JoNova: Science, carbon, climate and tax » NOAA

NOAA’s State of the Climate Report

Joanne Nova — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 04:58:47 +0000

SPPI has put out an excellent collection of papers in response to NOAA’s State of the Climate Report.

NOAA State of the Climate reply by SPPI

.. As usual, the official taxpayer-funded report is full of half-truths and strawmen. Arctic sea ice is shrinking (no mention of the Antarctic), the world is undeniably warming (yes, so? what’s causing that warming?). There’s the compulsory allusions to “consensus” — 300 scientists, blah blah blah (trust us! we’re experts).

The interesting thing is that the seven different responses are all quite different, yet all skeptical, even though there was no coordination behind the scenes to create that. There are so many holes in the NOAA document, that seven commentators could fire ad lib, and for the most part, all find different targets.

Has the temperature been constant ’til humans industrialized?

Craig Idso noticed that NOAA actually said “people have spent thousands of years building society for one climate and now a new one is being created — one that’s warmer and more extreme”. So NOAA is rewriting history too. The Vikings were never forced out of Greenland due to the nasty cold spell called the Little Ice Age. Glaciers [...]

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Climate money: Auditing is left to unpaid volunteers

JoNova — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 17:09:54 +0000

Billions for “the climate” but nothing left for audits?

It’s the most “important crisis” on Earth today, and we must rely on the science, yet it’s not quite important enough for anyone to independently double check those results. And just in case you think that the peer review process does that double checking, think again. Most papers are reviewed by only two or three colleagues who may be hoping to prove the same “theory” as the authors (so not especially keen to find holes in it), and who are unpaid and anonymous. (The saying “you get what you pay for” comes to mind. We pay to find a crisis, and we don’t pay to check the results.)

The best examples of unpaid auditing are the work of independent scientists Steve McIntyre, and Anthony Watts. The irony is that skilled workers are providing a pro bono service, normally a service to help those who can’t afford it, but in this case, to assist the largest single financial entity on the planet.

Steve McIntyre and the misleading “Hockey Stick” graph

Steve McIntyre was trained in mathematics and worked in mineral exploration for 30 years (and despite claims to the contrary has never [...]

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