Global Warming Hype

I mentioned a few days ago an outstanding documentary about the global warming swindle. I did a little digging--and found that one of the key points of that documentary, that there is strong evidence that solar activity changes, by altering cosmic ray flux, which changes the amount of cloud cover--plays a substantial role in altering temperatures here on Earth. I knew that there were scientific papers published about this--but I had no idea how many. Here are some excerpts and abstracts that I found with this search string in scholar.google.com:

"Cosmic Rays, Clouds, and Climate," Space Science Reviews, November, 2000:

A correlation between a global average of low cloud cover and the flux of cosmic rays incident in the atmosphere has been observed during the last solar cycle. The ionising potential of Earth bound cosmic rays are modulated by the state of the heliosphere, while clouds play an important role in the Earth''s radiation budget through trapping outgoing radiation and reflecting incoming radiation. If a physical link between these two features can be established, it would provide a mechanism linking solar activity and Earth''s climate. Recent satellite observations have further revealed a correlation between cosmic ray flux and low cloud top temperature. The temperature of a cloud depends on the radiation properties determined by its droplet distribution. Low clouds are warm (>273thinspK) and therefore consist of liquid water droplets. At typical atmospheric supersaturations (sim1%) a liquid cloud drop will only form in the presence of an aerosol, which acts as a condensation site. The droplet distribution of a cloud will then depend on the number of aerosols activated as cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) and the level of super saturation. Based on observational evidence it is argued that a mechanism to explain the cosmic ray-cloud link might be found through the role of atmospheric ionisation in aerosol production and/or growth. Observations of local aerosol increases in low cloud due to ship exhaust indicate that a small perturbation in atmospheric aerosol can have a major impact on low cloud radiative properties. Thus, a moderate influence on atmospheric aerosol distributions from cosmic ray ionisation would have a strong influence on the Earth''s radiation budget. Historical evidence over the past 1000 years indicates that changes in climate have occurred in accord with variability in cosmic ray intensities. Such changes are in agreement with the sign of cloud radiative forcing associated with cosmic ray variability as estimated from satellite observations.

"Cosmic Rays, Clouds, and Climate," Science November 29, 2002:

It has been proposed that Earth's climate could be affected by changes in cloudiness caused by variations in the intensity of galactic cosmic rays in the atmosphere. This proposal stems from an observed correlation between cosmic ray intensity and Earth's average cloud cover over the course of one solar cycle. Some scientists question the reliability of the observations, whereas others, who accept them as reliable, suggest that the correlation may be caused by other physical phenomena with decadal periods or by a response to volcanic activity or El Niño. Nevertheless, the observation has raised the intriguing possibility that a cosmic ray-cloud interaction may help explain how a relatively small change in solar output can produce much larger changes in Earth's climate. Physical mechanisms have been proposed to explain how cosmic rays could affect clouds, but they need to be investigated further if the observation is to become more than just another correlation among geophysical variables.

"Influence of Cosmic Rays on Earth's Climate," Physical Review Letters, November, 1998:

During the last solar cycle Earth's cloud cover underwent a modulation more closely in phase with the galactic cosmic ray flux than with other solar activity parameters. Further it is found that Earth's temperature follows more closely decade variations in galactic cosmic ray flux and solar cycle length, than other solar activity parameters. The main conclusion is that the average state of the heliosphere affects Earth's climate.

"Altitude variations of cosmic ray induced production of aerosols: Implications for global cloudiness and climate," Journal of Geophysical Research 2002:

The indirect radiative forcing of atmospheric aerosols is sensitive to particle size and concentration, which are influenced significantly by nucleation processes. Via its role in aerosol formation, cosmic ray may affect the cloud condensation nuclei abundance and hence the global cloud properties and climate. Systematic variations in ionization rates due to the modulation of cosmic ray radiation by the solar cycle are sufficient to cause notable variations in aerosol production, and we find that the signs of such variations are altitude-dependent.

Our study indicates that an increase in cosmic ray fluxes generally leads to an
increase in particle production in the lower troposphere but a decrease in particle
production in the upper troposphere. The main reason of such an altitude-dependent
influence is that the dependence of particle production rate on ionization rate is a complex function of ionization rate itself, as well as precursor gas concentration and ambient conditions. The implications of altitude variations of cosmic ray-induced aerosol production on global cloudiness and climate are discussed. In addition to the reported positive correlation between cosmic ray variations and low cloudiness, our analysis reveals that high cloudiness may be anti-correlated with cosmic ray variations if volcano and El Nin˜o impacts are excluded. The observed different correlations between cosmic ray variations and low, middle and high cloud anomalies appear to be consistent with the predicted different sensitivities of particle production to cosmic ray changes at different altitudes. A systematic change in global cloudiness may change the atmosphere heating profile, and if confirmed, may provide the external forcing needed to reconcile the different surface and troposphere temperature trends. Much more work is needed to understand how and how much the cosmic ray variations will affect the global cloud properties and climate.

"The role of solar forcing upon climate change," Quarternary Science Reviews 18 (1999):

Evidence for millennial-scale climate changes during the last 60,000 years has been found in Greenland ice cores and North Atlantic ocean cores. Until now, the cause of these climate changes remained a matter of debate. We argue that variations in solar activity may have played a signiÞcant role in forcing these climate changes. We review the coincidence of variations in cosmogenic isotopes (14C and 10Be) with climate changes during the Holocene and the upper part of the last Glacial, and present two possible mechanisms (involving the role of solar UV variations and solar wind/cosmic rays) that may explain how small variations in solar activity are
ampliÞed to cause signiÞcant climate changes. Accepting the idea of solar forcing of Holocene and Glacial climatic shifts has major implications for our view of present and future climate. It implies that the climate system is far more sensitive to small variations in solar activity than generally believed.

"The influence of cosmic rays on terrestrial clouds and global warming," Astronomy \& Geophysics August, 2000:

We analyse the new ISCCP (International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project) D2 cloud data to ascertain if a connection between cosmic-ray flux and cloud cover exists. Despite a previous finding that total-cloud factor and cosmic-ray fluxes were correlated, our results indicate that only the low-level cloud follows solar activity over the full period, 1983–94. Using several proxies for solar activity and the radiative forcing calculated by Ockert-Bell (1992) for the ISCCP cloud types, we estimate the possible impact that such a solar–terrestrial connection may have on climate. We conclude that, possibly excluding the most recent decades, much of the warming of the past century can be quantitatively accounted for by the direct and indirect effects of solar activity.

And there are dozens, perhaps hundreds more papers that come to similar conclusions.

Corruptocrats At Copenhagen

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:

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.

Obama and friends talk progressive leftist; but they do corrupt fatcat politics in a way that Republicans find outrageous or embarrassing.

CFLs Again

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:

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.

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.

Another Global Warming Hearing Canceled

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The Gore Effect Again & The Invention of Chimneys

From the December 22, 2009 Guardian:

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.

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.

Pasteurized Data

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

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

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.

The Role of Oil Companies In Funding Climate Skepticism

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"
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/
______________________________________________

(Thanks to Watts Up With That? for the pointer.)

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

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:

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.

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.

...

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.

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?

Maybe This Is Just Clumsy Writing

Maybe This Is Just Clumsy Writing

It's a June 24, 2003 email from the CRU archive:

From: "Mick Kelly"
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]

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.

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

2035 vs. 2350

An amusing example of what happens when you get the digits in the wrong sequence.

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!

The Raw Data

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

Not Everything That Looks Bad Is Bad

A number of people have made much of this code fragment from the CRU software:

;
; 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)

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.

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

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

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
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.

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"?

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....

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?

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.

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
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.

And Jones says to "keep quiet." Jones knew that Keenan was correct about this--but keeping the fraud going took precedence.

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

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:

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 ...

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):

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?

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!”

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.

Yet as Lott points out, the vast majority of American news media are barely covering this story, if they are covering it at all.

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:

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.

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
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?

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:

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

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.