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In answer to the excuse du jour: “The Ocean ate my Global Warming”.
Now that the plateau in air temperatures has lasted for 15 years, everyone, even IPCC lead authors, can see the “90% certain” models were 98% wrong. So the IPCC now claims the heat went into the deep abyss, which they didn’t predict, can’t measure accurately, and, even by the best estimates we have, has not been anywhere near large enough to explain the missing energy.
They predicted the surface air temperature would increase, but it didn’t. (The 1990 IPCC predictions about temperatures were so wrong the trends have come in below their lowest possible estimate.) They predicted the oceans would warm more than twice as much as they actually have (as best as we can tell). They did not predict the air temperature would level out for 15 years, and the oceans would suddenly start producing “natural cooling”.
The oceans are a bit of a mystery black box
There are 1.4 billion cubic kilometers of ocean out there — it’s so big it hid a 650 km volcano until two weeks ago. Only two people have been to the bottom ever (correction, three men), and they stayed just 20 minutes (and all they saw was silt). Despite this the IPCC wants us to believe we can measure the entire Earth’s ocean temperature in one hundreth’s of a degree, not just now, but allegedly also 50 or 60 years ago. There is no 95% certainty about ocean measurements in 1962 or even in 2002. Strangely, the best models in the world did not predict this in 2007. The IPCC are handwaving at the ocean heat so they can still say “the world is warming” but in reality the numbers are devastating, and the data (as scratchy as it is) supports the skeptics. If the standstill in temperatures is bad news for the IPCC, so are the ocean heat figures.
The excuse that the missing heat went into the ocean is a deceptive reframing — where a failure in ocean measurements is used to save them from their failure to predict what happened above the water. It is as simplistic as saying the warming line points up, and “up” is success.
 Who switched on natural variability in 1998? …
Ocean Heat Content does not help the IPCC
1.If the oceans affected global temperatures after 1998, what were they doing before that?
If the oceans caused natural cooling over the last 15 years, how do we know they didn’t cause natural warming over the 20 years before that? The answer is, if La Nina’s can cool the surface, El Nino’s can warm it. If oceans can draw heat out of the sky, then in times when they are not doing that, they can also increase the trends.
Caught again, the IPCC hides this banal symmetry. Their self-serving lop-sided rule is: if it cools, it’s natural; if it warms, it’s artificial. The killer contradiction goes unspoken. If the warming from 1979 -1999 was significantly caused by natural changes in currents, clouds or wind which allowed heat to build up in the air, it means they underestimated the natural effect of the oceans and overestimated the effect of CO2 during the warming. When CO2 levels reached their “highest” levels in human history after 1998, the oceans overrode whatever effect CO2 had. The IPCC knows so little about the ocean, that they didn’t even allow for this possibility in their past predictions. Why should we let them get away with the banal post hoc hand-waving excuse?
This is a point so simple any science journalist ought to spot it immediately. Have any of them asked?
2. The oceans are supposedly 0.06 C warmer than 50 years ago (but we can’t really measure the global ocean temperature to a hundreth of a degree).
The first point of deception is that temperature is measured in degrees, but the Climate-change Industry always report ocean temperatures in Joules. This hides the obvious problem — we just can’t measure the global ocean temperature that accurately.
Before 2003 there is only sparse irregular measurements with everything from buckets off boats to thermometers fired into the water and usually without pressure sensors (we estimated how deep they were from how long they’d been falling…not much room for precision there). Much of the ocean wasn’t covered, and there were almost no readings below 700m (the average depth of oceans is 4km).
We’ve only had decent measurements of the ocean since mid-2003 when the ARGO system started. But even these measurements are considerably less certain than often claimed, and they didn’t find the missing energy anyway (see point 4).
3. The utterly banal again: All forms of warming cause ocean heat to rise.
Ocean warming (like most other indicators) doesn’t prove anything about the cause. If the warming since 1700 was due to solar magnetic effects, or lunar effects, cosmic rays and changes in cloud cover, the oceans would warm. The only point that matters is whether the models have verifiable predictive skill of any kind. They don’t: Ergo the theory is wrong.
4. The missing energy is just not enough. The numbers Jim, look at the numbers!
ARGO data started in 2003, but the observed ocean warming does not fit the model predictions. (See this post for details.) The rate of increase is too small to demonstrate a large radiative imbalance.
But this also applies to the pre-ARGO data (as bad as it is). When we get down to hard numbers even professional experts in the Climate Change Industry find the “radiative imbalance” is only one third to one half of what the models and the theory of man-made global warming predict. They don’t necessarily say that in so many words, but the numbers do.
 Since sufficient ARGO data started in 2003, observed ocean warming does not fit the model predictions. See this post for details. | Updated, Sept 2013. The climate models estimate a CO2 additional forcing of 3.7 W/m2 with a doubling of CO2. (And since CO2 hasn’t doubled, then we’re looking for whatever part of 3.7W/m2 applies for the proportional increase in CO2 during the period in question. Hence that’s about 1W/m2 in the last 50 years, and less because 30% of the Earth is covered with land, not ocean).
David Stockwell has looked into the recent Levitis 2012 paper, which analyzed ocean heat from 1955-2010 and concluded that it supports the skeptics. Essentially, the models predicted 0.69W/m2, but Levitis found 0.3W/m2. Less than half. Once again, the data shows the models exaggerate by a factor of at least two.
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8.8 out of 10 based on 121 ratings
We could discuss that 95%-certain sermon from yon IPCC…
7 out of 10 based on 74 ratings
Michael Brown, recipient of taxpayer funds for astronomy, tells us that science is not about debate because people are not smart enough to judge the winner. He doesn’t list any evidence to support his faith in climate models (he’s just part of the herd following the consensus pack). Nor does he have any serious scientific criticism of the NIPCC climate report. But he uses plenty of names, baseless allusion, and innuendo. In the article “Adversaries, zombies and NIPCC climate pseudoscience” in The Conversation he resorts to a group smear (with the help of the taxpayer funded site) in the hope that people won’t listen to those who disagree with him. Apparently he can’t win a fair and open debate, so he’s doing what he can to stop one.
If science now has “Gods” who are above question, it’s not science, it’s a religion. A scientist who says “I’m right because I’m a scientist” is neither right nor much of a scientist. Brown is acting like a self-appointed High-Priest of the Climate Doctrine.
The NIPCC report is more balanced, more comprehensive, and more accurate than the politically-guided tome from the IPCC . It contains hundreds of peer reviewed references put together by independent scientists. In his reply to it, Michael Brown tells us all we need to know about the intellectual state of Australian science, and the value of The Conversation.
This is the face of the Church of Global Warming. (Yes, the “academic” site actually used this photo below — is there any better evidence that it’s not about science, but about propaganda?).
“Adversaries, zombies and NIPCC climate pseudoscience”
 Dead science lives on, thanks to the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change Michael Brown and The Conversation. |Photo: Scott Beale How low can Brown go?
How about “zombies”, “aliens”, and “pseudoscience”? As an unskeptical scientist (and we all know what that means), it appears Brown hopes to win through name-calling and “seeding doubt” about the motivations of people he disagrees with. Skeptical scientists are “skeptics” (always in quotes to imply they’re fakes) who are “bankrolled” (he’s blind to the evidence about the financial truth too).
For evidence Brown cites a consensus study that mixes up 0.3% with 97%. He likes the IPCC political-consensus approach. This is post-modern science (or post-science, science) forget radiosondes, just poll government appointees.
All the other evidence Brown lists is superficial and irrelevant. He claims: “there is remarkably good agreement between models of climate change and the temperature data.” Then offers as evidence the utterly banal and correct predictions of the “last 50 years” while ignoring the devastating failure in the predictions of the last 20 years that matter.
Modern science is broken — Astronomy in Australia is a small community and illogical, unscientific people have already been promoted to influential positions. I could ask where the decent astronomers are, and why aren’t they protesting, but because Brown’s activism is so strong, so unscientific, and unequivocal, I expect those who disagree with him would choose to stay silent. They wouldn’t know whether their next grant will be reviewed by him, but they know that if it is, and they are a vocal skeptic, it won’t help them. After a rant like this, why would anyone expect equal treatment?
This Heisenberg-like state of uncertainty (will or will he not be a reviewer for my application/proposal/paper? and will or will he not be biased if he thinks I am a zombie/denier/anti-science?) is enough to bring people in line. Welcome to the stifling blanket of self censorship.
Ode to the stupid
According to Brown, those who question the mantra of the IPCC are not just speaking their mind, they are using a pseudoscience “ploy” to fool the people (who are too dumb to realize). These evil mercenary skeptics want you to think we need to debate complex, costly plans that are dependent on our knowledge of the weather. (Imagine that!) Luckily for us, Brown is here to correct the dumb engineers, doctors, and lawyers who are unconvinced a solar panel in Melbourne will help stop a flood in Bangladesh.
The call for adversarial debate is a variant of the debate ploy, a common pseudoscience tactic. At first glance having two teams present competing positions seems entirely reasonable, but this approach only works if the intended audience can effectively assess the arguments presented.
Who is the pseudoscientist using a ploy to fool the public? The geologist who tells us that this warming is not unusual, or the man who has no evidence, and a profoundly unscientific and patronizing belief that only the anointed can speak their mind?
How’s this for reasoning: According to Brown, adversarial debate failed once with Einstein’s theory of relativity (the audience were not able to get the right answer in 1920 on one of the most difficult and ground breaking scientific advances in centuries). Cue the High-Priest, therefore and verily says he, adversarial debate is always a waste of time and science can only advance if the populace lets politicians annoint Gods in each subject (and everyone bows to them).
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8.9 out of 10 based on 138 ratings
A paper that is nearly 60 years old shows us just how intrinsically important CO2 is to life.
An acre of corn is a living machine drawing CO2 from the air around it. In windless conditions, CO2 concentrations over a cornfield build up each night as CO2 diffuses from higher air and the organic matter and bacteria create CO2 from the soil. A paper by Chapman et al from 1954[1], shows that as soon as the sun comes up, to power-up those dormant photosynthetic cells, the plants rapidly draw down as much CO2 as possible, and when the CO2 levels fall too low, plant growth surely slows.
On a windless day CO2 values rose to 410ppm overnight and fell to 210ppm during the morning.
This graph shows CO2 content of the air over a cornfield on a still day (no wind). Sunrise occurs at 5am and CO2 levels plummet til 8am, reaching their lowest by 1pm, which is nearly half the CO2 concentration of the peak reached overnight. The corn is affecting CO2 levels in air even as high as 150m or 500ft above. These level out by around 8am and only start to increase again, a couple of hours after sunset.
No wonder some farmers use greenhouses and pump in CO2 to boost their yields. The afternoon sun goes a-wasted as plants growth slows because CO2 levels are not high enough.
The message to gardeners is that this is why plants that get morning sun have an advantage.
 Fig. 1. Variations in the C02 content of air in a corn field and 152 m above it on a still day. A C02 deficit of more than 100 lbs an acre was developed within 3 hrs after sunrise, to remain nearly constant until late afternoon. Chapman point out that there is 40,000 lbs of CO2 normally present in the air over each acre.
This graph shows that on a windier day the effect is muted because CO2 is being brought in by the wind from areas around the field. CO2 falls ’til about 12 noon before leveling off as plant growth slows. Again, even air 150m above the field shows the effects of the plants underneath.
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9.1 out of 10 based on 97 ratings
Admire the power of the Internet. Since I started blogging we’ve had 9,999,619 pageviews. Minutes to go…
UPDATE #1: 10,000,075 pageviews. Thank you.
UPDATE #2: Extra special thanks to the volunteer moderators who work anonymously to keep things on track, who deal with the malcontents, complaints, and unpublishable bile and my evolving strategies. They made the 10 million pageviews possible and the 180,850 comments. They are spread over three countries and every timezone, and have been helping for 2 – 4 years each. They are a source of wisdom and advice. I would not be able to do this without their help.
Statistics show 1.67 million unique visitors from 225 countries have come to the site. From the extraordinary comments on Monday’s thread many readers are highly qualified in Engineering, Geology, Physics, Law, Medicine, Accounting, Architecture, Agriculture, Chemistry, Ecology and Education. From personal contact I know readers also include three national cartoonists, several members of the Australian and British Parliaments, State MPs, staffers to elected representatives, IPCC lead authors, journalists and at least six well known columnists. Readers include a professional full time carbon trader and several major investors, at least one of which I know has made quite a lot of money shorting renewables in Europe. I feel honored. humbled and grateful. Thanks to all who have supported me this year, to make this work possible. I still owe many of you a personal email.
There is a smart class of movers and shakers who influence events and markets. Even though the mainstream press may relentlessly report only one side, the other side of the message is getting out — may the best arguments win.
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9.3 out of 10 based on 126 ratings
 “What data? ” David Suzuki on Q&A David Suzuki’s performance on Q&A last night was extraordinary. I was knock-me-over amazed that he has not heard of UAH, GISS, HADcrut and RSS, and knew nothing of the pause in global surface temperatures that even the UK Met Office and IPCC lead author climate scientists like Hans von Storch are discussing.
How afraid is Suzuki about man-made global warming? So afraid, it doesn’t occur to him to check the data, incredibly he doesn’t even know what the data is. Tony Jones had to rephrase the questions to explain them to Suzuki, who doesn’t even understand them.
How much is his reputation as a scientist worth when he doesn’t even bother to check the evidence for a cause he stakes his reputation on?
Three times in Q&A he admitted he didn’t know — he didn’t know there was a pause in warming for the last 15 years, he didn’t know how global temperatures are measured, and he didn’t know that cyclones were not increasing over the Great Barrier Reef. He wants politicians jailed for “denying the science”. “You bet!” he exclaims, but then admits he hasn’t thought that through either.
The cartoon-like responses were incongruous. Should we go nuclear to reduce emissions? Suzuki tosses numbers, evidence, and cost-benefits down a deep well of ignorance: “It’s just crazy”. “What the hell is going on”. “You’ve got sunlight!” “Solar farms could be spread everywhere”. “There is plenty of sunlight beyond anything humanity needs”. The audience member who asked then pointed out we don’t have the batteries to cope with sunless cloudy days. Even Tony Jones asks how realistic solar is. At this first prod, Suzuki throws his hands up in the air, “I don’t know”.
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8.6 out of 10 based on 220 ratings
If you are fed up with dismal papers passing peer review and exploiting the good name of science, join us in protest. Christopher Monckton was not content to let John Cook and others get away with a paper where 0.3% becomes 97%, so Monckton is formally asking the journal to retract it — suggesting it would be wise to protect the journal from any allegation of scientific misrepresentation. Here is his entertaining background on events, and below that, a very serious letter 273 scientists and citizens have already signed to jointly send to the Editor Daniel Kammen. If deceptive wording and hidden data make you angry, join us by commenting below or emailing. — Jo
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Honey, I shrunk the consensus
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Michael Crichton said: “If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus.” Thales of Miletus, Abu Ali Ibn al Haytham, Newton, Einstein, Popper and Feynman thought much the same and said so. Science by head-count is mere politics.
Doran and Zimmerman (2009) and Anderegg et al. (2010) each concluded that 97% of a few dozen carefully-filtered climate scientists held Man guilty of some of the 0.7 Cº global warming since 1950.
Cook et al. (2013), in a recent me-too article in Environment Research Letters, conducted the largest-ever sensational epic blockbuster cast-of-thousands drama survey of scientific papers on climate change. They concluded that 97.1% of abstracts expressing an opinion on climate change endorsed the “scientific consensus”.
Here’s how they did it.
They examined 11,944 abstracts. But they arbitrarily threw out almost 8000 of them on the ground that they had not toed the Party Line by expressing the politically-correct opinion (or any opinion) on climate change.
Next, they ingeniously interchanged three separate versions of the imagined “scientific consensus”: that Man had caused some warming; that Man had caused most of the warming since 1950; and that man-made warming would be catastrophic unless the West were shut down and climate sceptics were put on trial – as the appalling James Hansen has suggested – for high crimes against humanity.
It was this last definition – in fact untested in Cook et al. or, as far as I know, in any other paper – that Mr Obama’s Twitteratus plumped for when he tweeted that 97% of scientists consider climate change not only real but “dangerous”.
The introduction to the Cook paper said that the survey was intended to examine the standard or IPCC “scientific consensus” that most of the warmer weather since 1950 was our fault.
The authors, having consigned 7930 abstracts to the Memory Hole because they had not parroted the Party Line, were left with 4014 abstracts. They marked just 64 of them, or 1.6% of the 4014 abstracts, as endorsing the standard version of “scientific consensus”.
Further examination by Legates et al. (2013) showed that only 41 of the 64 abstracts, or 1.0% of the 4014 abstracts expressing an opinion on the Party Line, or just 0.3% of the original 11,944 abstracts, had said Yes to the standard version of consensus.
The incredible shrinking consensus
 (A) Cook et al. claimed 97.1% consensus among 4014 abstracts; but (B) that was only 32.6% of all 11,944 abstracts in their sample; and (C) only 1% of the 4014 papers or (D) 0.3% of the entire 11,944 sample actually said Yes to the “scientific consensus” as Cook et al. had defined it. However, since 32.6% of all 11,944 abstracts, or 97.1% of the 4010 abstracts expressing an opinion on the Party Line, had said or implied that Man causes some warming, Cook et al. concluded by saying that 97.1% of all abstracts expressing an opinion had said that Man had caused most of the warming since 1950.
The totalitarian news media (that is just about all of them), ever careless with their logical quantifiers, dutifully reported that 97.1% of all scientists had stated their support for the “scientific consensus” that all global warming since 1950 was manmade.
The website of the Institute of Physics reported one of Cook’s co-authors as saying that the paper had indeed concluded that there was 97.1% support for that notion.
However, in my submission it is time for sceptics not merely to express dismay at the flagrant distortion of the objective truth that has occurred. I reported that co-author to his university for misconduct in the dissemination of research results, and the university has told me it has decided to investigate.
The Institute of Physics, to whom I also complained, says it does not propose to alter its story because, it says, the co-author’s statement accurately reflects the paper’s conclusion. I have sent it the authors’ own data-file and have asked it to check that the authors themselves had marked only 64 out of 11,944 papers as endorsing the version of “scientific consensus” for which the paper claims 97.1% consensus.
I have asked that the Institute should at least report that the result of the paper has been credibly challenged in the peer-reviewed literature; and I await its reply.
A report of research misconduct has gone to the Vice-Chancellor of Queensland University and to the Professor who is the “designated person” to investigate the lead author under the University’s research policies. I await a reply from either of them.
This is where you come in, gentle readers. For I have written a letter to the editor of Environmental Research Letters asking him to withdraw the paper on the ground that it is not merely defective but deceptive. The letter is below.
I should be very grateful if every reader who agrees with me that the paper should be withdrawn would send a message to this thread giving their names and, if they wish, their academic qualifications. I shall then add the names to the letter and send it to the editor. Jo Nova herself is a signatory. Please join us.
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8.9 out of 10 based on 157 ratings
Agnotology is the study of how ignorance grows through repetition of misleading misinformation. You might never have heard of it, but it’s the perfect term for the climate science “debate”. Predictably its use began when those convinced of man-man global warming claimed fossil fuel groups were funding misinformation. But as per usual, unskeptical scientists opened a promising new front only to got burned by the evidence.
In the latest volley, from Legates et al 2013, John Cook’s “97% consensus” survey has become the case study in agnotology. Based on incorrect results, a flawed method, and a logical fallacy, it kept key facts hidden while sloppily blending vague language into a form that is easily and actively misinterpreted. That it passed peer-review is another damning indictment of peer review.
Cook still refuses to provide about half the data, but the data that has been made public shows (after some digging) that a mere 41 papers out of 12,000 was called a 97% consensus. The trick is that Cook et al interchangeably use different definitions of consensus.
The Bait and Switch
The Bait: In the introduction Cook states that the reason for the paper is “to determine the level of scientific consensus that human activity is very likely causing most of the current GW [global warming]”.
The word “most” leaves no doubt that it refers to man-made forces causing “more than half”.
Cook categorizes endorsement of anthropogenic global warming into seven categories, only the first of which fits the aim stated in the introduction.
- Category 1: “Explicitly states that humans are the primary cause of global warming”
- Category 2: “Explicit endorsement without quantification” — (which, if they studied other forms of publication, would include myself and most skeptics. Yes, CO2 is a greenhouse gas, it does cause some warming, and human emissions are increasing. Thus the category includes everyone from dedicated skeptic to confirmed believer. “Some” warming could mean 1% or 100%.)
- Category 3: “Implicit endorsement” — (meaning researchers involved in carbon sequestration, or wombat territories, or early peach ripening, or anything that might be affected by the climate.)
 The switch: Cook doesn’t provide results for Category one in the paper, even though that was the aim of the paper. To “simplify the analysis”, he blends together categories 1, 2 and 3 (which include two very different definitions of consensus). In the data there are only 64 papers of Type 1 — papers that state that humans are the primary cause. (Is that why he did not report the result?) Worse, Monckton read the abstracts and found that 23 of those are misallocated.
Did Cook really think he could get away with taking 41 papers out of 11,944 and claiming it was a “97% consensus”? Most of the thousands of papers included in his “97%” collection are merely me-too papers where the scientists have assumed the models are right and someone else has done the sums.
This statement in the abstract of Cook et al is so vague as to be useless.
Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.
The statement refers to the broadest and weakest form of consensus, but is often mistakenly amplified to infer it causes “dangerous” global warming. By Cook’s own definition a mere 0.3% of papers actually show that “humans are the primary cause of recent global warming”. Furthermore, being the primary cause does not necessarily mean the warming is also dangerous. The paper was not even designed to find out how many scientists endorsed dangerous warming. Yet in the media this is how the paper is being used. Tellingly, Cook has made no attempt to correct this misuse.
Note the strong terms of reference of the Legates paper — this is not about accidental misinformation, but intentional deception:
“…the focus will be on misinformation said to have arisen not through inadvertence, nor through any limitation in the state of knowledge, nor through any defect in teaching or learning, but through the self interested determination of some sufficiently influential faction to circulate misinformation calculated to sow doubt, to conceal a truth, or to promote falsehoods.”
The nub of the problem here is that this poorly done research is not contributing to human knowledge, but to the exact opposite. Cook uses a poor study of opinions to replace the empirical evidence he ought to have. And Bedford and Cook use agnotology as a method to shut down open debate about it.
Legates et al:
“Totalitarian regimes spread misinformation while demonizing their opposition. How is
it different here? Haud secus isti. If it is as Michael Oppenheimer argued earlier—though
the figure is wrong, the discussion is useful because it agrees with the consensus—then
misinformation is being used as information to support the consensus. In that instance,
agnotology takes on an added connotation—it includes the study of how misinformation is
spread as information by those espousing a contrived consensus to support one’s cause.”
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8.9 out of 10 based on 98 ratings
 Tim Flannery. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen Dear Tim,
Now that the government funded golden platform is gone, you say you will “not be silenced. ” Bravo, I say.
Perhaps I can help? When I didn’t want to be silenced five years ago, I set up my own blog. I got no government grants. Any financial support comes from readers voluntarily (thanks to Peter, Bill, Bernd, and Malcolm yesterday). I forgo a job to run this blog and get called a “denier” by government funded academics and politicians. Nevertheless, this is the largest skeptical climate science blog in the country, and one of the handful of largest in the world.
To help you until you get your own blog running in full, I extend an open invitation to you for a guest post anytime, unedited, and in full with graphs and images. Links to your own material will help your google rank.
You talked about the importance of scientific discussion, after the Climate Commission was abolished yesterday: “I believe that Australians have a right to know – a right to authoritative, independent and accurate information on climate change.”
Where better to post accurate information on climate change?
Keeping in the spirit of things, I’d insist commenters stick to scientific remarks, without ad hominems and personal insults.
On this blog you can reach the very people who are, as you might say, unconvinced about the extent of man-made global warming, and slowing down progress on climate action. Since the evidence is overwhelming, there must be plenty to write about. Convince us with what convinces you.
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9.1 out of 10 based on 223 ratings
For James…
6.8 out of 10 based on 16 ratings
The race in the media continues: The UK Daily Mail (again), The Spectator, The UK Express. The headlines the IPCC must hate just keep coming, now in major newspapers and magazines. Finally, maybe, some of the media is starting to get it. At last also the IPCC is feeling the pressure to explain the halting of global warming and the poor performance of its climate models.
This is all well and good, but before we celebrate, ponder that if science journalists had been doing their job 10 years ago, the IPCC would have been put on the spot before before the wild evangelistic doom-fest of 2007 where national GDP points were roasted with every chapter. Billions could have been saved.
As I keep saying: The media is the problem. With good journalists, and real reporters, everything else gets better. Shine the light…
The UK Daily Mail Tamara Cohen
World’s top climate scientists told to ‘cover up’ the fact that the Earth’s temperature hasn’t risen for the last 15 years
But leaked documents seen by the Associated Press, yesterday revealed deep concerns among politicians about a lack of global warming over the past few years.
Germany called for the references to the slowdown in warming to be deleted, saying looking at a time span of just 10 or 15 years was ‘misleading’ and they should focus on decades or centuries.
Hungary worried the report would provide ammunition for deniers of man-made climate change.
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9.5 out of 10 based on 86 ratings
Thanks to Steve Hunter. See more of his cartoons at Andys rant.
Taxpayers rejoice! The science-propaganda agency is gone for good. One down — scores to go.
Tony Abbott was sworn in yesterday. Today Greg Hunt rang Tim Flannery to tell him the commission is closed. His $180,000 3-day-a-week job as a sales agent for “climate change” is over.
BREAKING (ABC): The Abbott Government has abolished the Climate Commission, pushing ahead with its plan to scrap government bodies associated with Labor’s carbon pricing scheme and climate change policy.
The commission was set up under then prime minister Julia Gillard in February 2011 as an independent body “to provide reliable and authoritative” information on climate change.
Jo Nova applauds the Abbott government decision to cut waste and to stop funding an inept unscientific agency which was unbalanced to the point of being government advertising in disguise. Today is a great day for taxpayers. This agency propped up billions of dollars in pointless futile government spending trying to change the weather. Nothing will bring back money spent on desal plants that were mothballed when the floods came that real scientists predicted. Likewise the money burned on solar panels and windfarms is gone for good too, and still going.
Emma Thompson reports on this from the ABC. As a fan of big-government she doesn’t challenge Flannery when he says the commission was independent and apolitical, despite it being completely dependent on government funds, not just to run, but to carry out its plans. And despite the fact that the commission omitted every inconvenient fact it wanted to, presenting a continuously one-sided story that served their own personal agendas. She interviewed no citizens or scientists who might have expressed a view that this move was wholly beneficial, a good step scientifically or very sensible and popular. (See my bolded quote above).
Tim Flannery speaks plain unvarnished nonsense:
“”We’ve stayed out of the politics and stuck to the facts,” he said.”
“As a result we’ve developed a reputation as a reliable apolitical source of facts on all aspects of climate change.
“I believe that Australians have a right to know – a right to authoritative, independent and accurate information on climate change.
In 2011 he compared “climate change deniers to flat Earth believers “. Another Flannery apolitical fact?
The Abbott government has these in their targets too, but needs to pass legislation to remove them:
“The Coalition Government also wants to dump the Climate Change Authority, which was set up in 2012 to provide independent advice to the government on the carbon price and emissions reductions targets.
Mr Hunt yesterday instructed his department to begin drafting repeal legislation to abolish the authority, in keeping with its over-riding plan to scrap the carbon pricing scheme.
In what is likely to be a harder task, the Government has also announced it is preparing legislation to scrap the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC).
Also set up in 2012, it has been provided with $10 billion in funding over five years to support private investment in renewable energy.”
It is not over yet. The Labor Party and Greens have left toxic bombs in the legislation they hope will stop the voters being able to remove unpopular, wasteful programs.
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8.9 out of 10 based on 159 ratings
Worldwide momentum is shifting. With David Rose’s article in the Daily Mail, Matt Ridley in the Wall Street Journal (“We got it wrong on warming“), and the excellent article by Ross McKitrick in the Financial Post the skeptical message is going mainstream.
The war is by no means over, but the race in media coverage has stepped up a notch. Now, for the first time there is an element of competition, serious newspapers don’t want to be left behind. Editors have realized the skeptics have a case.
In Australia the grand failure of the carbon tax in the recent election is still ripping through the news, the institutions, and the mood. It was a categorical defeat. From comments and emails I know this event was watched around the world.
Roy Spencer, veteran with two decades of experience wonders if this is a turning point too:
“…recent events are quite exceptional.”
” We are now at the point in the age of global warming hysteria where the IPCC global warming theory has crashed into the hard reality of observations.”
Ross McKitrick, Canada:
“To those of us who have been following the climate debate for decades, the next few years will be electrifying. There is a high probability we will witness the crackup of one of the most influential scientific paradigms of the 20th century, and the implications for policy and global politics could be staggering.
“…something big is about to happen. Models predict one thing and the data show another. The various attempts in recent years to patch over the difference are disintegrating.
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9.7 out of 10 based on 127 ratings
Another round of government-funded PR went out a couple of weeks ago, across the obedient Pravda-media. It told us about another meaningless “record” that was probably not a record, and wouldn’t tell us whether man-made warming was the cause, even if it was. Not a single journalist had the wherewithal, nous or intellectual honesty to search the Internet looking for a different point of view. Though, in their defense, how could they have guessed that Prof David Karoly wouldn’t know about the UAH satellite program to measure temperatures? (It has only been running since 1979.)
This below, are the 12 month averages over Australia by satellite. Graphed at Kens Kingdom by Ken Stewart, with no doctorate in climatology and no government funds.
 In the troposphere over Australia it was a hot year but not a record.
For the third time this year we’ve been hit with claims of a “hottest ever” record that doesn’t tell us anything about the climate, but does reveal a lot about the sick state of government funded science, corrupted, decrepit, and so far from being scientific it might as well be run by Greenpeace. If the government stopped funding climate science entirely, climate research might speed up.
The “hottest” headlines are science-marketing
- Again, for the third time, the more accurate, more comprehensive satellites show it was a hot year, but was probably not a record. Satellite data shows we didn’t have a hot angry summer. Man-made emissions were probably not to blame for the hot angry summer we didn’t have. And now apparently we also haven’t quite had the “hottest” 12 month period since 1910 either, but the hottest since 2010. (But what’s a hundred years between friends?)
- Again, for the third time, the “records” depend on mystery methods that can’t be replicated. This time the records appear to be based on ACORN data, supposedly the highest quality we have. This is the dataset we were told had neutral adjustments — an equal number of positive and negative changes. But inexplicably (yet again) somehow those neutral changes increase the trend. (Define neutral?) Who would have guessed that thermometers in the 1920s and 30s were overestimating temperatures and nobody noticed for decades after the fact? (Lucky that got fixed, eh!) Handily for record-makers, the BOM have more than one dataset — if it’s not a record in one, it might be in the other? The angry summer records depended on AWAP data that are not published in full either, and subject to different mystery-black-box adjustments. Back in 1910 that set has a mere 16 temperature stations on a continent of 7 million square kilometers. (No there can’t possibly be anything to hide in those undisclosed methods can there?)
- Again, for the millionth time, even if it is the hottest for a century, it doesn’t mean anything about the cause. To state the bleeding obvious: all causes of warming cause warming. The world started warming up in the 1700’s, long before CO2, the trend was the same in the 1870s as it was in the 1980s. None of that fits the man-made- emissions graph of CO2. Ergo, CO2 didn’t have much effect, if any. The climate models can’t tell us what caused the warming to start 2-300 years ago, they don’t work on 20 year, 2000 year or 200,000 year scales. They don’t work on local, regional or global scales. They don’t work on vertical atmospheric scales. They don’t work.
The need for constant “record” headlines (despite the conflicting data) is the mark of an effective lobby group, but it isn’t the mark of careful impartial scientist.
The satellite data shows it was not a record
There are thousands of measurements coming in from satellites that criss cross the nation day and night covering every corner of the land. This data came out within a few days of the propaganda pieces published all over the country, but the “scientists” at The University of Melbourne couldn’t wait, indeed, they were in such a rush you’d think there was an election on, and dare I say, that getting out an inaccurate message before the vote, was more important than waiting a few days to get the science right?
The satellite measured TLT (meaning Tropospheric Lower Temperature) more accurately shows what the bulk atmosphere above the Australian land-mass is doing – which is the quantity that is most directly related to greenhouse gas impacts. Indeed the models tell us that the rate of warming should be larger in the mid to upper troposphere than at the surface. In other words, if CO2 caused the warming, it would turn up in these satellite records before we saw it in the surface charts.
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8.9 out of 10 based on 70 ratings
 (Click to go to Climate Madness) Pop in on Australian Climate Madness and enjoy Simon’s parody “Escalating Hysteria”. John Cook pretends that skeptics “deny” the warming trend, and see the world as a series of flat segments. (Who’s in denial of the “halting”?)
But it’s alarmists who ignore the fact that the long term warming trend started two to three centuries ago, long before most man-made emissions, and the long underlying trend hasn’t changed. It was the IPCC who took the rising part of a regular cycle and falsely claimed acceleration by looking at shorter and shorter segments in a fake mathematical trick.
Only an unscrupulous fan of global warming could explain why the last decade “has warmed” by blending that data from last ten years into graphs from the last hundred.
Hat tip to Dave!
9.3 out of 10 based on 61 ratings
We are over the peak. Years late, the IPCC concedes some territory and wears headlines they must hate (“Global warming is just HALF what we said“, “We got it wrong on warming“), but PR still rules, and in the big game, this will quickly spin to a minor bump. It’s a classic technique to release “the bad news” before the main report, to clear the air for the messages the agents want to stick.
Since 2007 they’ve burned through their credibility in so many ways: think Climategate, and getting caught pretending activist material was science, being busted for 300-year-typos like the Himalayan Glaciers, plus 15 years of no warming, no hot spot, models being wrong, droughts ending, and ice returning, all the while pouring scorn and derision on anyone who questioned them. The IPCC were being hammered and they had to change tacks. Now, for the first time, the IPCC is making a serious retreat, presumably in the hope of being able to still paint itself as “scientific” and to fight from a different trench. Anything to continue the yearly junkets and to save face. What they hope is that no one will notice that the deniers were right and the experts were wrong, and the “government panel” has helped governments waste billions of your dollars.
They were 90% certain in 2007, which was never a scientific probability, but a hands-up vote. Now, in the most meaningless of ways, they are 95% certain of something more vague: the range has gone from 2°C to 4.5°C, to 1°C to 6°C. (See Matt Ridley in the Wall St Journal). They just made the barn door even wider. In years to come this allows them more room to pretend they hit the target, without acknowledging that they missed it for 23 years. And even that new supersize barn door may still not be wide enough.
They offer no credit to those who were right, and leave themselves room to issue alarming messages: the world might not get as technically warm but look out, now one degree will become a disaster. They will still be issuing bumper stickers saying “Things are worse than we thought”. Emissions will still be higher than expected, but now floods, snow, and the all purpose “variability” will be beyond expectations. The Hydra lives on. Expect press releases saying “we were too optimistic thinking that two degrees was safe”.
The IPCC’s lowest estimate is still too high
According to the papers Anthony Cox and I reviewed, they are still too high — climate sensitivity from empirical evidence is more likely about 0.4°C. Though the skeptics have been right for years that the IPCC models were exaggerating the warming, the IPCC will still call us deniers. The Joe Romm’s and alarmist commenters will attack the IPCC for being too conservative and careful, but this is exactly what the IPCC needs. The protest fog will help cast a veil of “scientificy-ness” that the IPCC so desperately needs. What is better for it than to be seen to be attacked from both sides? It will feed the idea of a poor but honest agency that is (ha ha) “in no way alarmist” — despite the evidence that they’ve denied the radiosonde data on model feedbacks since at least 2006, denied the importance of the higher resolution ice core data from 1999- 2003, denied that their 1990 predictions were completely and utterly wrong.
David Evans predicted that they would have to do this four years ago
Dr David Evans (my other half) predicted the IPCC would have to turn down their “climate sensitivity knob” in March 2009 at the Heartland Conference. Here is his slide number 18.
 Reducing climate sensitivity solves many issues with the models Way back then, looking at the evidence for the missing hot spot, it was clear that the IPCC had only two choices 1: Turn back the climate sensitivity knob (whereupon lots of missing pieces would fall into place) or 2: Go full on delusional, rage-against-the-data and go double or nothing.
In a sense they’ve done both. One degree is sensible, six degrees of warming is delusional. They’ve gone double and nothing. By painting a broad canvas over their festering wounds they can crop and edit the picture in future “memorabilia” to highlight opposite conclusions on different days of the week, and simultaneously pretend they hit their target, while never acknowledging the failure of earlier shots.
Bjorn Lomborg covers up for dodgy science
Bjorn Lomborg is doing his best to help the IPCC by (as usual) knowing nothing about the science, pretending to be a critic, but half his message is just saying exactly what the IPCC would want him to say. He ought stick to discussing the economics (which he does so well) and stay right out of the science debate, where he helps to protect and ensure funding to corrupt, low standard institutions that have been captured by lobbyists.
“As climate scientist Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M University tweeted: “Summary of upcoming IPCC report: ‘Exactly what we told you in 2007, 2001, 1995, 1990 reports'”
Why did Lomborg bother to uncritically repeat this banal falsehood, one that is easily provable to be 100% wrong? The IPCC made predictions in numbers in 1990 that are known to have failed. Their “best estimate” of future warming keeps changing, even as they deceptively pretend to be getting more “certain”. The figure that gets repeated is the number they make up: “95% certain”.
Lomborg the apologist strikes again:
This highlights the fact that the IPCC has always claimed only that more than half of the temperature rise is due to humans, although in public discussion it has usually been interpreted as all.
The obvious implication that Lomborg doesn’t say is that the IPCC have been very happy to allow these misinterpretations to stand uncorrected. It’s their modus operandi. They put out double-fog, and quietly nurture those who feed the public debate with mistakes which the IPCC can hypocritically distance itself from at any time it so chooses. The IPCC has never corrected the alarmist commentariat, and it deserves to wear their mistakes as its own.
Watch this debate become all about “impacts”
The actual number of degrees is neither here nor there — as long as the IPCC can still talk of “impacts”, western governments feed them money, and the media treat them as if they have a skerrick of barest credibility left, they will keep distorting markets and corrupting science. The IPCC is finally acknowledging they can’t defend the science of Working Group I in 2007. They concede that fight but will shift to using Working Group II reports. It is a different front, but just another muddy stinky trench.
*Apologies for the apostrophies. Fixed. (I think).
9.8 out of 10 based on 115 ratings
 Dr Dennis Jensen in Parliament Dennis Jensen spoke out about the hype around global-warming as long ago as 2004, when there were almost no politicians (or anyone for that matter) daring to publicly mention any skeptical thoughts. It was so risky. What he said then is still largely true.
Jensen obviously knows what science is, can see through the sacred cows, and has the background to foster and filter good science from bad. Science is much more than “climate”, and vested interests pull at it from all directions. We need a science minister who won’t be fooled by slick press releases or activists wearing lab-coats.
Science is broken, web sites are funded to smear senior scientists, namecalling is rife to the highest levels. Government funded work no longer belongs to the public — instead so-called scientists and their universities fight legal battles to hide it from critics, while they run away from public debate. Science has been misused, exploited and corrupted, to justify sweeping changes to the economy, our laws, potentially our way of life. The ARC has lost its way, funding political research disguised as “psychology” that is transparently designed to denigrate voters who disagree with the government. These millions could have gone to medical research instead.
No matter what Jensen says, he will be attacked by the religious acolytes of climate change (see Graham Readfearn) for the most ridiculous of things (like things that he has never said). The country needs to rise above the frivolous and naked attempts to control policies by childish verbal intimidation.
Dennis Jensen has a PhD in Materials Science and Physics, experience at CSIRO and in Defense Science and Technology Organisation. He’s the most highly qualified member of Parliament in any area of science.
He foresaw in 2004 that the theory of man-made global warming was “suspect” and would probably come unstuck — the models were failing, some of the data was being hidden from view, and other data was questionable. This was not a full time research project, nor his specialty, and he held no full time position requiring him to investigate man-made global warming, and yet almost all of what he said then stands the test of time and all the newer results since then has borne out his judgment.
9.3 out of 10 based on 83 ratings
It’s taken a week, but at least one Labor adviser has finally got a better answer as to why the Labor Party suffered a record loss. As long as Labor “spins” its mistakes, not only does it not learn any lessons, but it gives the public no reason to trust that it has changed. Labor suffers so much from not having open ongoing debate. If Kelty (and others) had said this two years ago, they would not be in such a hole now.
The Australian
…the party’s breach of trust with voters over the carbon tax was a bigger cause of its defeat than the disunity cited by senior ALP figures.
Mr Kelty, who is backing Bill Shorten in the mould of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating to become the next ALP leader, said the seeds for last Saturday’s loss could be traced back to the failure of Labor to explain to voters why Kevin Rudd was dumped in favour of Julia Gillard in 2010.
“To be honest, I think they lost the election in two points of history,” Mr Kelty said.
Spin has a price:
“They didn’t ever explain the change of leadership from Rudd to Gillard. Therefore they didn’t lose the next election, but they didn’t win it either. So there goes that first downward trend. People couldn’t understand why it wasn’t explained to them.
Kelty is still mincing words a little. It’s not that people “saw” it as a breach of trust. It was a breach of trust.
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9 out of 10 based on 51 ratings
Readfearn’s quiz is one of the most trashy-teenage-smears I’ve seen in print. (Where else but The Guardian?). Monckton responds to Graham Readfearn’s vacuous attacks on Dennis Jensen M.P. with his trademark withering style. Readfearn had tried to be withering, in a 12 year old kind of way, but petty snark-by-association only proves how incapable he is. Readfearn (journalist) scorns Dr Jensen — PhD in materials engineering, CSIRO researcher, Analyst – Defence Science and Technology Organisation. But Readfearn has nothing at all on Jensen, not a single tiny point, the best he can do is try to paint Jensen with things other people said. It is scorn by proxy — Readfearn is really attacking Monckton. That the Guardian editors thought this worth reproducing says a lot about the intellectual caliber there. – Jo
A journalist with a grudge is a mere propagandist
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
A journalist with a grudge is a mere propagandist. Graham Readfearn, described as “a journalist”, heavily lost a public debate on the climate against me some years ago and has borne a steaming grudge ever since. Readfearn is no seeker after truth. He is an unthinking propagandist for the New Religion of ThermageddonTM.
This sad figure, furious at his fell0w-Socialists’ recent electoral drubbing, now snipes futilely at Dennis Jensen, perhaps the most scientifically-qualified member of either House, and certainly better qualified than the militantly ignorant Readfearn.
Dennis Jensen’s crime, in Readfearn’s eyes, is that “he doesn’t accept the position of the world’s science academies and Australia’s CSIRO that climate change is caused mainly by humans burning fossil fuels and chopping down trees and that this might be bad.”
Stop right there, Graham, baby. Let’s just take a peek at the peer-reviewed literature on this notion that there is some sort of a scientific consensus that Man can claim credit for most of the 0.7° C global warming since 1950.
As Readfearn may know, in May 2013 a comic called Environment Research Letters, which was set up in 2006 precisely to preach the New Religion, published a fairy-tale by five polemical blograts at Queensland Kindergarten and a clutch of their studenty friends at various real universities. These children’s story was that 97.1% of abstracts of almost 12,000 scientific papers published worldwide between 1991 and 2012 endorsed the supposed “scientific consensus” that most post-1950 global warming was down to us. Trouble was, this “once-upon-a-time” fable did not end “happily ever after” for the Queensland kiddiwinks. Legates et al. (2013), in a grown-up, peer-reviewed paper in the long-established Science and Education journal, devastatingly revealed that the Queensland Quixotes themselves had only marked 64 out of 11,944 abstracts as actually saying that most post-1950 warming was manmade. Oops!
One realizes you’re arithmetically challenged, Graham, old fruit, so one’s large and able staff have determined that 64 out of 11,944 is not 97.1%. It’s 0.5%. Oops2!
But Legates et al. went further. They read all 64 abstracts. A third of them – 23, in fact – did not say most post-1950 warming was manmade. Only 41 did so. Oops3!
One’s l. and a. s. have done the math for you again, Grazza. The true length and breadth and with of your imagined “scientific consensus” is not 97.1%. It’s 0.3%. Oops4!
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9.2 out of 10 based on 119 ratings
We have discussed this issue at length on The Senate-Rage! post. I’ve taken those thoughts a bit further in an Op-Ed in The Australian today. There are no comments allowed there so here is a thread for further thoughts and feedback on our new Senate and whether we need to revamp the system. This is my first purely political op-Ed. I find it surprising that almost no one, on any side of politics, is speaking out for the little guys and the disaffected voter. Bob Brown (former Greens senator) calls it a “scandal” of “legally induced frauding”, that “must” change, so I know I am onto something. He thinks Liberal voters don’t know the difference between “liberals” and “liberal dems” and that “Stop The Greens” might fool Green supporters. How stupid are the voters. Really? — Jo
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Three cheers for micros
UNLEASH the sanctimony! Practically everyone on all sides of mainstream politics is not pleased with the success of the micro-parties in the Senate election. For goodness’ sake, car-loving, sports-crazy Australians may have elected car-loving, sports-mad senators. Is that so bad?
The not-quite-elected souls have barely uttered a word in public, but apparently this is such a disaster we need to remake the Senate voting system. Not so fast, I say. This is a beautiful representative democracy at work.
There are cries that no one should be elected on 0.22 per cent of first preferences – but if only first preferences count, why do we number the rest?
About 23 per cent of Australians placed a mini or micro-party first in the Senate list. Does it matter that they peppered their first vote across the board, and it gradually coalesced into a quota? Shouldn’t they have some representation?
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8.8 out of 10 based on 82 ratings
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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