Climategate: Who are the ‘deniers’ now? December 15, 2009
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Climategate: Who are the ‘deniers’ now?
By E. THOMAS McCLANAHAN
The Kansas City Star, December 12, 2009
A couple of years ago, supporters of global warming theory began referring to skeptics as “deniers” — implying that anyone who doubted climate change should be lumped with Holocaust deniers.
Now the shoe is on the other foot, thanks to the eye-popping e-mail dump that hit the Internet recently and quickly became known as “Climategate.” The response of much of the global-warming “community” has been … denial.
A New York Times story on the Copenhagen climate summit declared, “In Face of Skeptics, Experts Affirm Climate Peril.” The U.S. negotiator at Copenhagen, Jonathan Pershing, said the hacked e-mails have “no fundamental bearing” on the summit. Al Gore waved off the controversy as so much “sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency went right ahead with its “endangerment finding,” laying the basis for the regulatory equivalent of a tax on greenhouse gases.
The e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, however, raise serious questions about the theory of anthropogenic global warming, or AGW.
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UN climate marathon risks failure December 14, 2009
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UN climate marathon risks failure
Mail & Guardian, December 14, 2009
The spectre of failure loomed on Monday over the United Nations climate summit, with China accusing wealthy nations of “playing tricks”, as the marathon talks in Copenhagen entered their crucial final phase.
As environment ministers haggled behind closed doors, some of the biggest players gave a glimpse of the size of the divide that needs to be bridged between rich and poor nations when about 120 leaders gather for the summit climax on Friday.
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, whose country is the industrialised world’s biggest per capita polluter, brandished the spectre of failure unless there was more compromise all round.
“There’s a big risk that we will have conflicting views between developed and developing countries,” Rudd said. “And there is always a risk of failure here.”
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IPCC and the “Trick” December 13, 2009
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IPCC and the “Trick”
By Steve McIntyre
ClimateAudit, December 10, 2009
Much recent attention has been paid to the email about the “trick” and the effort to “hide the decline”. Climate scientists have complained that this email has been taken “out of context”. In this case, I’m not sure that it’s in their interests that this email be placed in context because the context leads right back to a meeting of IPCC authors in Tanzania, raising serious questions about the role of IPCC itself in “hiding the decline” in the Briffa reconstruction.
Relevant Climategate correspondence in the period (September-October 1999) leading up to the trick email is incomplete, but, in context, is highly revealing. There was a meeting of IPCC lead authors between Sept 1-3, 1999 to consider the “zero-order draft” of the Third Assessment Report. The emails provide clear evidence that IPCC had already decided to include a proxy diagram reconstructing temperature for the past 1000 years and that a version of the proxy diagram was presented at the Tanzania meeting showing the late twentieth century decline. I now have a copy of the proxy diagram presented at this meeting (see below).
The emails show that the late 20th century decline in the Briffa reconstruction was perceived by IPCC as “diluting the message”, that “everyone in the room at IPCC” thought that the Briffa decline was a “problem” and a “potential distraction/detraction”, that this was then the “most important issue” in chapter 2 of the IPCC report and that there was “pressure” on Briffa and other authors to show a “nice tidy story” of “unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more”. [Update Dec 11 - see note at bottom on the chronology. Comments from readers have clarified that the issue at the Arusha meeting was that the Briffa reconstruction "diluted the message" more through its overall inconsistency as opposed to the decline, which was still relatively attenuated in the Arusha version. After the Arusha meeting, Briffa hastily re-calculated his reconstruction sending a new version to Mann on Oct 5, 1999 and it was this hastily re-done version that introduced the very severe decline that was hidden in the First Order Draft and Jones WMO Report]
The chronology in today’s posts show that the version of the Briffa reconstruction shown in the subsequent proxy diagram in the IPCC “First Order Draft” (October 27, 1999), presumably prepared under the direction of IPCC section author Mann, deleted the inconvenient portion (post-1960) of the Briffa reconstruction, together with other modifications that had the effect of not “diluting the message”.
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Climategate: those defending it are damned themselves December 12, 2009
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Climategate: those defending it are damned themselves
By Andrew Bolt
Herald Sun, December 12, 2009
How loudly would these carpetbaggers scream if the review was held instead by a sceptic funded by ExxonMobil?
As the science scandal known as ClimateGate grows, the largest U.S. physicists’ association is finding itself roiled by internal dissent and allegations of conflict of interest over a forthcoming review of its position statement on man-made global warming.
The scientist who will head the American Physical Society’s review of its 2007 statement calling for immediate reductions of carbon dioxide is Princeton’s Robert Socolow, a prominent supporter of the link between CO2 and global warming who has warned of possible “catastrophic consequences” of climate change.
Socolow’s research institute at Princeton has received well over $20 million in grants dealing with climate change and carbon reduction…
”It is Socolow whose entire research funding stream, well over a million dollars a year, depends on continued alarm over global warming,” says William Happer, a fellow Princeton University professor and head of the Happer physics lab who has raised the question of a conflict of interest…
Happer and other members of the APS have been urging the society to take a second look at the 2007 statement… Their letter circulated last month says: “By now everyone has heard of what has come to be known as ClimateGate, which was and is an international scientific fraud, the worst any of us have seen… We have asked the APS management to put the 2007 statement on ice until the extent to which it is tainted can be determined, but that has not been done.”…
Hal Lewis, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara who has been an APS member for 65 years, says that he asked both the current and incoming APS presidents to require that Socolow recuse himself from a review of this subject, and both refused.
That means the review will be “chaired by a guy who is hip deep in conflicts of interest, running a million-dollar program that is utterly dependent on global warming funding,” Lewis says.
Professor Will Alexander, who argues that temperature rises are driven more by solar activity and will be beneficial, says those who dismiss the Climategate scandal are damned by it:
The most recent development is that on 4 December Working Group 1 of the IPCC issued a statement that it firmly stands behind the conclusions reached in its 2007 assessment reports, “The key finding that the warming in the climate system is unequivocal.” This is still a long way from proving human causality. The only proof that they can offer is manipulated deductions from limited tree ring measurements in remote areas of the globe that show that present global temperatures are higher than any experienced in the past thousands of years. Therefore the increases must be due to human activities. I repeat my question. Why did they not base their conclusions on solid analyses of rainfall and river flow measurements during the past 100 years?
Their statement also defends the integrity of the individual scientists involved in the climategate affair. I share the view that the individuals should not become the scapegoats for the scientifically corrupt system. I have personal experience of the extent to which climate alarmists are prepared to go to silence the opposition.
An unforeseen consequence of the working group’s proclaimed support for the individuals and their tactics in particular, now places the whole IPCC structure in the same boat. If the investigations confirm serious shortfalls in procedures used in the two institutions, then by its own admission, the same criticisms must apply to the IPCC itself.
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Friday Fun: It’s A Climategate Christmas December 11, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in Videos.Tags: climate change, Climategate, global warming, Minnesotans For Global Warming
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Friday Fun: It’s A Climategate Christmas
Via Minnesotans For Global Warming
See also: Hide the Decline Video
Sunspotless Day tally now puts 2009 in 5th place, closing in on 2008 December 10, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in sunspots.Tags: climate change, global warming, sunspots
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Sunspotless Day tally now puts 2009 in 5th place, closing in on 2008
Via ICECAP, Dec 09, 2009
Today marked the 17th straight day without a sunspot. It will according to spaceweather will mark the 260th sunspotless day this year and the 771st spotless day this minimum. This moves 2009 into 5th place in the top 20 spotless years since 1849, when that kind of assessment became reasonable. See the enlarged image here.
See how the sunspot number has not recovered from the expect minimum (declared by NASA first in December 2008!!!). See the enlarged image here.
This long cycle and the last 3 suggest that the phasing of the 213 year and 106 low solar cycle may be at work as it was in the late 1700s and the early 1800s, the so-called Dalton Minimum (below, enlarged here), the age of Dickens. Those days, snow was common in London. Ironically last winter was one of the snowiest in London in many a decade. Snow will fall next week in England (and Copenhagen). More later.
Enlarged here.
CLIMATEGATE CHAOS by Will Alexander, S. African UN Scientist. December 9, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, Climategate, global warming, Professor Will Alexander
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CLIMATEGATE CHAOS by Will Alexander, S. African UN Scientist.
Via Climate Realists, December 7, 2009
Today is D-Day for Copenhagen. The organizers could not possibly have foreseen so much unfavourable publicity. Thirty million Google hits in three weeks!
The international stakes are monumental.
Never in the history of science has a single issue generated so much interest and controversy.
Looking closer, never in the history of science has there been such a flagrant disregard for the fundamental requirements of scientific endeavour. These are clearly described in the UNESCO/ICSU Declaration on science and the use of scientific knowledge (1999).
Please Click PDF file to read FULL report from Will Alexander
‘Climategate’ at centre stage as Copenhagen opens December 8, 2009
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‘Climategate’ at centre stage as Copenhagen opens
Times Online, December 7, 2009
The “Climategate” row took centre stage on the opening day of the Copenhagen climate summit today as the world’s leading oil exporter intervened to question the scientific consensus on man-made global warming.
As 15,000 delegates from 192 nations began what was billed as the “last, best chance” to avert a catastrophic rise in sea and air temperatures, Saudi Arabia’s chief climate negotiator, Mohammed al-Sabban, spoke from the floor to say that e-mails hacked from a UK research centre had shaken trust in the work of scientists.
He was not the first to mention the Climategate scandal. In his opening address to the conference, Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Nobel prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said the hackers had been trying to undermine the work of his organisation.
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Lawrence Solomon: Climategate gang is writing the script for Copenhagen December 7, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, Climategate, Copenhagen, global warming
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Lawrence Solomon: Climategate gang is writing the script for Copenhagen
Financial Post, December 7, 2009
The Copenhagen Diagnosis, a year-long study to be unveiled at the Copenhagen climate change meetings that begin today, was designed to dramatize how little time we have left to save the planet from catastrophic climate.
But the Copenhagen Diagnosis, which is billed as an update to the last report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has a credibility problem. The Climategate gang – the same crew now discredited by emails that emerged showing a conspiracy to cook the books – had a dozen of its members in charge of producing the Copenhagen Diagnosis. More credibility problems: The Copenhagen Diagnosis relies on data from the Hadley Centre of the UK meteorological office and the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University – two bodies that may now need to set aside the data altogether and start over.
The suspect data — known as HADCRUT – is a merged dataset comprised of marine temperatures provided by the Hadley Centre and land-based temperatures from the Climate Research Unit. Because the CRU portion of the data is so suspect with so much of the public, the Met Office has announced a three-year year investigation in which it will re-examine 160 years of temperature data. The Met took this step, which makes official the view that the world has been relying on suspect data, over the objections of the UK government, which fears waiting until 2012 before having solid data. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown is among the most vocal of global warming advocates, having said that Copenhagen is the last chance to save the world from environmental disaster and characterizing those who disagree as “behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics.”
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Climategate Pty Ltd December 6, 2009
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Climategate Pty Ltd
Quadrant Online, December 2, 2009
Scientists trade their lab coats for pin stripes
Writing in The Daily Telegraph, David Penberthy reduced his belief in climate change to a simple proposition. “[W]hen it comes to the basic questions of science,” he wrote, “forgive me for sticking with the guys in the lab coats.” Whether or not this coincides with majority opinion, as he assumes, it reflects a quaint view of scientific practice.
Does Penberthy hold to the romantic image of scientists depicted in Hollywood classics like Madame Curie? Is he thinking of ascetics in white coats, toiling over test tubes in dingy laboratories, ruining their health for truth and human progress? If so, he needs to broaden his perspective. For one thing, he needs to catch up with the transformed higher education landscape of recent times.
The media’s groupthink on climate change suppresses some natural questions. What should we make of the near-unanimity of opinion among a cohort of scientists in such a complex and dynamic field? Is there more to it than consistent measurements, experimental results and interpretations?
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