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Labels: global warming Labels: global warming More than 100 people have been killed in the cold snap across Europe, with temperatures plummeting and snowfall causing chaos from Moscow to Milan. In Poland, where temperatures have dropped to as low as -20C in some areas, police appealed for tip-offs about people spotted lying around outside. At least 42 people, most of them homeless, died over the weekend. In Ukraine 27 people have frozen to death since the thermometer dropped last week. Authorities in Romania said 11 people had succumbed to the chill, and in the Czech Republic the toll was 12. In Germany, where temperatures have fallen to -33C in certain parts, at least seven people are known to have lost their lives in the freezing weather. ... Roads were not exempt from the chaos. After a weekend that brought the heaviest snowfall in about 100 years, Moscow was gridlocked, with tailbacks snailing around the Russian capital. In Italy, where winters are usually mild, motorways in the north-east were closed and the Ministry of Defence dispatched helicopters in Sicily to bring medical aid to those in need. Labels: global warming, history But while the environmental and economic advantages of using fluorescent bulbs are paramount, there are also some costs. Fluorescent bulbs work by using electricity to excite mercury vapor, and mercury can be a dangerous, toxic pollutant, perhaps most readily vilified due to its prevalence in the ocean food chain. Thus, proper disposal and care of fluorescent lightbulbs need to come hand in hand with their wide use, otherwise they bring the risk of increased mercury contamination in the environment. The problem is confounded in the manufacturing process if that mercury is not safely contained and controlled. And that’s precisely the concern in China, where most of the world’s fluorescent lightbulbs are produced, and where factory conditions are poorly regulated and environmentally porous. In fact, in many cases the factory conditions are downright deplorable, and aside from the long term environmental damage that comes from mercury contamination, hundreds of Chinese workers are exposed to mercury poisoning on a daily basis. These problems have recently escalated due to a rapid increase in foreign demand, particularly because of the European Union’s directive making fluorescent bulbs compulsory by 2012. The standards for health and safety in the Chinese factories can vary from high tech operations to sweatshops. Some tests have demonstrated concentrations of mercury in factory workers that were 150 times the accepted standard, and many are frequently hospitalized. In one Chinese factory, 121 out of 123 employees had excessive mercury levels. Labels: global warming Labels: global warming Labels: global warming Labels: global warming The UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray today after developing countries reacted furiously to leaked documents that show world leaders will next week be asked to sign an agreement that hands more power to rich countries and sidelines the UN's role in all future climate change negotiations. The document is also being interpreted by developing countries as setting unequal limits on per capita carbon emissions for developed and developing countries in 2050; meaning that people in rich countries would be permitted to emit nearly twice as much under the proposals. The so-called Danish text, a secret draft agreement worked on by a group of individuals known as "the circle of commitment" – but understood to include the UK, US and Denmark – has only been shown to a handful of countries since it was finalised this week. The agreement, leaked to the Guardian, is a departure from the Kyoto protocol's principle that rich nations, which have emitted the bulk of the CO2, should take on firm and binding commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, while poorer nations were not compelled to act. The draft hands effective control of climate change finance to the World Bank; would abandon the Kyoto protocol – the only legally binding treaty that the world has on emissions reductions; and would make any money to help poor countries adapt to climate change dependent on them taking a range of actions. The document was described last night by one senior diplomat as "a very dangerous document for developing countries. It is a fundamental reworking of the UN balance of obligations. It is to be superimposed without discussion on the talks". A confidential analysis of the text by developing countries also seen by the Guardian shows deep unease over details of the text. In particular, it is understood to: • Force developing countries to agree to specific emission cuts and measures that were not part of the original UN agreement; • Divide poor countries further by creating a new category of developing countries called "the most vulnerable"; • Weaken the UN's role in handling climate finance; • Not allow poor countries to emit more than 1.44 tonnes of carbon per person by 2050, while allowing rich countries to emit 2.67 tonnes. Labels: global warming Labels: global warming On a normal day, Majken Friss Jorgensen, managing director of Copenhagen's biggest limousine company, says her firm has twelve vehicles on the road. During the "summit to save the world", which opens here tomorrow, she will have 200. "We thought they were not going to have many cars, due to it being a climate convention," she says. "But it seems that somebody last week looked at the weather report." Ms Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. "We haven't got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand," she says. "We're having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden." And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? "Five," says Ms Jorgensen. "The government has some alternative fuel cars but the rest will be petrol or diesel. We don't have any hybrids in Denmark, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it's very Danish." The airport says it is expecting up to 140 extra private jets during the peak period alone, so far over its capacity that the planes will have to fly off to regional airports – or to Sweden – to park, returning to Copenhagen to pick up their VIP passengers. As well 15,000 delegates and officials, 5,000 journalists and 98 world leaders, the Danish capital will be blessed by the presence of Leonardo DiCaprio, Daryl Hannah, Helena Christensen, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Prince Charles. A Republican US senator, Jim Inhofe, is jetting in at the head of an anti-climate-change "Truth Squad." The top hotels – all fully booked at £650 a night – are readying their Climate Convention menus of (no doubt sustainable) scallops, foie gras and sculpted caviar wedges. Labels: global warming Labels: global warming Predictably, the IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri reacted angrily citing the IPCC 2007 climate change reports which asserted that the (Himalayan) glaciers are receding faster than in any other part of the world and if the present rate ( of melting) continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps even sooner is very high if the earth keeps warming at the current rate. Several other Indian scientists and glaciologists have got into the debate now with some of them criticizing the Indian Government with an ostrich-like attitude in the face of impending disaster. What is the reality? Let us take a closer look: First, where did this number 2035 (the year when glaciers could vanish) come from? According to Prof Graham Cogley (Trent University, Ontario), a short article on the future of glaciers by a Russian scientist (Kotlyakov, V.M., 1996, The future of glaciers under the expected climate warming, 61-66, in Kotlyakov, V.M., ed., 1996, Variations of Snow and Ice in the Past and at Present on a Global and Regional Scale, Technical Documents in Hydrology, 1. UNESCO, Paris (IHP-IV Project H-4.1). 78p estimates 2350 as the year for disappearance of glaciers, but the IPCC authors misread 2350 as 2035 in the Official IPCC documents, WGII 2007 p. 493! Labels: global warming Labels: global warming Labels: global warming Labels: global warming Labels: global warming After my paper was published, the State University of New York — where the research discussed in my paper was conducted — carried out an investigation. During the investigation, I was not interviewed — contrary to the university’s policies, federal regulations, and natural justice. I was allowed to comment on the report of the investigation, before the report’s release. But I was not allowed to see the report. Truly Kafkaesque. The report apparently concluded that there was no fraud. The leaked files contain the defense used against my allegation, a defense obviously and strongly contradicted by the documentary record. It is no surprise then that the university still refuses to release the report. (More details on all of this — including source documents — are on my site.) My paper demonstrates that by 2001, Jones knew there were severe problems with the urbanization research. Yet Jones continued to rely on that research in his work, including in his work for the latest report of the IPCC. Labels: global warming There are four major classes of such bugs known definitively to be in the code. 1) Use of static data or static places: This means the code sometimes stores things in a particular place, but always the same place. If two instances of the code are ever running at the same time, they will step on each other, producing incorrect output. This is the least serious, as someone could simply assure us that they never ran two instances at once. We’d have to trust them on this, but under normal circumstances, that wouldn’t be a disaster. 2) Failure to test for error conditions. In many places, the code fails to test for obviously insane error conditions but just goes on processing. That means that if the input is somehow fundamentally broken, the output may be subtly broken. Again, we don’t have the input to retest. 3) Reliance on the user to select the correct input sets. The code relies on the user to tell it what data to process and doesn’t make sure the data is correct, it must trust the user. CRU had data sets with identical names but fundamentally different data. There’s no way now to be sure uncorrected data wasn’t used where corrected data was appropriate or that data wasn’t corrected twice. 4) Reliance on the user to select the correct run-time options. During the run, many of the programs relied on the user to select the correct options as the run progressed. The options were not embedded in the results. A single mis-key could cause the output to be invalid. Unfortunately, these types of defects combine in a multiplicative way. A mis-key during a run could result in subtly bad input that could cause an error condition that’s not detected resulting in radically bad output that’s not detected because of lack of input validation ... Minor quibble here: If the program gives garbage output for “obviously insane” or “fundamentally broken” inputs, this may not be the fault of the program. If I’d spent my time doing input validity tests on all the possible inputs to subroutines I wrote, I wouldn’t get at real work done. At some time, you have to assume some good nature in others, and get on with the tasks at hand. After all, they’re using your code, you aren’t using their data..... Sounds cruel, but if you’ve worked in the field... If they pay me for taking care of their excessive stupidity, then again.... Not to mention, what do you care if the output is wrong for “fundamentally broken” input? I have seldom felt so alone. Confronted with crisis, most of the environmentalists I know have gone into denial. The emails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, they say, are a storm in a tea cup, no big deal, exaggerated out of all recognition. It is true that climate change deniers have made wild claims which the material can't possibly support (the end of global warming, the death of climate science). But it is also true that the emails are very damaging. The response of the greens and most of the scientists I know is profoundly ironic, as we spend so much of our time confronting other people's denial. Pretending that this isn't a real crisis isn't going to make it go away. Nor is an attempt to justify the emails with technicalities. We'll be able to get past this only by grasping reality, apologising where appropriate and demonstrating that it cannot happen again. It is true that much of what has been revealed could be explained as the usual cut and thrust of the peer review process, exacerbated by the extraordinary pressure the scientists were facing from a denial industry determined to crush them. One of the most damaging emails was sent by the head of the climatic research unit, Phil Jones. He wrote "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" ... When it comes to his handling of Freedom of Information requests, Professor Jones might struggle even to use a technical defence. If you take the wording literally, in one case he appears to be suggesting that emails subject to a request be deleted, which means that he seems to be advocating potentially criminal activity. Even if no other message had been hacked, this would be sufficient to ensure his resignation as head of the unit. Labels: global warming Labels: global warming Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm, Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow. I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998. Thanks for the comments, Ray. Cheers And from the November 21, 2009 article: Mike, I presume congratulations are in order - so congrats etc ! Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he documents everything better this time ! And don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites - you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? - our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it.We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it - thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that. IPR should be relevant here, but I can see me getting into an argument with someone at UEA who’ll say we must adhere to it ! ... From: Phil Jones To: santer1@XXXX Subject: Re: A quick question Date: Wed Dec 10 10:14:10 2008 Ben, Haven’t got a reply from the FOI person here at UEA. So I’m not entirely confident the numbers are correct. One way of checking would be to look on CA, but I’m not doing that. I did get an email from the FOI person here early yesterday to tell me I shouldn’t be deleting emails - unless this was ‘normal’ deleting to keep emails manageable! McIntyre hasn’t paid his £10, so nothing looks likely to happen re his Data Protection Act email. Anyway requests have been of three types - observational data, paleo data and who made IPCC changes and why. Keith has got all the latter - and there have been at least 4. We made Susan aware of these - all came from David Holland. According to the FOI Commissioner’s Office, IPCC is an international organization, so is above any national FOI. Even if UEA holds anything about IPCC, we are not obliged to pass it on, unless it has anything to do with our core business - and it doesn’t! I’m sounding like Sir Humphrey here! ... From: Phil Jones Mike, Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment - minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise. I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!! Cheers Phil: ... Options appear to be: Send them the data Send them a subset removing station data from some of the countries who made us pay in the normals papers of Hulme et al. (1990s) and also any number that David can remember. This should also omit some other countries like (Australia, NZ, Canada, Antarctica). Also could extract some of the sources that Anders added in (31-38 source codes in J&M 2003). Also should remove many of the early stations that we coded up in the 1980s. Send them the raw data as is, by reconstructing it from GHCN. How could this be done? Replace all stations where the WMO ID agrees with what is in GHCN. This would be the raw data, but it would annoy them. #1047388489 #1047390562 It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice ! #1051156418 This second case gets to the crux of the matter. I suspect that deFreitas deliberately chose other referees who are members of the skeptics camp. I also suspect that he has done this on other occasions. How to deal with this is unclear, since there are a number of individuals with bona fide scientific credentials who could be used by an unscrupulous editor to ensure that ‘anti-greenhouse’ science can get through the peer review process (Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Baliunas, Soon, and so on)…. Example three is the driving out of Professor James Saiers as editor of the Geophysical Research Letters journal, which under him had published a sceptical paper by sceptics Sallie Baliunas and Wille Soon. Here’s Tom Wigley to Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann: 1106322460 txt Proving bad behavior here is very difficult. If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted. Mann writes: [snip] I’m not sure that GRL can be seen as an honest broker in these debates anymore, and it is probably best to do an end run around GRL now where possible. They have published far too many deeply flawed contrarian papers in the past year or so. There is no possible excuse for them publishing all 3 Douglass papers and the Soon et al paper. These were all pure crap. There appears to be a more fundamental problem w/ GRL now, unfortunately… Mike Mann again: Thanks Tom, Yeah, basically this is just a heads up to people that something might be up here. What a shame that would be. It’s one thing to lose “Climate Research”. We can’t afford to lose GRL. I think it would be useful if people begin to record their experiences w/ both Saiers and potentially Mackwell (I don’t know him–he would seem to be complicit w/what is going on here). If there is a clear body of evidence that something is amiss, it could be taken through the proper channels. I don’t that the entire AGU hierarchy has yet been compromised! [snip] mike Labels: global warming Labels: global warming Labels: global warming Exaggerated and inaccurate claims about the threat from global warming risk undermining efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions and contain climate change, senior scientists have told The Times. Environmental lobbyists, politicians, researchers and journalists who distort climate science to support an agenda erode public understanding and play into the hands of sceptics, according to experts including a former government chief scientist. Excessive statements about the decline of Arctic sea ice, severe weather events and the probability of extreme warming in the next century detract from the credibility of robust findings about climate change, they said. Such claims can easily be rebutted by critics of global warming science to cast doubt on the whole field. They also confuse the public about what has been established as fact, and what is conjecture. “I worry a lot that NGOs [non=governmental organisations] are very much in the habit of doing exactly that,” said Professor Sir David King, director of the Smith School for Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford, and a former government chief scientific adviser. “When people overstate happenings that aren’t necessarily climate change-related, or set up as almost certainties things that are difficult to establish scientifically, it distracts from the science we do understand. The danger is they can be accused of scaremongering. Also, we can all become described as kind of left-wing greens.” Antarctica is likely to be the world's only habitable continent by the end of this century if global warming remains unchecked, the Government's chief scientist, Professor Sir David King, said last week. Antarctica is likely to be the world's only habitable continent by the end of this century if global warming remains unchecked, the Government's chief scientist, Professor Sir David King, said last week. He said the Earth was entering the "first hot period" for 60 million years, when there was no ice on the planet and "the rest of the globe could not sustain human life". The warning - one of the starkest delivered by a top scientist - comes as ministers decide next week whether to weaken measures to cut the pollution that causes climate change, even though Tony Blair last week described the situation as "very, very critical indeed". Labels: global warming Labels: global warming 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. Labels: global warming But the sun's recent activity, or lack thereof, may be linked to the pleasant summer temperatures the midwest has enjoyed this year, said Charlie Perry, a research hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Lawrence. The sun is at a low point of a deep solar minimum in which there are few to no sunspots on its surface. In July through August, 51 consecutive days passed without a spot, one day short of tying the record of 52 days from the early 1900s. As of Sept. 15, the current solar minimum ranks third all-time in the amount of spotless days with 717 since 2004. There have been 206 spotless days in 2009, which is 14th all-time. But there are still more than 100 days left in the year, and Perry expects that number to climb. Perry, who studies sunspots and solar activity in his spare time, received an undergraduate degree in physics at Kansas State University and a Ph.D in physics and astronomy at The University of Kansas. He also has spent time as a meteorologist. A sunspot, Perry explains, is a location on the sun's surface that is cooler than the surrounding area. When there are more sunspots, the sun's surface becomes more dynamic and an opposite effect takes place, releasing more heat and energy when other parts of the sun become hotter. A solar minimum is when the amount of spots on the sun is at a low and the reverse is true for a solar maximum. The complete solar cycle is about an 11-year process. Perry says the current solar minimum could continue into 2010. "There's a fair chance it will be a cooler winter than last year," Perry said. Perry said there is a feeling from some in the scientific community the Earth may be entering into a grand minimum, which is an extended period with low numbers of sunspots that creates cooler temperatures. The year without a summer, which was 1816, was during a grand minimum in 1800 to 1830 when Europe became cooler, Perry said. Another grand minimum was in 1903 to 1913. Perry said there is anecdotal evidence the Earth's temperature may be slightly decreasing, but local weather patterns are much more affected by the jet stream than solar activity. However, Perry said snow in Buenos Aires and southern Africa, the best ski season in Australia and a cooler Arctic region are some of the anecdotal evidence for a cooling period. So, Perry said, sunspots may have a far greater impact on weather than previously thought. While that snow hasn't stuck much, Day said, it's a harbinger of things to come. Autumn officially starts tomorrow. "Fall was cancelled and we've gone straight to winter," he said as a joke. Day said there's a potential for a rain-snow mix to fall on the Front Range starting tomorrow night and into Wednesday morning. He said many people seem surprised at the sudden cold snap, but said about eight years of above-average temperatures have conditioned the public to expect summer to linger longer. "This is actually a lot closer to normal," Day said. Labels: global warming Among some global warming skeptics, there is speculation that the Sun may be on the verge of falling into an extended slumber similar to the so-called Maunder Minimum, several sunspot-scarce decades during the 17th and 18th centuries that coincided with an extended chilly period. Most solar physicists do not think anything that odd is going on with the Sun. With the recent burst of sunspots, “I don’t see we’re going into that,” Dr. Hathaway said last week. Still, something like the Dalton Minimum — two solar cycles in the early 1800s that peaked at about an average of 50 sunspots — lies in the realm of the possible, Dr. Hathaway said. (The minimums are named after scientists who helped identify them: Edward W. Maunder and John Dalton.) But the overlap of the Maunder Minimum with the Little Ice Age, when Europe experienced unusually cold weather, suggests that the solar cycle could have more subtle influences on climate. One possibility proposed a decade ago by Henrik Svensmark and other scientists at the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen looks to high-energy interstellar particles known as cosmic rays. When cosmic rays slam into the atmosphere, they break apart air molecules into ions and electrons, which causes water and sulfuric acid in the air to stick together in tiny droplets. These droplets are seeds that can grow into clouds, and clouds reflect sunlight, potentially lowering temperatures. The Sun, the Danish scientists say, influences how many cosmic rays impinge on the atmosphere and thus the number of clouds. When the Sun is frenetic, the solar wind of charged particles it spews out increases. That expands the cocoon of magnetic fields around the solar system, deflecting some of the cosmic rays. But, according to the hypothesis, when the sunspots and solar winds die down, the magnetic cocoon contracts, more cosmic rays reach Earth, more clouds form, less sunlight reaches the ground, and temperatures cool. “I think it’s an important effect,” Dr. Svensmark said, although he agrees that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that has certainly contributed to recent warming. Terry Sloan, a cosmic ray expert at the University of Lancaster in England, said if the idea were true, one would expect the cloud-generation effect to be greatest in the polar regions where the Earth’s magnetic field tends to funnel cosmic rays. “You’d expect clouds to be modulated in the same way,” Dr. Sloan said. “We can’t find any such behavior.” Still, “I would think there could well be some effect,” he said, but he thought the effect was probably small. Dr. Sloan’s findings indicate that the cosmic rays could at most account for 20 percent of the warming of recent years. Labels: global warming SINGAPORE (Reuters) - A dramatic warming of the planet 55 million years ago cannot be solely explained by a surge in carbon dioxide levels, a study shows, highlighting gaps in scientists' understanding of impacts from rapid climate change. During an event called the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, global temperatures rose between 5 and 9 degrees Celsius within several thousand years. The world at that time was already warmer than now with no surface ice. "We now believe that the CO2 did not cause all the warming, that there were additional factors," said Richard Zeebe, an oceanographer with the University of Hawaii at Manoa. "There may have been an initial trigger," he told Reuters on Wednesday from Hawaii. This could be a deep ocean warming that caused a catastrophic release of methane from hydrate deposits under the seabed. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas but much of it is oxidised into CO2 when it is released from hydrate deposits. Zeebe and his colleagues estimated the amount of CO2 released during the Palaeocene-Eocene event by studying sediment cores from seabeds around the globe. Their study is published in the latest issue of Nature Geoscience. Labels: global warming Niwa senior climate scientist Georgina Griffiths said May "broke records from one end of the country to the other - it was the coldest May on record", and there was nothing much to toast in the South Wairarapa wine village, which registered 69 percent of normal sunshine hours for May - the lowest figure for the town since records began. "In May, Martinborough was gray, gloomy and depressing," she said. "In June, the east coast strips of both islands were gloomy while sun shone around the rest of the country, like Hamilton which had record sunshine hours," Ms Griffiths said. Below normal June sunshine (75 - 90 percent of normal) blighted coastal Otago, coastal Canterbury and the East Cape, she said. It was wet too with double the normal rainfall for May (about 200 percent of normal) in Wairarapa, Canterbury and Otago while much of Northland, Auckland, Wellington and Southland got at least 150 percent of normal May rainfall. June didn't fare much better as Ngawi racked up a record low topping the mercury at just 6.6C on June 16 - the lowest daily maximum temperature on the books. June 16 also marked the beginning of a 10-day anticyclone - a high that hung round the country with scant wind and clear skies; "all ingredients in a recipe for frost", Ms Griffiths said. Wairarapa, alongside most of the lower North Island, experienced the second-coldest June in recorded history, with monitoring equipment in Ngawi and Martinborough clocking average maximum daytime temperatures of 11.6C and 11.9C respectively. It's an unusually cool morning, as temperatures are near record-breaking lows for today's date, July 10. At Sikorsky Memorial Airport, the early morning low was 55, just one degree above the record, set in 1983. At Danbury Municipal Airport, the low was 50, three degrees above the record low for the date, set in 1953. A record was broken at Westchester County Airport -- the closest official weather station to Stamford and Greenwich. The low there this morning was 55 degrees, shattering the former record low of 60, also set in 1953. At Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks, the early morning low was 51 today, 2 degrees above the record of 49, set in 1963. MILWAUKEE - July, like March, has come in like a lion. Today's high temperature was 63 degrees, missing by a single degree the all-time record for coldest high on July 1st. "The record low high temperature is 62 degrees, set in 1986 and 1876," said Storm Team 4caster Brian Gotter. "We got about as close as we could, but there will be no white-out taken to the record books today." Labels: global warming
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Another Global Warming Hearing Canceled
Yup! The snowstorm shut down D.C., so the global warming hearings had to be canceled.
Unfortunately, this really is a religion. To paraphrase Voltaire, global warming will cease to be a theory when the last environmentalist is eaten by a polar bear in Los Angeles.
An Article I Couldn't Sell
Climate Change
Back when I was an undergraduate, almost twenty years ago, I was contemplating that my doctoral dissertation in history would be something related to climate change and industrialization. In particular, I had long been curious about the coincidence of the Maunder Minimum, the decline of the Little Ice Age, and the rise of the Industrial Revolution.
The rise of the Little Ice Age coincided with the collapse of the Viking settlements in North America and Greenland, the decline of the Mississippian Mound Builder civilization, the collapse of the Anasazi culture in the Southwest, and the sudden arrival of the Aztecs from the Southwest into the Valley of Mexico. The expansion of Genghis Khan into Asia is also about the same period. The sudden cooling associated with the Little Ice Age—and the corresponding changes in rainfall—might well explain this curious coincidence of cultural transformations starting in the 1200s around the globe.
I have therefore always been a bit surprised at how rapidly the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hypothesis went from “possible” to “no doubts allowed.” I have sufficient awareness of the history of climate change and its effects on human beings to wonder if a solar cycle induced warming trend caused the Industrial Revolution—not the other way around. A warming climate in Britain, by increasing crop yields, might have allowed more leisure time for troublemakers like Newcomen and Watt to invent the steam engine, which led directly to increased utilization of coal and other fossil fuels.
I have long suspected that the AGW believers were driven by a certain level of self-satisfied certitude that prevented them from looking seriously enough at alternative models. While I had my suspicions about the politicians involved in this, I assumed that most of the scientists were pawns in a larger game intended to benefit financial speculators in carbon credit trading.
After reading this dump of documents, I’m much less prepared to accept them as pawns. I started picking emails at random from the CRU dump--and I'm astonished at how McCarthyite some of it is. For example, this email from Tom Wigley to Rick Piltz suggesting that someone should work on getting the University of Wisconsin to reassess the granting of a Ph.D. to a scientist who Wigley decided was a problem for the true faith:You may be interesting in this snippet of information about Pat Michaels. Perhaps the University of Wisconsin ought to open up a public comment period to decide whether Pat Michaels, PhD needs re-assessing? “Michaels' PhD … dealt with statistical (regression-based) modeling of crop-climate relationships. In his thesis, Michaels claims that his statistical model showed that weather/climate variations could explain 95% of the inter-annual variability in crop yields. Had this been correct, it would have been a remarkable results. Certainly, it was at odds with all previous studies of crop-climate relationships, which generally showed that weather/climate could only explain about 50% of inter-annual yield variability.
Even assuming that Wigley is correct, and Michaels’ doctoral work was flawed, Wigley admits that at the time this was “a common way to account for the effects of changing technology on yield.” How could this be done this out of “ignorance,” while Wigley also admits that it was common practice at the time? Trying to get someone's Ph.D. revoked under such conditions is positively McCarthyite—and really shows how intent Wigley was on trying to destroy Michaels’ livelihood and standing as a scientist.
In Michaels' regressions he included a trend term. This was at the time a common way to account for the effects of changing technology on yield. … In other words, Michaels' claim that weather/climate explains 95% of the variability is completely bogus.
Apparently, none of Michaels' thesis examiners noticed this. We are left with wondering whether this was deliberate misrepresentation by Michaels, or whether it was simply ignorance.
Here are two other emails that together really impress me with their dishonesty. In a September 29, 2009 email from Michael Mann at PSU to Andrew Revkin, a New York Times environmental reporter, Mann says: “Skepticism is essential for the functioning of science. It yields an erratic path towards eventual truth. But legitimate scientific skepticism is exercised through formal scientific circles, in particular the peer review process. A necessary though not in general sufficient condition for taking a scientific criticism seriously is that it has passed through the legitimate scientific peer review process. those such as McIntyre who operate almost entirely outside of this system are not to be trusted.”
And yet on July 8, 2004, Phil Jones wrote to Michael Mann: “The other paper by MM is just garbage - as you knew. De Freitas again. Pielke is also losing all credibility as well by replying to the mad Finn as well - frequently as I see it. I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !”
So those who operate outside the peer review process are not to be trusted—and if need be, Professor Phil Jones will change the definition of peer-reviewed literature to keep peer reviewed papers from being considered. Perhaps Professor Mann responded to Professor Jones with an indignant note about the importance of the “legitimate scientific peer review process” and it just wasn’t included in this dump—but the overall tone of many of these emails is the scientific equivalent of Chicago politics.
The Gore Effect Again & The Invention of Chimneys
From the December 22, 2009 Guardian:
I'm reading Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror at the moment, and she mentions that the chimney was invented in the 11th century, and ascribes it to the cooling that presaged the Little Ice Age. I found that claim quite astonishing, so I did a little digging. She's overstated it, but not by much.
Sir William Smith's View of the State of Europe During the Middle Ages (1888) discusses that there is no evidence of chimneys in England "prior to the twelfth century." John E. Crowley's The Invention of Comfort (2003) reports that while chimneys were used in industrial applications in Roman times, they were not used for household heating. A hole in the roof was sufficiently efficient for that purpose. Various motivations are ascribed to this--but the obvious one is that it suddenly got very cold on a consistent basis in the twelfth century. This account from 1877 asserts:The chimney for carrying off the smoke of a house is of modern invention. It was not introduced into England before the twelfth, and into Italy in the thirteenth century. Even in the seventeenth century throughout England the houses of the well-to-do yeomen were without chimneys.
Considering the role that Italian fashion played in the Renaissance--and generally the movement of culture and refinement northward--I'm inclined to think that Tuchman has it right: chimneys were a response to increased cold, making the traditional hole in the ceiling approach inadequate.
CFLs Again
I've heard from a lot of readers with their disappointments about CFLs. One reader had two CFLs explode in indoor settings--which is really quite scary, when think about the fact that they contain mercury vapor. Several readers have indicated that when used in frequent on and off settings, the lifetime is quite disappointing--no better than the dramatically cheaper incandescent bulbs that they replaced. In short, if you are environmentally responsible, turning off lights when not in use--you will pay a pretty penny for doing so.
Another reader tells me that his Home Depot accepts dead CFLs for recycling. I should hope so! I'll find out if that is true here as well.
Finally, one reader mentioned this tragedy going on in China:
And all so that we can prevent global warming that may or may not be happening, and may or may not be partially man's doing! At least partly this push towards CFLs is because the Chinese government seems to own the Democratic Party. I suspect that they pushed for the CFL requirement in the EU through their puppets there as well.
Pasteurized Data
All this talk about how the CRU "homogenized" the data to remove inconsistencies brought forward a comment from a reader. He pointed out that the data wasn't just homogenized; it was also pasteurized: heat was added until the data was completely sterile!
Suns Behaving Badly
I've mentioned before that there is some question about whether solar cycle changes might explain some, most, or even all of the supposed global warming. As a direct effect, no, but one theory is that changes in solar output affect cosmic ray flux, which influences cloud formation-and so an indirect effect. (Look up the history of how cloud chambers were used for analyzing output from atom smashers.) This might explain the apparent warming on Mars and Neptune roughly coincident with Earth warming in recent years.
Over at Watts Up With That? there is a chart showing changes in solar geomagnetic activity that somewhat fits with the cooling that has apparently been underway the last few years.
Cold weather would seem to fit this change in behavior. That it was 9 degrees Fahrenheit when I drove down the mailbox this morning at 10:30 AM is, of course, just coincidence!
Raw Vs. Homogenized Data
Willis Eschenbach over at Watts Up With That? has a detailed examination of how the raw data from Australian temperature reporting stations was massaged. The raw data actually shows a substantial cooling over the last century. Eschenbach then explains the theory behind adjusting the raw data to correct for movement of weather stations, loss of data, etc.--and why CRU's "adjustments" seem arbitrary and intended more to fit what they wanted to find, than based on anything that qualifies as science. It's a long and detailed discussion which I am reluctant to quote in fragments. But go read it, and see why many people are more than a little skeptical that we're being told the truth.
Corruptocrats At Copenhagen
The December 8, 2009 Guardian (a leftwing British newspaper) has a disturbing report of what is going to disrupt Copenhagen--and it isn't necessarily the Climategate scandal:
Obama and friends talk progressive leftist; but they do corrupt fatcat politics in a way that Republicans find outrageous or embarrassing.
The Role of Oil Companies In Funding Climate Skepticism
Every time I point to the scientists like Professor Lindzen at MIT who are skeptical, I hear the claim that the oil companies and other fossil fuel firms are funding the climate skeptics--and therefore we don't have to listen to those scientists, or at least we don't have to take them seriously. So what a surprise! Guess who provided funding to the AGW crowd? From a July 5, 2000 email in the CRU dump:From: "Mick Kelly"
(Thanks to Watts Up With That? for the pointer.)
To: m.hulme@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Subject: Shell
Date: Wed, 05 Jul 2000 13:31:00 +0100
Reply-to: m.kelly@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Cc: t.oriordan@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, t.o'riordan@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Mike
Had a very good meeting with Shell yesterday. Only a minor part of the agenda, but I expect they will accept an invitation to act as a strategic partner and will contribute to a studentship fund though under certain conditions. I now have to wait for the top-level soundings at their end after the meeting to result in a response. We, however, have to discuss asap what a strategic partnership means, what a studentship fund is, etc, etc. By email? In person?
I hear that Shell's name came up at the TC meeting. I'm ccing this to Tim who I think was involved in that discussion so all concerned know not to make an independent approach at this stage without consulting me! I'm talking to Shell International's climate change team but this approach will do equally for the new foundation as it's only one step or so off Shell's equivalent of a board level. I do know a little about the Fdn and what kind of projects they are looking for. It could be relevant for the new building, incidentally, though opinions are mixed as to whether it's within the remit.
Regards
Mick
______________________________________________
Mick Kelly Climatic Research Unit
University of East Anglia Norwich NR4 7TJ
United Kingdom
Tel: 44-1603-592091 Fax: 44-1603-507784
Email: m.kelly@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Web: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/tiempo/
______________________________________________
There is a long history of corporations promoting governmental regulation ostensibly for the public good--but really, because they have figured out how to use regulation to injure smaller, less able or less connected competitors. See Gabriel Kolko's The Triumph of Conservatism for a detailed account of how Progressive Era federal regulation of business was, in almost every case, driven by Big Business interests for their own economic benefit, or to prevent more onerous state or local regulation.
It may be that fossil fuel companies bought into this stuff because they figured it was better to be in on it early, and try to manipulate the resulting process. Or perhaps they figured that, like some big companies, if you promote all the Politically Correct stuff, such as gay pride parades, then you get cover for abusing the rest of your workforce.
Environmental Hypocrisy
Instapundit likes to say "I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who tell me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis." And he links to articles like this one from the December 5, 2009 Telegraph:
And this article from the December 6, 2009 Digital Journal:For the delegates to the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit, inconvenient truths abound. Not the least of which is the prediction that attendees will generate a carbon footprint equal to all of Morocco's for 2006.
Look, I'm sure that many of the climate warming peasants really believe what the priests, bishops, archbishops, cardinals, and even Pope Gore himself are saying about this. But doesn't it bother you that the clergy of the Church of Global Warming aren't prepared to live by the rules that they tell their parishioners to follow? When are you going to wake up, and realize that the "experts" going to these events are the equivalent of clergymen who preach about sexual purity--and then molest the altar boys?
...
In all, the UN estimates that the carbon footprint of the Carbonhagen Slummit should be roughly 40,584 tons of carbon-related emissions, or approximately the entire carbon output of the nation of Morocco for all of 2006. That comes out to 100,083.5 dead polar bears per 400kg of carbon emissions. Are there even that many polar bears on Planet Earth? Won't be by Wednesday! And all that's not even counting all the limos being driven to Carbonhagen from all over Europe, or all the CO2 about to be spewed by 16,500 blowhards.
When one Climate Slummit delegate was asked why they didn't just videoconference the whole thing for 'green' reasons, he replied that there was no substitute for personal contact. Or flying in style in private jets. Or riding in style in limos. Or the free prostitutes. Or caviar wedges you just can't eat through a TV screen. Actually, the delegate just mentioned the personal contact thing. I threw the rest in randomly because it seems to fit the template for Global Warming science itself, as exposed through ClimateGate. Just throw in whatever you see fit. Truth is not a factor. Just the outcome. In fact, the only thing I see missing from the big Carbonhagen Slummit picture are any of the 31,000 skeptical scientists. I'm sure it's just coincidence.
Maybe This Is Just Clumsy Writing
It's a June 24, 2003 email from the CRU archive:From: "Mick Kelly"
Why would you need money to cover the costs of a trip that wasn't made? And the concern that NOAA (that's a U.S. government agency) might become "suspicious" certainly has a whiff of something improper going on.
To: Nguyen Huu Ninh (cered@xxxxxxxxx.xxx)
Subject: NOAA funding
Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 14:17:15 +0000
----boundary-LibPST-iamunique-1131694944_-_-
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Ninh
NOAA want to give us more money for the El Nino work with IGCN.
How much do we have left from the last budget? I reckon most has been spent but we need to show some left to cover the costs of the trip Roger didn't make and also the fees/equipment/computer money we haven't spent otherwise NOAA will be suspicious.
Politically this money may have to go through Simon's institute but there overhead rate is high so maybe not!
Best wishes
Mick [emphasis added]
UPDATE: A reader suggests that the NOAA funding might have been specifically for certain categories of activities, and CRU had used the money as some general purpose funding. That's a very easy mistake to make, and perhaps indicative of careless accounting as opposed to intentional fraud.
2035 vs. 2350
An amusing example of what happens when you get the digits in the wrong sequence.
The Raw Data
I mentioned a few days ago a Times article quoting CRU scientists that they had lost much of the raw temperature data upon which their house of cards is based. I received an email full of foul language and personal insults calling me a liar, and pointing to this. (I expect foul language and rage from environmentalists. They seem to have trouble remaining calm.)
It turns out that while CRU discarded some of the raw data, it is claimed that the original data is still out there:[Response: No. The original data is curated at the met services where it originated. - gavin]
What this means is that with a bit of effort (probably a lot of effort), you could request all of the raw data from the various national meteorological services and reconstruct what CRU started from. But without a comprehensive list of what datasets were originally in CRU's raw data, you wouldn't get the same results. The problem of inability to recreate the massaged data because of discrepancies and deficiencies in the programs mentioned in the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file, of course, would be an issue.
UPDATE: It may not help to ask for the raw data, unless you do it behind their backs. Lord Monckton's report (starting at p. 31) points out that New Zealand's government published data showing rising temperatures over the last century--but when some troublemaker actually downloaded the data from their website, it turned out that the rising temperatures weren't in the raw data at all. The New Zealand government had "adjusted" the raw data before producing their own claims, and refuses to explain the rationale for the adjustments.
Not Everything That Looks Bad Is Bad
A number of people have made much of this code fragment from the CRU software:;
Eric S. Raymond over at Armed and Dangerous sees this as prima facie evidence of intentional fraud. Some of the responses to his argument make the claim that this is actually an adjustment to bring Maximum Latewood Density measures into conformity with known thermometer readings for recent decades. This is a proxy for temperature derived from measuring tree growth characteristics--and it might be a legitimate method for correcting this data to more correctly match the temperature data. It is rather curious that the adjustments down match the last peak global temperatures, in the 1930s, but then suddenly start up at the time when the global warmists claim that--surprise, surprise--it was getting hotter because of mankind's actions.
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,- 0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,’Oooops!’
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)
If this was a legitimate correction, you would hope for a better comment than "Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!" Especially since some of the other emails from the true believers acknowledge that they are having a problem with recent temperature declines not matching their elegant models. Once you demonstrate that you can't be trusted to tell the truth, everything--even the most innocent statements--suddenly get a lot more scrutiny than they did before.
The Dishonesty of This Crowd
In an September 29, 2009 email from Michael Mann at PSU to Andrew Revkin, a New York Times environmental reporter, Mann says:Skepticism is essential for the functioning of science. It yields an erratic path towards eventual truth. But legitimate scientific skepticism is exercised through formal scientific circles, in particular the peer review process. A necessary though not in general sufficient condition for taking a scientific criticism seriously is that it has passed through the legitimate scientific peer review process. those such as McIntyre who operate almost entirely outside of this system are not to be trusted.
And yet on July 8, 2004, Phil Jones wrote to Michael Mann:The other paper by MM is just garbage - as you knew. De Freitas again. Pielke is also losing all credibility as well by replying to the mad Finn as well - frequently as I see it. I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !
So those who operate outside the peer review process are not to be trusted--and if need be, they will change the definition of peer-review literature to keep peer reviewed papers from being included.
Positively Stalinist
I've started picking stuff at random from the CRU dump--and I'm astonished at how Stalinist it is. For example, this email from Tom Wigley to Rick Piltz suggesting that someone should work on getting the University of Wisconsin to reassess the granting of a Ph.D. to a scientist who Tom Wigley decided was a problem for their global warming cause:You may be interesting in this snippet of information about
Now, even if we assume that Wigley is correct, and Michaels' doctoral work was flawed, Wigley is admitting that this was at the time "a common way to account for the effects of changing technology on yield." Wigley claims that Michaels' might have done this out of "ignorance," while also admitting that it was common practice at the time. If it was common practice, then how does it qualify as "ignorance"?
Pat Michaels. Perhaps the University of Wisconsin ought to
open up a public comment period to decide whether Pat Michaels,
PhD needs re-assessing?
Michaels' PhD was, I believe, supervised by Reid Bryson. It dealt
with statistical (regression-based) modeling of crop-climate
relationships. In his thesis, Michaels claims that his statistical
model showed that weather/climate variations could explain 95%
of the inter-annual variability in crop yields. Had this been
correct, it would have been a remarkable results. Certainly, it
was at odds with all previous studies of crop-climate relationships,
which generally showed that weather/climate could only explain about
50% of inter-annual yield variability.
How did result come about? The answer is simple. In Michaels'
regressions he included a trend term. This was at the time a common
way to account for the effects of changing technology on yield. It
turns out that the trend term accounts for 90% of the variability,
so that, in Michaels' regressions, weather/climate explains just 5
of the remaining 10%. In other words, Michaels' claim that
weather/climate explains 95% of the variability is completely
bogus.
Apparently, none of Michaels' thesis examiners noticed this. We
are left with wondering whether this was deliberate misrepresentation
by Michaels, or whether it was simply ignorance.
Trying to get someone's Ph.D. revoked under such conditions is positively Stalinist. Those who want to pretend that there's nothing to this scandal are beginning to look positively delusional.
The Scale of This Fraud....
Douglas J. Keenan writes about what happened when he had a paper published pointing out that "some important research relied upon by the IPCC (for the treatment of urbanization effects) was fraudulent." And what happened as a result?
Read the discussion between Phil Jones and Tom Wigley about this, in which Wigley admits:Seems to me that Keenan has a valid point. The statements in the papers
And Jones says to "keep quiet." Jones knew that Keenan was correct about this--but keeping the fraud going took precedence.
that he quotes seem to be incorrect statements, and that someone (WCW
at the very least) must have known at the time that they were incorrect.
The global warming believers can keep trying to spin this, but these are not the actions or statements of scientists trying to find truth.
This Global Warming Scandal
It just keeps getting worse. Along with statements by the scientists that strongly suggest intentional efforts to suppress alternative points of view and manipulation of the data to get the "right" results, the programs actually used to convert the raw data have a lot of very serious problems. Some of these problems are sloppy programming that raises serious questions as to whether the outputs can be trusted. The comments at Volokh Conspiracy are quite enlightening:
The defenses of this bad programming are enough to make me wonder if I was some sort of weirdo is how I do my job (or did my job, back when I had one):
Perhaps if I had not written defensive code that checked inputs for validity, I would still be employed writing bad code? Or are the defenses of this absurdity just ad hoc, to make the Climate "Research" Unit look good?
Along with bad programming without dishonest intent, there seems to be dishonest intent as well. John Lott over at Fox News discusses this problem:But the CRU’s temperature data and all of the research done with it are now in question. The leaked e-mails show that the scientists at the CRU don’t know how their data was put together. CRU took individual temperature readings at individual stations and averaged the information out to produce temperature readings over larger areas. The problem comes in how they did the averaging. One of the leaked documents states that “our flagship gridded data product is produced by [a method that] renders the station counts totally meaningless” and “so, we can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!” There were also significant coding errors in the data. Weather stations that are claimed to exist in Canada aren’t there -- leading one memo to speculate that the stations “were even invented somewhere other than Canada!”
Yet as Lott points out, the vast majority of American news media are barely covering this story, if they are covering it at all.
The computer code used to create the data the CRU has used contains programmer notes that indicate that the aggregated data were constructed to show an increase in temperatures. The programmer notes include: “Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!” and "Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend -- so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!" The programmers apparently had to try at least a couple of adjustments before they could get their aggregated data to show an increase in temperatures.
All this could in theory be correctable by going back and starting from scratch with the original “raw” data, but the CRU apparently threw out much of the data used to create their temperature measures. We now only have the temperature measures that they created.
UPDATE: For those who insist that this is a tempest in a teapot--even George Monbiot, one of the true believers in AGW, is admitting that the problem is substantial, and that the refusal of a lot of other AGW true believers to admit that the problem is real is a form of a denialism. From the November 25, 2009 Guardian:
Now, Monbiot's defense is that the denialists are even less honest. And this justifies the misbehavior we see in the CRU's emails how?
What's also important is to understand how thoroughly non-reproducible the "results" of all this work really is. Some poor programmer named Harry put a very detailed description of his attempts to recreate the temperature data sets in a document called HARRY_READ_ME.txt. (The use of file names with READ_ME or some variant by programmers documenting what they have found is quite common.) If you are a programmer, you will read through this, and sympathize with Harry--but you will also be horrified at how irreproducible the results were of running various programs on existing data sets. Here's one small example:..not good! Tried recompiling for uealogin1.. AARGGHHH!!! Tim's
So how did this code work the first time that they created the data? Different hardware and compiler, probably, handled floating point overflow correctly--or the floating point exception simply didn't get reported. So how accurate was the data? Poor Harry also reports on his considerable efforts to recreate some of the data files upon which this whole global warming claim is largely based--and his attempts to verify that running one of these conversion programs actually can recreate the data files that they are current using:
code is not 'good' enough for bloody Sun!! Pages of warnings and
27 errors! (full results in 'anomdtb.uealogin1.compile.results').
17. Inserted debug statements into anomdtb.f90, discovered that
a sum-of-squared variable is becoming very, very negative! Key
output from the debug statements:
OpEn= 16.00, OpTotSq= 4142182.00, OpTot= 7126.00
DataA val = 93, OpTotSq= 8649.00
DataA val = 172, OpTotSq= 38233.00
DataA val = 950, OpTotSq= 940733.00
DataA val = 797, OpTotSq= 1575942.00
DataA val = 293, OpTotSq= 1661791.00
DataA val = 83, OpTotSq= 1668680.00
DataA val = 860, OpTotSq= 2408280.00
DataA val = 222, OpTotSq= 2457564.00
DataA val = 452, OpTotSq= 2661868.00
DataA val = 561, OpTotSq= 2976589.00
DataA val = 49920, OpTotSq=-1799984256.00
DataA val = 547, OpTotSq=-1799684992.00
DataA val = 672, OpTotSq=-1799233408.00
DataA val = 710, OpTotSq=-1798729344.00
DataA val = 211, OpTotSq=-1798684800.00
DataA val = 403, OpTotSq=-1798522368.00
OpEn= 16.00, OpTotSq=-1798522368.00, OpTot=56946.00
forrtl: error (75): floating point exception
IOT trap (core dumped)
..so the data value is unbfeasibly large, but why does the
sum-of-squares parameter OpTotSq go negative?!!
Probable answer: the high value is pushing beyond the single-
precision default for Fortran reals?Welcome to the GRIM Comparer
Please enter the first grim file (must be complete!): cru_ts_2_10.1961-1970.tmp
Please enter the second grim file (may be incomplete): glo2grim1.out
File glo2grim1.out terminated prematurely after 4037 records.
SUMMARY FROM GRIMCMP
Files compared:
1. cru_ts_2_10.1961-1970.tmp
2. glo2grim1.out
Total Cells Compared 4037
Total 100% Matches 0
Cells with Corr. == 1.00 0 ( 0.0%)
Cells with 0.90<=Corr<=0.99 3858 (95.6%) Cells with 0.80<=Corr<=0.89 119 ( 2.9%) Cells with 0.70<=Corr<=0.79 25 ( 0.6%) ..which is good news! Not brilliant because the data should be identical.. but good because the correlations are so high! This could be a result of my mis-setting of the parameters on Tim's programs (although I have followed his recommendations wherever possible), or it could be a result of Tim using the Beowulf 1 cluster for the f90 work. Beowulf 1 is now integrated in to the latest Beowulf cluster so it may not be practical to test that theory.
Now, getting pretty close is a good thing--but it isn't confidence inspiring that 95.6% of the cells are 90% to 99% correct--and 90% is likely to exceed by many times the supposed global warming. Now, if the errors are randomly distributed, it might not much matter--but I thought that what separated science from humanities is the ability to do mathematical verification.
Civilizational Declines During The Little Ice Age
The Little Ice Age is generally considered to take place between 1250 and 1850 AD. The AGW believers generally deny that the Little Ice Age was global, arguing that it was European. I've long thought it curious that non-European civilizations suddenly decline or even collapse at about the same time. For example, from reading works such as this, it appears that the Mississippian Moundbuilder civilization went into decline between 1200 and 1500--and thus before European contact can explain it. I also notice that this decline seems to be associated with substantial nutritional problems in the skeletons that have been recovered from the decline period. Population decline was already well under way when Columbus arrived, giving smallpox and measles to the Indians, who returned the favor with what now appears to have been an especially virulent strain of syphilis.
There seems to be considerable debate about whether droughts in the 1100s caused the decline of the Anasazi culture, or whether the decline is in the 1200s. This article argues for the second half of the 1200s as drought periods that ended the Anasazi culture--and seems to argue that the Mississippian Moundbuilder culture was impacted by these same weather pattern changes. At about this same time, in the mid-1200s, the Aztecs arrive from the Southwest into the Valley of Mexico (to the severe disadvantage of the locals).
While not everyone experienced the climate change in the same way, that North America was suffering a dramatic transformation in the same half century seems to argue that the Little Ice Age was global--not specific to Europe.
The Global Warming Fraud
An interesting set of articles from the November 21, 2009 and November 22, 2009 Australian Herald Sun. It includes a number of emails from Professor Phil Jones who heads Britain's Climate Research Unit that demonstrate that he was intentionally fiddling with data to get the "right" results:From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@XXXX, mhughes@XXXX
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@XXX.osborn@XXXX
Phil
Subject: IPCC & FOI
Date: Thu May 29 11:04:11 2008
These are not the actions of someone who believes that the data demonstrates global warming. These are the actions of someone who is engaged in a criminal enterprise.
Fraud is widespread in the academic community. Michael Bellesiles and Ward Churchill are the tip of the iceberg.
UPDATE: This November 22, 2009 article pretty conclusively demonstrates the type of intellectual fraud going on in the global warming community, with this set of emails:
And:
This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?
I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor…
GRL is Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union--and not a trivial journal in any way. Yes, it was very important to get people fired there.
Hi Malcolm,
Save The Maldives!
Before they go under water! But there is a little problem with the "rising sea levels will drown sea level countries." From the March 28, 2009 London Telegraph:But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.
Despite fluctuations down as well as up, "the sea is not rising," he says. "It hasn't risen in 50 years." If there is any rise this century it will "not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm". And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by
Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.
The reason why Dr Mörner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on "going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world".
When running the International Commission on Sea Level Change, he launched a special project on the Maldives, whose leaders have for 20 years been calling for vast sums of international aid to stave off disaster. Six times he and his expert team visited the islands, to confirm that the sea has not risen for half a century. Before announcing his findings, he offered to show the inhabitants a film explaining why they had nothing to worry about. The government refused to let it be shown.
Similarly in Tuvalu, where local leaders have been calling for the inhabitants to be evacuated for 20 years, the sea has if anything dropped in recent decades. The only evidence the scaremongers can cite is based on the fact that extracting groundwater for pineapple growing has allowed seawater to seep in to replace it. Meanwhile, Venice has been sinking rather than the Adriatic rising, says Dr Mörner.
One of his most shocking discoveries was why the IPCC has been able to show sea levels rising by 2.3mm a year. Until 2003, even its own satellite-based evidence showed no upward trend. But suddenly the graph tilted upwards because the IPCC's favoured experts had drawn on the finding of a single tide-gauge in Hong Kong harbour showing a 2.3mm rise. The entire global sea-level projection was then adjusted upwards by a "corrective factor" of 2.3mm, because, as the IPCC scientists admitted, they "needed to show a trend".
When I spoke to Dr Mörner last week, he expressed his continuing dismay at how the IPCC has fed the scare on this crucial issue. When asked to act as an "expert reviewer" on the IPCC's last two reports, he was "astonished to find that not one of their 22 contributing authors on sea levels was a sea level specialist: not one". Yet the results of all this "deliberate ignorance" and reliance on rigged computer models have become the most powerful single driver of the entire warmist hysteria.
3rd Coldest October on Record
NOAA is reporting that October was nationally the 3rd coldest October since national records start in 1895:Temperature Highlights - October
Now, Alaska was warmer than average, with the 10th highest temperature since records there start in 1918. But it turns out that you can plot national temperature averages for year to date here. There's definitely a warming trend from 1895 to the 1930s, then cooling until 1970, then warming until 1998--and now cooling again. If greenhouse gases were the major determinant of global temperatures, it is a bit odd that they fell for forty years--at a time when industrialization was dramatic, and have started to fall again--in spite of no successful effort to control greenhouse gases.
It could well be that manmade greenhouse gases are contributing to warming, but that other phenomena are playing a larger role. Those other phenomena would seem to be considerably more powerful than manmade greenhouse gases, if they successfully overwhelmed manmade greenhouse gases 1930-70, and 2000-09. That doesn't mean that manmade greenhouse gases aren't a factor, and perhaps even a serious concern. But the popular attempts to overstate the criticality of manmade greenhouse gases smell more like an attempt at justifying control and enriching the already obscenely rich (like Al Gore) than something that requires immediate action.
Finally: AGW Scientists Admit That There's Some Exaggeration Going On
From the October 30, 2009 Times of London:
One of the experts warning about the importance of not engaging in exaggeration is Professor David King:
So go back to the May 2, 2004 Independent, and what was King saying?
I'm so glad that the experts are counseling against exaggeration and hysterics...now. I wonder how much longer it is going to take before they start arguing, "Well, we don't know for sure what is going to happen, but perhaps we should be cautious."
The Coming Ice Age
I mentioned several years ago the last time the mainstream media were hyping climate change--when they were scared witless of the coming ice age--of which this 1975 Newsweek article is a fine example. Here's another amusing example, from 1977.
In Search Of... was an interesting series narrated by Leonard Nimoy. I often found myself a little uncomfortable with its willingness to listen to kooks--but this episode about the coming ice age is a reminder that not that long ago, all sorts of people who today are screeching about global warming were screeching about the need to "do something" about the coming ice age.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. When the proposed solutions are extraordinarily expensive (in money, in rights, in giving control of people's lives to others), the most prudent action is to wait for these extraordinary claims to be proved.
BBC On Global Warming--And The Lack Thereof
From October 9, 2009 BBC:
The rest of the article is making excuses for why maybe the people that made all these predictions--and were wrong--maybe really are right, after all. But don't let their lack of success--or the success of the skeptics in correctly predicting this--make you in anyway skeptical of the anthropogenic global warming theory.
Sunspots
This September 21, 2009 Topeka Capital-Journal article again mentions the near record low sunspot numbers and its likely effects on climate:
I'm sure the eco-worshipers will point out that Perry is a hydrologist, not a climatologist, so we can ignore his Ph.D. in physics and astronomy, and therefore, everything he says is wrong.
The weather here has gone from sometimes unpleasantly warm to "is it time to turn the heater back on again?" quite suddenly. And others are noticing this as well, as this September 21, 2009 Coloradan report tells us:Southern Wyoming this morning has already seen upward of 2 inches of snow, said Don Day Jr. of DayWeather, the Coloradoan's weather service. Parts of Larimer County above 7,500 feet saw snow this morning, including Red Feather Lakes and Glacier View Meadows.
Here's a pretty amazing web site concerning the role that angular momentum changes caused by planetary positions may have on solar cycles--the Landcheidt Cycle. This site has graphs showing correlation of C-14 and Be-10 production, which matters because C-14 production is a proxy for solar output. (As solar output increases, more cosmic rays are prevented from reaching Earth's upper atmosphere, reducing C-14 production.)
A Shockingly Fair Article About Global Warming in the New York Times
This July 20, 2009 article admits that there are real scientists (not just those slaves to Exxon!) who believe that solar cycle changes play at least some part in the global warming that happened at the close of the 20th century (and which is now curiously disappearing):
And they even interviewed Henrik Svensmark:
Of course, they interviewed a cosmic ray expert who disagrees--but even his disagreement admits that there might be some connection:
Hmmm. Considering how poor the data is on global warming, it makes you wonder what's actually left if even 20% of the difference is solar cycle.
I Think There's Still Some Gaps In The Science
From July 15, 2009 Reuters:
Of course, the article goes on to say, "See? We don't really understand this stuff, so we should be all very, very worried about global warming!"
And The Reason For The Cap-And-Trade Bill Was?
From the July 10, 2009 Wairarapa [New Zealand] Times-Age:
From the July 10, 2009 Connecticut Post:
From the July 1, 2009 channel 4 in Milwaukee:
From July 10, 2009 WCVB channel 5 in Boston:BOSTON -- If you think you've never seen such a cool start to the summer, you are right: It's been more than 100 years since Boston has been this cold in June.
For the period of June 1 through July 8, Boston, Providence and Worcester have had the coolest high temperature on record, according to StormTeam 5's JC Monahan.
The average high temperature for Boston for that time period was 69.7 degrees. That tied the record set in 1903. In Worcester, the average was 69.3 degrees -- the coolest since 1972, and Providence's average high was 72.3 degrees -- the coolest since 1916.
