There are still folks out there still trying to salvage something out of the great global warming climate panic promotion. The one question no one has an answer for is the outright manipulation of data. I begin to yell fraud when it was revealed a mere six months ago how simply the Mann hockey stick data had been cooked.
I still thought that we were dealing with one individual even though there was little cooperation in terms of sharing data reported. Climate Gate ended all that.
This spells it out pretty starkly.
What really bothers me is how willing the media was to been misled and worse, how some scientists went for it all. The sheer lack of wisdom is appalling. It is as if the editors sent rookies out to pitch the tale knowing that they would be impressed. An old fox would be simply too cautious having been burned by authority repeatedly.
Whenever I could dig up data it was yelling caution and watching McIntyre’s effort to extract raw data immediately raised red flags to say nothing about the ad hominen attacks. A scientist attacking a colleague is always indicative of extreme bias.
It is worth commenting that the IPCC ‘s reputation is presently completely destroyed in case you missed this. Everything coming from their enterprise is been vigorously examined by peers and shortcomings are now bleated to the press. This has gone on for weeks. Academia is also on a hunt aimed at hanging the culprits and I am sure that the damage will be huge.
I regret to say that climate science looks amateurish and the scholars will need to clean house.
As an aside, in the sciences there is a natural pecking order that is not overly visible. All first year students are expected to take at least three science courses and the calculus. Rather obviously, if you are weak in the calculus, you find a way to avoid later more difficult mathematics. However, that course is sufficient to access a whole range of empirical sciences. I will go further, additional courses in Stats and programming and a couple of others will make everyone happy. The real challenge is to pick up the mass of empirical knowledge needed to perform in the field of choice.
The emails revealed that the ‘computer model’ had turned into a mass of garbage which is pretty good evidence that the senior guys did not know enough about their model to inform their programming staff and oversee development and testing. This is system design blunder #1. Had they had excellent math talent, they likely would not be doing this. The result is the present disaster.
There are obviously climate scholars who had talent and loved the field. Unfortunately, they did not win the promotion wars this time around. The Dutch scholar chased out, had rightly focused on the heat content of the ocean. This had not been plugged into the so called climate models.
February 28, 2010
The recent revelations of scientific errors (not to say fraud) in the U.N.'s global warming documents are important, but Fred Singer reminds us not to lose sight of the most important point: the IPCC's fundamental conclusions, relating to the allegedly unprecedented warming of the past half-century, are based on bad surface temperature data and are contradicted by more-reliable satellite data and by our knowledge of the earth's climate history. We know for a fact, in short, that the computer models that are the only basis for the AGW theory are wrong:
The reports of the UN-IPCC have long provided the basis of the so-called 'scientific consensus.' Climate statements of assorted national academies of sciences, including the venerable Royal Society, turned out to be nothing more than rehash of the IPCC conclusions, rather than independent assessments. [Ed.: This is true of the EPA's endangerment finding as well.] Similarly, the statements issued by various professional societies simply relied on the IPCC - without adding any analyses of their own.
In turn, this apparent consensus misled not only the media and the public but also the wider scientific community, which had remained largely unaware of the ongoing debate and of the work of the many reputable climate experts who disagreed with the IPCC. Thanks to the e-mails of ClimateGate (CG), we now know of the efforts by a small clique to suppress publication of such dissenting views by subverting the scientific peer-review process - often with the connivance of the editors of leading professional journals.
All this is now changing. The e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia server strongly suggest that the basic temperature data had been manipulated, yielding the reported strong surface warming of the past 30 years. Again, we had long suspected this, because the data from weather satellites showed little warming trend of the atmosphere since 1979. Available proxy data seemed to confirm this result (see "Hot Talk Cold Science" [1997] -- HTCS Fig 16). But according to theory - and every greenhouse climate model -- tropospheric trends should be substantially greater than surface trends.
This disparity between the trends derived from weather station data and from satellite data was already apparent in 1996 (see HTCS Fig 9), and was amply confirmed in a special study of the US National Academy
The NAS report could not reconcile the disparity and never explained its cause. But it has become evident now that the cause may be a greatly exaggerated surface trend - brought about by the CG cabal. We will learn the details once we unravel just how the data were manipulated.
The 'manufacture' of a 'man-made' warming trend, when there is none, likely involved (i) selection of stations that showed a trend, and (ii) inadequate correction for purely local warming influences such as the 'urban heat island' effect (see HTCS Figs 7 and 8; and the recent extensive publications of Joe D'Aleo and Anthony Watts).
In a sense then, the other 'Gates' discovered since CG - GlacierGate and all the rest - are a distraction from the main story. They were all found in IPCC Volume 2, which deals with climate impacts, i.e. with the consequences of global warming. They indicate a general sloppiness and make a mockery of the much touted IPCC standards and procedures. They have severely shaken the public's and the media's faith in the IPCC. But the main story is still CG - because it impacts directly on IPCC Volume 1, which deals with climate science and the causes of climate change rather than with climate impacts.
To sum up: CG demonstrates just how the IPCC [2007] arrived at its erroneous conclusion about anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the latter half of the 20th century. They used bad data. It's no surprise then that none of the evidence the IPCC put forth in support of AGW can stand up to scrutiny - as already shown in the reports of the NIPCC ("Nature, not human activity, rules the climate" and "Climate change reconsidered") [2008 and 2009].
Now that we know Al Gore is a hoaxer, can we please get back to drilling for oil and gas? We have huge supplies of oil and gas under our control, but our oil companies--which by international standards are tiny in terms of the quantity of petroleum to which they have access--are legally prevented from developing it and, in some cases, even exploring for it. (Congress doesn't want the American people to understand how much wealth and how many jobs we are forgoing by being the only country in the world that perversely refuses to develop its own energy resources.) Here, Chevron's Vice President for Exploration, Bobby Ryan, explains the need to explore the Outer Continental Shelf, where unknown but no doubt vast reserves of energy are to be found.
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