Climategate

[MrEmann]

As I prepare My answer. Doing the research, and confirming My results, I have to say. I find it interesting that *if you even ONCE quote Faux News, or Bill O'Reilly, or Glenn Beck, I think I'll scream!*. So the conservative point of view is off limits, but rhetoric from the left is acceptable? Can I quote CNN? If so why them, and not Fox news? Can I quote John Stossel, or is He too right wing? I'm just curious as to what constitutes noteworthy and honest reporting on this subject. At least to you.

[Thorne]

So the conservative point of view is off limits, but rhetoric from the left is acceptable? Can I quote CNN? If so why them, and not Fox news?

Rhetoric from ANY side is unacceptable, as rhetoric is not evidence! CNN can get it just as wrong as Fox. They just don't generally try to justify their misconceptions with religion, as O'Reilly and Beck are wont to do.

No, you said that there was SCIENCE that denies global warming. All I asked to see was that science.

[MrEmann]

http://mises.org/daily/2571

Let's call this exhibt A in My argument.

David Evans a mathmetician by definition a scientist had this to say:

I devoted six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian government to estimate carbon emissions from land use change and forestry. When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty conclusive, but since then new evidence has weakened that case. I am now skeptical.


This evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we are absolutely certain when we apparently need to act now? So the idea that carbon emissions were causing global warming passed from the scientific community into the political realm. Research increased, bureaucracies were formed, international committees met, and eventually the Kyoto protocol was signed in 1997 to curb carbon emissions.

The political realm in turn fed money back into the scientific community. By the late 1990s, lots of jobs depended on the idea that carbon emissions caused global warming. Many of them were bureaucratic, but there were a lot of science jobs created too.

I was on that gravy train, making a high wage in a science job that would not have existed if we didn't believe carbon emissions caused global warming. And so were lots of people around me; there were international conferences full of such people. We had political support, the ear of government, big budgets. We felt fairly important and useful (I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet!

Better data shows that from 1940 to 1975 the earth cooled while atmospheric carbon increased. That 35 year non-correlation might eventually be explained by global dimming, only discovered in about 2003.

The temporal resolution of the ice core data improved. By 2004 we knew that in past warming events, the temperature increases generally started about 800 years before the rises in atmospheric carbon. Causality does not run in the direction I had assumed in 1999 — it runs the opposite way!

There is now a credible alternative suspect. In October 2006 Henrik Svensmark showed experimentally that cosmic rays cause cloud formation. Clouds have a net cooling effect, but for the last three decades there have been fewer clouds than normal because the sun's magnetic field, which shields us from cosmic rays, has been stronger than usual. So the earth heated up. It's too early to judge what fractionThere is now no observational evidence that global warming is caused by carbon emissions. You would think that in over 20 years of intense investigation we would have found something. For example, greenhouse warming due to carbon emissions should warm the upper atmosphere faster than the lower atmosphere — but until 2006 the data showed the opposite, and thus that the greenhouse effect was not occurring! In 2006 better data allowed that the effect might be occurring, except in the tropics. of global warming is caused by cosmic rays.

None of the new evidence actually says that carbon emissions are definitely not the cause of global warming, there are lots of good science jobs potentially at stake, and if the scientific message wavers then it might be difficult to later recapture the attention of the political system. What has happened is that most research efforts since 1990 have assumed that carbon emissions were the cause, and the alternatives get much less research or political attention.

[Thorne]

http://mises.org/daily/2571

Let's call this exhibt A in My argument.

David Evans a mathmetician by definition a scientist had this to say:

A couple of problems I have with this one:
1 - while a mathematician may be a scientist (though not necessarily so) that does NOT make him a climatologist. His expertise seems to be more concerned with the economics of global warming than with the actual science.
2 - the writer makes many scientific claims without providing links to the relevant research. Suspicious, at best. While some of these claims could POSSIBLY be valid, there is nothing to show what these claims are based on.
3 - the Ludwig von Mises Institute is a libertarian academic organization engaged in research and scholarship in the fields of economics, philosophy and political economy. NOT science and NOT climatology. They are considered to be "right wing" in their ideologies, and as near as I can tell with just a short scan, the Institute is not doing any research into climate change.

[MrEmann]

http://www.dailytech.com/Temperature...ticle10866.htm

This shall be exhibit B

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on.

Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn't itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.

Let's hope those factors stop fast. Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans -- and most of the crops and animals we depend on -- prefer a temperature closer to 70.

[Thorne]

This shall be exhibit B

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded....
<snip>
While the data doesn't itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.

You left out the most dramatic claim from this article: "Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming".

Very dramatic. And very wrong! First off he admits that much of his "data" is anecdotal. He then describes weather patterns and tries to imply that they are indicative of climate patterns as well. This is just not true. All of his information is for a one year period between January 2007 and January 2008. Climate patterns can only be honestly judged over much longer time spans than that. Just off the top of my head I can recall that there is an 11 year (I think) solar cycle which can affect weather AND climate. All of the known natural cycles are already accounted for by climate scientists when they make their warnings of global climate change.

And if you had checked this author's source you would have seen a problem right away. He provides a link to the source just before making this alarming statement: The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out most of the warming recorded over the past 100 years."

Well, turns out that there is an "UPDATE AND CAVEAT" a short ways down in which YOUR source is mentioned. Anthony Watts, the person who provided the information for Michael Asher, your source, says categorically: "I wish to state for the record, that this statement is not mine: “–a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years”

There has been no “erasure”. This is an anomaly with a large magnitude, and it coincides with other anecdotal weather evidence. It is curious, it is unusual, it is large, it is unexpected, but it does not “erase” anything."

Now, if this "anomaly" has continued over the past three years, then we might have an interesting story. But I haven't seen any evidence of that. Have you?

[MrEmann]

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.c...e-9e32747616f9



All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously. A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year time. For all sources, it's the single fastest temperature change every recorded, either up or down. […] Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on. No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

[MrEmann]

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.c...e-9e32747616f9



Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966. The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average." China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them. And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its "lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past. The ice is back. Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year. […]Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as "a drop in the bucket." Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to "stock up on fur coats." He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon. The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased. It's way too early to claim the same is about to happen again, but then it's way too early for the hysteria of the global warmers, too.

[MrEmann]

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/st...rctic-ice.html


There's an upside to the extreme cold temperatures northern Canadians have endured in the last few weeks: scientists say it's been helping winter sea ice grow across the Arctic, where the ice shrank to record-low levels last year. Temperatures have stayed well in the -30s C and -40s C range since late January throughout the North, with the mercury dipping past -50 C in some areas. Satellite images are showing that the cold spell is helping the sea ice expand in coverage by about 2 million square kilometres, compared to the average winter coverage in the previous three years. "It's nice to know that the ice is recovering," Josefino Comiso, a senior research scientist with the Cryospheric Sciences Branch of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, told CBC News on Thursday. […] Winter sea ice could keep expanding. The cold is also making the ice thicker in some areas, compared to recorded thicknesses last year, Lagnis added. "The ice is about 10 to 20 centimetres thicker than last year, so that's a significant increase," he said. If temperatures remain cold this winter, Langis said winter sea ice coverage will continue to expand.

[MrEmann]

http://global-warming.accuweather.co..._summer_1.html

Pictures of the annual summer thaw in Antartica

and this tidbit

This process is typical during the Antarctic summer months and not a sign of global warming. Actually, the summer thaw down there was later than normal, and NASA believes that La Nina might have something to do with that. Usually, the breakup of fast ice around the Antarctica Peninsula occurs in early to mid-December, but this area was solidly frozen well into January.

[Thorne]

Your exhibits C, D, E and F, which you did not label, are all variations on exhibit B. They claim a single years decline in global temperature to be a trend, rather than a possible anomaly. Has this trend continued since January 2008?

No, it has not. In fact, according to the CRU 2009 and 2010 were both significantly warmer than 2008, and in fact 2010 has tied with 2003 as the third warmest year on record, trailing behind only 1998 and 2005.

They also state that: "The period 2001-2010 (0.44°C above 1961-90 mean) was 0.20°C warmer than the 1991-2000 decade (0.24°C above 1961-90 mean). The warmest year of the entire series has been 1998, with a temperature of 0.55°C above the 1961-90 mean. After 1998, the next nine warmest years in the series are all in the decade 2001-2010. During this decade, only 2008 is not in the ten warmest years. Even though 2008 was the coldest year of the 21st century it was still the 12th warmest year of the whole record."

And in regards to the Antarctic ice sheet? That article is from - wit for it - 2008!

So five of your pieces of evidence against global warming are based upon a single anomalous year. This is not science, sir, this is cherry picking data.

[MrEmann]

Exhibit G


http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.c...b-bd9faf4dcdb7

Over 700 dissenting scientists (updates previous 650 report) from around the globe challenged man-made global warming claims made by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former Vice President Al Gore. This new 2009 255-page U.S. Senate Minority Report -- updated from 2007’s groundbreaking report of over 400 scientists who voiced skepticism about the so-called global warming “consensus” -- features the skeptical voices of over 700 prominent international scientists, including many current and former UN IPCC scientists, who have now turned against the UN IPCC. This updated report includes an additional 300 (and growing) scientists and climate researchers since the initial release in December 2007. The over 700 dissenting scientists are more than 13 times the number of UN scientists (52) who authored the media-hyped IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers.



“Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly….As a scientist I remain skeptical...The main basis of the claim that man’s release of greenhouse gases is the cause of the warming is based almost entirely upon climate models. We all know the frailty of models concerning the air-surface system.” - Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a PhD in meteorology, and formerly of NASA, who has authored more than 190 studies and has been called “among the most preeminent scientists of the last 100 years.”


Warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in the history…When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.” - UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist.

“The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn’t listen to others. It doesn’t have open minds… I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by people who are not geologists.” - Indian geologist Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia at Punjab University and a board member of the UN-supported International Year of the Planet.


“Anyone who claims that the debate is over and the conclusions are firm has a fundamentally unscientific approach to one of the most momentous issues of our time.” - Solar physicist Dr. Pal Brekke, senior advisor to the Norwegian Space Centre in Oslo. Brekke has published more than 40 peer-reviewed scientific articles on the sun and solar interaction with the Earth.


“It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming.” - U.S Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA.

“The Kyoto theorists have put the cart before the horse. It is global warming that triggers higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not the other way round…A large number of critical documents submitted at the 1995 U.N. conference in Madrid vanished without a trace. As a result, the discussion was one-sided and heavily biased, and the U.N. declared global warming to be a scientific fact,” Andrei Kapitsa, a Russian geographer and Antarctic ice core researcher.

“Gore prompted me to start delving into the science again and I quickly found myself solidly in the skeptic camp…Climate models can at best be useful for explaining climate changes after the fact.” - Meteorologist Hajo Smit of Holland, who reversed his belief in man-made warming to become a skeptic, is a former member of the Dutch UN IPCC committee.

“CO2 emissions make absolutely no difference one way or another….Every scientist knows this, but it doesn’t pay to say so…Global warming, as a political vehicle, keeps Europeans in the driver’s seat and developing nations walking barefoot.” - Dr. Takeda Kunihiko, vice-chancellor of the Institute of Science and Technology Research at Chubu University in Japan.


These are only a few of the quotes I could have used.


This is also from the same article.

This Senate report is not a “list” of scientists, but a report that includes full biographies of each scientist and their quotes, papers and links for further reading. The scientists featured in the report express their views in their own words, complete with their intended subtleties and caveats. This Senate report features the names, biographies, academic/institutional affiliation, and quotes of literally hundreds of additional international scientists who publicly dissented from man-made climate fears. This report lists the scientists by name, country of residence, and academic/institutional affiliation. It also features their own words, biographies, and weblinks to their peer reviewed studies, scientific analyses and original source materials as gathered from directly from the scientists or from public statements, news outlets, and websites in 2007 and 2008.

[Thorne]

Exhibit G

Ahh, the listing of the scientists. Please note that this is the Senate MINORITY report in 2008 (again), which means it's from Republicans, who are noted for their anti-global warming stance to start with. This does not mean they are necessarily wrong, but it does raise a red flag.

I looked through the "highlights" they quoted and found that of the 26 quotes given only 9 were from scientists who might be remotely connected to climate studies, including meteorologists (who study weather more than climate) and environmental scientists (who I included to be fair: I'm not certain of the qualifications here). Only 35%, and these are the highlights? While these scientists will have their opinions, and can speak perhaps to the scientific process, how much real expertise do they have in the field? One of the quotes given in the highlights was from a paleontologist!

The one quote I found most relevant, and which you have quoted as well was this one:
"Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly. As a scientist I remain skeptical...The main basis of the claim that man's release of greenhouse gases is the cause of the warming is based almost entirely upon climate models. We all know the frailty of models concerning the air-surface system." - Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a PhD in meteorology, and formerly of NASA, who has authored more than 190 studies and has been called "among the most preeminent scientists of the last 100 years."
Here Dr. Simpson is questioning whether mankind's release of CO2 is to blame, not whether global warming is occurring. I have already stated that there is a lot of controversy over this.

Now, I'll admit that I have not delved into the whole report to see where these quotes actually came from. I do know from other reading I have done that SOME of these kinds of reports (not necessarily this one) have been disingenuous at best, and outright lies at worst. Some scientists quoted in similar reports have apparently responded negatively to the use of their names in such reports, claiming they were either misquoted or taken out of context. I suspect, though cannot prove, that some of those quoted here could feel the same.

[MrEmann]

Exhibt H

http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/963

BALI, Indonesia - The UN climate conference met strong opposition Thursday from a team of over 100 prominent international scientists, who warned the UN, that attempting to control the Earth’s climate was “ultimately futile.”

“It is not possible to stop climate change, a natural phenomenon that has affected humanity through the ages. Geological, archaeological, oral and written histories all attest to the dramatic challenges posed to past societies from unanticipated changes in temperature, precipitation, winds and other climatic variables,” the scientists wrote.

[Thorne]

Exhibt H
<snip>
“It is not possible to stop climate change, a natural phenomenon that has affected humanity through the ages. Geological, archaeological, oral and written histories all attest to the dramatic challenges posed to past societies from unanticipated changes in temperature, precipitation, winds and other climatic variables,” the scientists wrote.

Nothing wrong here. IF the current climate change is natural, there is probably little we can do about it. IF, however, it is being caused by man-made CO2 emissions, then reducing those emissions may help. Even if the warming is natural, though, adding CO2 to the atmosphere can only make things worse, not better.

[MrEmann]

Exhibit I

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/968

t’s an assertion repeated by politicians and climate campaigners the world over – ‘2,500 scientists of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) agree that humans are causing a climate crisis’.

But it’s not true. And, for the first time ever, the public can now see the extent to which they have been misled. As lies go, it’s a whopper. Here’s the real situation.

Like the three IPCC ‘assessment reports’ before it, the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) released during 2007 (upon which the UN climate conference in Bali was based) includes the reports of the IPCC’s three working groups. Working Group I (WG I) is assigned to report on the extent and possible causes of past climate change as well as future ‘projections’. Its report is titled “The Physical Science Basis”. The reports from working groups II and II are titled “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability” and “Mitigation of Climate Change” respectively, and since these are based on the results of WG I, it is crucially important that the WG I report stands up to close scrutiny.


Very enlightening. The entire article should be read.

[MrEmann]

The real story is why none of this info has EVER been mentioned on CNN, CBS, NBC, NPR, etc. as the socialists in congress try to ram thru a $1,500/person tax on energy... It is important to inform your kids that these are not news organizations- they are propagandists.

MMGW is already the most expensive fraud in history and it’s about to get exponentially worse...


Please note. Not mentioned in any of the exhibits'

Fox News

Bill O'Reilly

Glenn Beck

John Stossel

Just scientists and peer reviewed papers.

As I maintained. There is plenty of scientific evidence to show:

Humans did not create this problem

Humans cannot stop this problem

Attempting to change the NATURAL global climate rhythms is futile

The proponents of "global climate change are more motivated by politics and pay checks.

I'm done here. I may read responses to all of this. I will not respond to any further postings.

[Thorne]

The real story is why none of this info has EVER been mentioned on CNN, CBS, NBC, NPR, etc. as the socialists in congress try to ram thru a $1,500/person tax on energy... It is important to inform your kids that these are not news organizations- they are propagandists.

Well, we can agree on this, at least. They are propagandists, though I think they are far closer to the middle than some other propagandist media.

Please note. Not mentioned in any of the exhibits'

Fox News

Bill O'Reilly

Glenn Beck

John Stossel

Just scientists and peer reviewed papers.

Not from what I've seen. You just used different conservative propaganda outlets.

Humans did not create this problem

This is not certain. It's possible that we did not, but mounting evidence is showing that, if nothing else, we are making things worse.

Humans cannot stop this problem

Possibly true, especially if we don't want to spend any money to attempt to stop it.

Attempting to change the NATURAL global climate rhythms is futile

Also probably true, unless of course we've already done so by actually causing this current warming trend.

The proponents of "global climate change are more motivated by politics and pay checks.

While the opponents of it are all motivated by humanitarian concerns. Yeah, right.