only ones who believe there is no global warming are those from the far right.

 

[AnnaG]

BTW, coldstream, perhaps you should read these if you think alternative energy is calamitous, expensive, and inefficient.

Cloudy Germany a Powerhouse in Solar Energy - washingtonpost.com

Fast German Solar Energy, Power Industry and Market Facts

Germany Embraces the Sun

 

[Walter]

NOAA: July Temperature Below-Average for the U.S.

10 08 2009
From NOAA/NCDC
The July 2009 temperature for the contiguous United States was below the long-term average, based on records going back to 1895, according to a preliminary analysis by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.
The average July temperature of 73.5 degrees F was 0.8 degrees F below the 20th century average. Precipitation across the contiguous United States in July averaged 2.90 inches, which is 0.14 inches above the 1901-2000 average

 

[Walter]

The discovery of more data distortion further undermines the claim of recent temperature records. The IPCC is now on wobbly legs at all four corners

By Terence Corcoran​

T

he official United Nation’s global warming agency, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is a four-legged stool that is fast losing its legs. To carry the message of man-made global warming theory to the world, the IPCC has depended on 1) computer models, 2) data collection, 3) long-range temperature forecasting and 4) communication. None of these efforts are sitting on firm ground.

Over the past month, one of the IPCC’s top climate scientists, Mojib Latif, attempted to explain that even if global temperatures were to cool over the next 10 to 20 years, that would not mean that man-made global warming is no longer catastrophic. It was a tough case to make, and it is not clear Mr. Latif succeeded. In a presentation to a world climate conference in early September, Mr. Latif rambled somewhat and veered off into inscrutable language that is now embedded in a million blog posts attempting to prove one thing or another.

A sample: “It may well happen that you enter a decade, or maybe even two, you know, when the temperature cools, all right, relative to the present level...And then, you know, I know what’s going to happen. You know, I will get, you know, millions of phone calls, you know —‘What’s going on?’ ‘So is global warming disappearing, you know?’ ‘Have you lied on us, you know?’ So, and, therefore, this is the reason why we need to address this decadal prediction issue.”

The decadal prediction issue appears to be a combination of computer model problems, the unpredictability of natural climate variation, and assorted uncertainties. Making all this clear to the average global citizen will not be easy and climate scientists need to be able to make it clear, said Mr. Latif. “We have to ask the nasty questions ourselves, all right, or some other people will do it.”

All this is still swirling around the global climate issue today. But now along comes another problem. Canadian data buster Steve McIntyre has spend most of the last three years deconstructing the IPCC’s famous claim that the last couple of decades of the 20th century were the hottest in a thousand years. Using what was called The Hockey Stick graph, the IPCC claimed to have the smoking gun that showed a sharp run up in global temperatures through to 1997. The validity of the IPCC data began to crumble when Mr. McIntyre and Ross McKitrick of Guelph University found serious data problems that raised doubts about the graph and the claims of record high temperatures.

As Ross McKitrick explains in his op-ed, Steve McIntyre has uncovered another data distortion that further undermines the original graphic claim that the world has set temperature records in recent years. If world temperatures may have been just as hot in the past as they have been recently, and if the the next two decades could be cooler than they have been recently, the theory of climate change becomes an even tougher case to make.

The IPCC is now on wobbly legs at all four corners. Its models are inadequate and need overhaul, data integrity is at issue, the climate is not quite following the script, and the communication program for the whole campaign is a growing struggle.

 

[Tonington]

The Yamal ring-width chronology of Briffa (2000)

My attention has been drawn to a comment by Steve McIntyre on the Climate Audit website relating to the pattern of radial tree growth displayed in the ring-width chronology "Yamal" that I first published in Briffa (2000). The substantive implication of McIntyre's comment (made explicitly in subsequent postings by others) is that the recent data that make up this chronology (i.e. the ring-width measurements from living trees) were purposely selected by me from among a larger available data set, specifically because they exhibited recent growth increases.

This is not the case. The Yamal tree-ring chronology (see also Briffa and Osborn 2002, Briffa et al. 2008) was based on the application of a tree-ring processing method applied to the same set of composite sub-fossil and living-tree ring-width measurements provided to me by Ra**** Hantemirov and Stepan Shiyatov which forms the basis of a chronology they published (Hantemirov and Shiyatov 2002). In their work they traditionally applied a data processing method (corridor standardisation) that does not preserve evidence of long timescale growth changes. My application of the Regional Curve Standardisation method to these same data was intended to better represent the multi-decadal to centennial growth variations necessary to infer the longer-term variability in average summer temperatures in the Yamal region: to provide a direct comparison with the chronology produced by Hantemirov and Shiyatov.

These authors state that their data (derived mainly from measurements of relic wood dating back over more than 2,000 years) included 17 ring-width series derived from living trees that were between 200-400 years old. These recent data included measurements from at least 3 different locations in the Yamal region. In his piece, McIntyre replaces a number (12) of these original measurement series with more data (34 series) from a single location (not one of the above) within the Yamal region, at which the trees apparently do not show the same overall growth increase registered in our data.

The basis for McIntyre's selection of which of our (i.e. Hantemirov and Shiyatov's) data to exclude and which to use in replacement is not clear but his version of the chronology shows lower relative growth in recent decades than is displayed in my original chronology. He offers no justification for excluding the original data; and in one version of the chronology where he retains them, he appears to give them inappropriate low weights. I note that McIntyre qualifies the presentation of his version(s) of the chronology by reference to a number of valid points that require further investigation. Subsequent postings appear to pay no heed to these caveats. Whether the McIntyre version is any more robust a representation of regional tree growth in Yamal than my original, remains to be established.

My colleagues and I are working to develop methods that are capable of expressing robust evidence of climate changes using tree-ring data. We do not select tree-core samples based on comparison with climate data. Chronologies are constructed independently and are subsequently compared with climate data to measure the association and quantify the reliability of using the tree-ring data as a proxy for temperature variations.

We have not yet had a chance to explore the details of McIntyre's analysis or its implication for temperature reconstruction at Yamal but we have done considerably more analyses exploring chronology production and temperature calibration that have relevance to this issue but they are not yet published. I do not believe that McIntyre's preliminary post provides sufficient evidence to doubt the reality of unusually high summer temperatures in the last decades of the 20th century.
We will expand on this initial comment on the McIntyre posting when we have had a chance to review the details of his work.

K.R. Briffa
30 Sept 2009

• Briffa, K. R. 2000. Annual climate variability in the Holocene: interpreting the message of ancient trees. Quaternary Science Reviews 19:87-105.
• Briffa, K. R., and T. J. Osborn. 2002. Paleoclimate - Blowing hot and cold. Science 295:2227-2228.
• Briffa, K. R., V. V. Shishov, T. M. Melvin, E. A. Vaganov, H. Grudd, R. M. Hantemirov, M. Eronen, and M. M. Naurzbaev. 2008. Trends in recent temperature and radial tree growth spanning 2000 years across northwest Eurasia. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B-Biological Sciences 363:2271-2284.
• Hantemirov, R. M., and S. G. Shiyatov. 2002. A continuous multimillennial ring-width chronology in Yamal, northwestern Siberia. Holocene 12:717-726.

Yamal ring-width chronology of Briffa (2000)

 

[Walter]

The media, polls and even scientists suggest the global warming scare is all over but the shouting

By Lawrence Solomon​

The great global warming scare is over — it is well past its peak, very much a spent force, sputtering in fits and starts to a whimpering end. You may not know this yet. Or rather, you may know it but don’t want to acknowledge it until every one else does, and that won’t happen until the press, much of which also knows it, formally acknowledges it.
I know that the global warming scare is over but for the shouting because that’s what the polls show, at least those in the U.S., where unlike Canada the public is polled extensively on global warming. Most Americans don’t blame humans for climate change — they consider global warming to be a natural phenomenon. Even when the polls showed the public believed man was responsible for global warming, the public didn’t take the scare seriously. When asked to rank global warming’s importance compared to numerous other concerns — unemployment, trade, health care, poverty, crime, and education among them — global warming came in dead last. Fewer than 1% chose global warming as scare-worthy.
The informed members of the media read those polls and know the global warming scare is over, too. Andrew Revkin, The New York Times reporter entrusted with the global warming scare beat, has for months lamented “the public’s waning interest in global warming.” His colleague at The Washington Post, Andrew Freedman, does his best to revive public fear, and to get politicians to act, by urging experts to up their hype so that the press will have scarier material to run with.
The experts do their best to give us the willies. This week they offered up plagues of locusts in China and a warning that the 2016 Olympics “could be the last for mankind” because “the earth has passed the point of no return.” But the press has also begun to tire of Armageddon All-The-Time, and (I believe) to position itself for its inevitable attack on the doomsters. In an online article in June entitled “Massive Estimates of Death are in Vogue for Copenhagen,” Richard Cable of the BBC, until then the most stalwart of scare-mongers, rattled off the global warnings du jour – they included a comparison of global warming to nuclear war and a report from the former Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan, to the effect that “every year climate change leaves over 300,000 people dead, 325-million people seriously affected, and economic losses of US $125-billion.” Cable’s conclusion: “The problem is that once you’ve sat up and paid attention enough to examine them a bit more closely, you find that the means by which the figures were arrived at isn’t very compelling… The report contains so many extrapolations derived from guesswork based on estimates inferred from unsuitable data.”
The scientist-scare-mongers, seeing the diminishing returns that come of their escalating claims of catastrophe, also know their stock is falling. Until now, they have all toughed it out when the data disagreed with their findings – as it does on every major climate issue, without exception. Some scientists, like Germany’s Mojib Latif, have begun to break ranks. Frustrated by embarrassing questions about why the world hasn’t seen any warming over the last decade, Latif, a tireless veteran of the public speaking circuits, now explains that global warming has paused, to resume in 2020 or perhaps 2030. “People understand what I’m saying but then basically wind up saying, ‘We don’t believe anything,’” he told The New York Times this week.
And why should they believe anything that comes from the global warming camp? Not only has the globe not warmed over the last decade but the Arctic ice is returning, the Antarctic isn’t shrinking, polar bear populations aren’t diminishing, hurricanes aren’t becoming more extreme. The only thing that’s scary about the science is the frequency with which doomsayer data is hidden from public scrutiny, manipulated to mislead, or simply made up.
None of this matters anymore, I recently heard at the Global Business Forum in Banff, where a fellow panelist from the Pew Centre on Global Climate Change told the audience that, while she couldn’t dispute the claims I had made about the science being dubious, the rights and wrongs in the global warming debate are no longer relevant. “The train has left the station,” she cheerily told the business audience, meaning that the debate is over, global warming regulations are coming in, and everyone in the room — primarily business movers and shakers from Western Canada — had better learn to adapt.
Her advice was well accepted, chiefly because most in the room had already adapted — they are busy trying to cash in by obtaining carbon subsidies, building nuclear plants, or providing services to the new carbon economy.
My assessment for those wondering where we’re at: Yes, the train left the station some time ago. And it is now off the rails.

 

[TenPenny]

The media, polls and even scientists suggest the global warming scare is all over but the shouting

Then I humbly suggest that you stop.

 

[Walter]

Then I humbly suggest that you stop.

Buy me new eyes.

 

[Tonington]

Buy me new eyes.

Bloody socialists...

 

[Niflmir]

Ok, none of this even borders on sense for me.

ಠ_ಠ

 

[Tonington]

Ok, none of this even borders on sense for me.

ಠ_ಠ

LOL, which part(s)?

 

[Niflmir]

LOL, which part(s)?

I was pretty much lost at the request for eyes...

 

[Tonington]

I think he could have said "Don't you hate pants?" and it would have been as relevant.

 

[Walter]

October 08, 2009

Growing ice, the mob and red-faced professors: Warmists are having yet another bad week

By Lawrence Solomon​

It’s hard to be green when you’re red-faced all the time. It’s easy to be red-faced when your cause is global warming doomsterism.

This week, the doomsters were embarrassed to learn, once again, that the planet was not in grave peril. Antarctica, their greatest candidate for catastrophe, was not melting at an ever-faster rate, according to a report in Geophysical Research Letters, but at the slowest rate in 30 years. To add to their frustration, they couldn’t even lash out at the lead author, Marco Tedesco of the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Department of City College of New York — the doomsters had praised his previous reports showing high rates of Antarctic melt.

The latest news from the Arctic — delivered daily via satellite — is no better. Two years ago with the Arctic ice in rapid retreat, the doomsters, convinced of the coming of an ice-free Arctic, could scarcely contain themselves. Now, with the Arctic ice in rapid return, their anticipation of disaster seems more a cruel hoax of Nature. The doomsters now dread to track the satellite data beamed down to us courtesy of the International Arctic Research Center and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency — you can see why they cringe each day by going to the satellite website and following the red line: IJIS Web Site.

The red faces aren’t all caused by Nature’s refusal to cooperate in Earth’s demise. The clean carbon folks have recently discovered that they’ve been in bed with organized crime. Scotland Yard and Europol, among numerous other law enforcement agencies across Europe, are hot on the trail of scam artists believed to have made off with £1-billion by illicitly trading carbon credits. In Australia, authorities are investigating claims that a supplier to Carbon Planet, a carbon trading business, has been using fake carbon trading certificates to persuade forest dwellers in Papua New Guinea to sign over the rights to their forests under a UN scheme called REDD, for “Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation.’’ Australia’s REDD-faced Climate Change Minister Penny Wong may now be unable to tout Carbon Planet — about to list on the Australian stock exchange on the promise of A$100-million in REDD assets — at the upcoming climate change meetings in Copenhagen. Other dodgy carbon dealings led to the suspension of the UK branch of SGS, one of the world’s largest clean energy auditors, and of the Norwegian certification company DNV.

If universities could blush, Stanford would be setting the skies ablaze with its latest embarrassment, an attempt to censor a global warming documentary about to be released that had filmed one of its professors, global warming catastrophist Stephen Schneider. “You are prohibited from using any of the Stanford footage you shot, including your interview of Professor Stephen Schneider,” Stanford demanded in a letter. “Professor Schneider likewise has requested that I inform you that he has withdrawn any permission for you to use his name, likeness or interview in connection with any film project you may undertake.”

What caused Stanford and Schneider to go ballistic over the release of the documentary, Not Evil Just Wrong, by independent Irish filmmaker Phelim McAleer? He asked Schneider about his many predictions of global cooling catastrophe in the 1970s.

Why did the filmmaker back down, even though he had obtained permission for the interview? In legal proceedings, a well-heeled bully has no difficulty beating up a poor guy with only right on his side. Not that the gentleman lacked either spine or recourse. He then documented the bad behaviour of Stanford and Schneider by having an actor read Schneider`s words before a blank screen. After its release, on Oct. 18, the sky over Stanford will turn an even deeper hue of red.

This week of embarrassment for the global warmists does not look all that different from most weeks. Overzealous scientists and their enablers have a habit of selecting the data they like and setting the rest aside. Some — Schneider among them — have even justified exaggerating the dangers in the cause of making the public take note. When they get caught they often resort to obfuscations and cover-ups.

And red faces become the norm.

 

[AnnaG]

NASA flights will study Antarctic ice changes - CNN.com

Last Time Carbon Dioxide Levels Were This High: 15 Million Years Ago, Scientists Report

Why Antarctic ice is growing despite global warming - environment - 20 April 2009 - New Scientist

From Walter's article:

October 08, 2009

Growing ice, the mob and red-faced professors: Warmists are having yet another bad week

By Lawrence Solomon​

It’s hard to be green when you’re red-faced all the time. It’s easy to be red-faced when your cause is global warming doomsterism.

This week, the doomsters were embarrassed to learn, once again, that the planet was not in grave peril. Antarctica, their greatest candidate for catastrophe, was not melting at an ever-faster rate, according to a report in Geophysical Research Letters, but at the slowest rate in 30 years. To add to their frustration, they couldn’t even lash out at the lead author, Marco Tedesco of the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Department of City College of New York — the doomsters had praised his previous reports showing high rates of Antarctic melt.

But they are inferring it's still melting.
And then right in the next paragraph they say:

Now, with the Arctic ice in rapid return, their anticipation of disaster seems more a cruel hoax of Nature.

Wait! is it still melting only at a slower rate or is it returning? They can't seem to make up their mind.
I wish people would can the crap and read what they post. Perhaps then they can pick out the contradictions and whatever else that makes their posts silly.

 

[Walter]

What happened to global warming?


By Paul Hudson
Climate correspondent, BBC News


This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.
But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.
And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.
So what on Earth is going on? Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man's influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming.

Game over; even the BBC can read the writing on the wall.