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For all those thoughts that don’t belong…
7.6 out of 10 based on 29 ratings
In May it was all over the newspapers, in June it was shown to be badly flawed. By October, it quietly gets withdrawn. The apology and press release are coming soon…right?
Thanks to help from the Australian Research Council it only took 300,000 dollars and three years to produce a paper that lasted all of three weeks. But it scored the scary headlines! It was “confirmation”, it was “unprecedented warming”, and it was a scientific certainty that was based on “27 natural climate records” and “over the last 1000 years”. What could possibly go wrong? They had 2 whole proxies that went right back a thousand years, and they’d used computers (!) to rehash the data 3000 ways! Frankly, I’m surprised it lasted three weeks. Let’s remember that if one single journalist had simply asked “how much colder was it in 1200AD?” Gergis, Karoly and the rest would have had to say “0.09 of a degree”. No one asked. But Gergis et al, had a proxy in Tasmania, and another in New Zealand, and they were “confident” they could calculate the whole grand continental collective temperature to nine one hundredths of a degree? Seriously.
As Mike E then pointed out in comments, the error margin was larger than the result:
“The average reconstructed temperature anomaly in Australasia during A.D. 1238–1267, the warmest 30-year pre-instrumental period, is 0.09°C (±0.19°C) below 1961–1990 levels.”
Kudos to the team at Climate Audit (especially to Jean S and Nick Stokes) who uncovered a problem so significant, that ultimately it could not be ignored, even if it could be glossed over, delayed, and put on hold for months in the interim.
The science communication didn’t match the science
The headlines I listed back then:
“1000 years of climate data confirms Australia’s warming” said the press release from University of Melbourne. It was picked up by The Guardian: “Australasia has hottest 60 years in a millennium, scientists find”; The Age and The Australian led with “Warming since 1950 ‘unprecedented’. The story was on ABC 24 and ABC news where Gergis proclaimed:” there are no other warm periods in the last 1000 years that match the warming experienced in Australasia since 1950.” It was all over the ABC including ABC Radio National, and they were “95% certain“! On ABC AM, “the last five decades years in Australia have been the warmest. ” Plus there were pages in Science Alert, Campus Daily Eco news, The Conversation, Real Climate* and Think Progress.
Perhaps commenters could get in touch with the news organisations and bloggers above and encourage them to correct the record? No doubt they will be racing to make sure Australians are not misinformed, or overly alarmed without reason.
Prof Lewandowsky tells us that even once bad science is corrected, people often remember the misinformation instead of the correction. So no doubt, he’ll be keen to help us repeat that the Gergis paper should not have been published, its results should not have been promoted, and their certainty was misplaced.
Now all scientists are human, and everyone makes mistakes, so it’s up to Joelle Gergis and David Karoly now to correct the record.
Will anyone thank the skeptical scientists who found the mistake?
(H/t Richard Tol, and Marc Morano).
9.6 out of 10 based on 163 ratings
UPDATED (Already)
Money is grubby thing, but financial independence means freedom. Freedom to spend time writing what a heart believes instead of what an employer demands. (Freedom to follow the most inexplicable whim — like tossing the 9-5 day to debate details of dendroclimatology with people who detest you). I wouldn’t be able to indulge in the luxury of writing this blog if it weren’t for the gold shares that keep food on the table.
Next Monday David is speaking at The Gold Symposium in Sydney. (I’ll be in the audience.) Who should go? — only people who don’t want to be poor. I want to see both these independent conferences succeed ( The AEF too), I want to share the word about both money and science, and I want to help independent spirits meet up. That’s why I’m giving them both a shameless plug before the article. There is a big overlap between gold and skepticism: skeptical of government science often means skeptical of government money too (see We are all Austrians now). For the pure-science readers here, it may all seem thoroughly odd, but while some will paint gold as a fatuous symbol of pointless wealth – and sometimes it is, the flip side is that its real use is an anti-cheating device. It helps fight the endless battle against corruption. It makes it harder for governments to silently take your purchasing power through inflation. There is an independent libertarian streak running through both communities. David’s speeches on monetary history and our current financial woes have touched a nerve, and received rave reviews in South Africa and Alaska. The article below covers only a slice of what he’ll talk about, but as you can tell, it’s big-picture stuff. It’s all those questions economists and investors should have been asking from the start. We are at a special point in financial history. If you don’t understand where money comes from, how it’s “made”, and why your wealth can be quietly stolen even as the dollars increase in your account — then you won’t see what’s coming. David has been predicting the price of gold would rise for ten years, but large financial houses have predicted the opposite year after year. He was right.
There is still time to get tickets to join us at the Gold Symposium (Mon and Tues, 22 – 23 October 0212) and The AEF conference: “The Rational Environmentalist” which David is also speaking at, and I’m attending on Saturday (20 October 2012) this weekend.
– Jo
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Guest post Dr David Evans
Why Gold?
The reasons for the gold price to increase are intensifying, not going away.
This is the end-game of the world’s deepest and broadest bubble ever, which began in 1982. In a very real and literal sense, modern money is debt — it’s an IOU you can trade for something you value. So the ratio of all the debt in society to GDP measures the amount of money.
The critical debt-to-GDP ratio is normally around 150%. There have been two significant excursions above this value. The first was in the 1920’s, where it reached 196% in 1929 at the onset of the Great Depression (the GDP crashed harder than the money supply, sending the ratio even higher for a while). The other is since 1982, where it reached 230% by 1987 when we also had a stock market crash. Rather than do nothing like the central banks in 1929, the central banks in 1987 made cheap loans widely available, so there was no shortage of money. The bubble powered on, assisted by changes in banking rules to make money manufacture ever easier, and had soared to 375% in the US in 2008 when the GFC hit. It is now around 350% in the US – in Europe it’s even worse, around 450%. It’s global, so there is no unaffected party with which to trade our way out.
Central banks learned from the Great Depression not to let the money supply decrease. But debt/bank-money/credit creation in the private sector faltered in 2008, due to a lack of ability to pay more interest and due to a lack of unencumbered collateral. This pricked the bubble, and it’s been falling (deleveraging) since. Governments stepped in to keep the money supply up, mistaking the bubble conditions of the previous two decades for “normal”. After four years, governments are increasingly losing their ability to borrow, so are having to resort to the last option—printing new base money directly.
This is the post-bubble normal. Whenever it comes to the crunch, governments and their central banks print: QE1, QE2, QE3, LTRO, OTM, etc. Everyone talks about austerity and deflation, but in a democracy there is no option: there are many borrowers and few lenders, too many votes to buy, and powerful corporates have debt which they would prefer to repay in smaller future dollars. Basically, most of the electorate at this stage thinks it would prefer debt-default via inflation.
Yes, governments today don’t literally print money. Nowadays they type in a number into an account at the central bank (technically they must buy something in doing so — this is called “monetization” — so the size of the central bank’s balance sheet is the amount of base money). The root cause of the bubble was over-manufacture of money by central and commercial banks, because these folk have the ability to create money out of nothing. No matter what the safeguards, that power is always eventually abused.
Gold, on the other hand, is the old currency. It evolved in the marketplace as the preferred money over the last 5,000 years, before the rise of big government. It is honest, because you have to earn it before you can spend it — you cannot just print some up when required. Even digging it out of the ground in the first place costs almost much as it’s worth.
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7.8 out of 10 based on 43 ratings
Prof Stephan Lewandowsky had to make an ethics committee application in order to survey anti-skeptics to “find out” whether skeptics are conspiracy mad nutters (as you would). Simon Turnill launched an FOI to ask for information and has received some information. Turnill wondered why the application seemed so unrelated to the survey. I pointed out that I’d seen a different Lewandowsky paper that fitted the description in the application. Simon hunted and found Popular Consensus: Climate Change Set to Continue (where Lewandowsky shows people in the Hay St. Mall, in Perth, some “stock market” graphs and asks them to extrapolate the trend).
Lewandowsky appears to have obtained an ethics approval for this bland paper, and then put in a last minute request for a “slight modification” which was for an entirely different survey for a different purpose and an unrelated paper, and which, as it happens, uses an internet survey rather than a face to face one. But apart from that… it was nearly the same.
Worse, Turnill found that by the time Lewandowsky was finalizing the ethics application in August 2010, he’d already done that bland survey fully 7 months before, and the paper was almost finished. The submitted paper was received on Sept 7th 2010 (the day after he started sending emails to skeptics under the name of his assistant Charles Hanich). Turnill notes that Lewandowsky refers to “The Survey” in the future tense and as if there was only one survey.
The 40 new questions and all the other changes were approved by the Ethics Committee in less than 24 hours. (This is the same ethics committee that apparently took days to decide whether there were privacy issues preventing Lewandowsky from publishing the names of the skeptic leaning blogs and emails which he had chosen to approach in the name of his ARC taxpayer funded research. Hmm. Could those bloggers be offended by being approached by UWA? Really? It was never a privacy issue, it was something that should have been in his published methods).
This is the same ethics team which approved him hiding his name from skeptics (but not from believers) — allegedly because I had written this post where I point out Lewandowsky uses name-calling and logical errors to stop people discussing evidence.
Steve McIntyre writes that Lewandowsky justified withholding his name for fear that he would contaminate the results. “Nonetheless, Lewandowsky’s name was prominently displayed at some of the anti-skeptic blogs. Lewandowsky’s fears that the survey would be contaminated seem to have been justified.”
Simon has gone into details of the ethics of human research.
He notes that one of the duties of a researcher is to “ensure that respect for the participants is not compromised by the aims of the research”.
Simon Turnill wonders how much respect Lewandowsky can give:
“Does the research raise questions regarding “respect”? Given Prof Lewandowsky is on the record, well prior to the research being carried out, that he was of the opinion that climate scepticism was linked to far-fetched conspiracy theory ideation (see here), it could be argued that there was a substantial risk of humiliation or disrespectful treatment of participants, given that it may be argued that the intention of the research was to make that link – which in itself is objectively demeaning (either to the participants or a subset of the “wider community”). Even if it did not reach the threshold for “harm” could be regarded at least as a “discomfort”.
There is something creep-wrong about paying a scientist to study people he hates.
Ethically, the benefits of the research are supposed to outweigh the risks.
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9.3 out of 10 based on 53 ratings
It’s hard to measure sea levels, because land often moves up and down too (which is known as “isostatic“). But Australia is stable tectonically, so the Australian sea-level record is more useful than most. It preserves the holocene era and the rises and falls, and correspond more with glacio-eustatic (ice equivalent) sea-level changes, rather than changes in land masses.
During the coldest days of the last ice age (known as a glacial maximum) 20,000 years ago, the oceans were 125m lower than today. They peaked at around 1 -2 meters higher than present between 9000 and 5000 years ago, and have been trending down ever since. Our current rate of 30cm/century (if that continues) hardly seems unprecedented or highly unusual. And 10% of that is apparently due to an isostatic “adjustment”. Worse, if you look at the raw data, the rate is closer to zero. Hmm. Lucky we have all those adjustments eh?
If Australian sea levels keep falling at this rate, we might really need to save That Reef.
Clearly there are many details yet to be worked out about sea-levels.
That phenomenal rise out of the ice age:
 …
WA and NSW coastlines are considered the most stable
“Bryant (1992) reviewed the variable sea-level highstands of the last interglacial (based on the analysis of Murray-Wallace and Belperio, 1991) and mid-Holocene around Australia and found that there was possible downwarping of northern Australia and up warping along the southern edge of the continent (including Tasmania). Most of the east coast of New South Wales and west coast of Western Australia were classed as relatively stable.
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8.5 out of 10 based on 61 ratings
Anything you want to discuss? – Jo
8.4 out of 10 based on 14 ratings
Follow the money. As usual the Green trail ends at a Greenback (so-to-speak). In this case it’s the euro-colored kind. The EU is focusing on “first generation” biofuels — corn, soy, sugar and palm oil — which pushes up prices of food, and cuts down forests. (In a recent study, sugar cane ethanol was shown to produce 10 times the pollution of gasoline and diesel.) In contrast “second generation” biofuels are waste products. If the EU were interested in the environment, they would favour the second type. Instead, the policy hurts the poor and enriches the rich and does little to help the environment.
In 2010, Indur Goklany calculated the additional mortality burden of biofuels policies and found that nearly 200,000 people died in that year alone because of efforts to use biofuels to reduce CO2 emissions.
Where are the Greens protests?
Jo
The press release:
Biofuels benefit billionaires
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8.5 out of 10 based on 56 ratings
In a move of Olympian audacity, Seth Borenstein keeps a straight face and shamelessly shifts to pretending that more Antarctic sea-ice fits their climate change theory. Yet again climate models fail to predict things in advance, they only do the post modern type of prediction — the bury-my-bewilderment type, after the fact. Once more, nothing can disprove the theory of man-made climate catastrophe.
The oceans are warming, but that now means less sea ice in the Arctic, and more sea-ice in the Antarctic. Of course!
Shifts in wind patterns and the giant ozone hole over the Antarctic this time of year — both related to human activity — are probably behind the increase in ice, experts say. This subtle growth in winter sea ice since scientists began measuring it in 1979 was initially surprising, they say, but makes sense the more it is studied.
The only point of science is to predict things. But when alarmist predictions turn out to be wrong, Borenstein and co don’t adjust the theory, they pretend post hoc that the new results “fitted” all along, and radiate collective amnesia about the hundreds of times they “experts” predicted the opposite.
Antarctic sea ice hit record highs in late September. Skeptics pointed out that out, and asked why alarmists didn’t mention it, and news outlets ignored it. It’s taken the PR team three long weeks to come up with the big idea that really, this doesn’t show the models are wrong for the 40th time. In PR it helps to pretend your scientists are not surprised.
“Antarctic sea ice hasn’t seen these big reductions we’ve seen in the Arctic. This is not a surprise to us,” said climate scientist Mark Serreze, director of the NSIDC.
No surprise? But look at what they used to say:
The IPCC Experts in AR4 prediction (thanks to Bishop Hill)
“In 20th- and 21st-century simulations, antarctic sea ice cover is projected to decrease more slowly than in the Arctic (Figures 10.13c,d and 10.14),”
In other words, they didn’t predict the outcome, and they didn’t get the cause right either, but as long as they can pretend it’s man-made they can keep telling us off in the press, and asking for larger grants.
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9 out of 10 based on 81 ratings
When everything else about being Green turns out to be a pox on the environment, it’s no surprise that electric cars are too.
The Norwegian University of Science and Technology study found greenhouse gas emissions [of electric cars] rose dramatically if coal was used to produce the electricity.
Electric car factories also emitted more toxic waste than conventional car factories, their report in the Journal of Industrial Ecology said.
So electric cars are only bad if they are powered by coal fired electricity, or made in a factory. Oh.
Presumably the aspiring Green needs a hand-made hydroelectric car, right? That, or the kind of car that has 18 gears, a chain and two wheels.
The kicker with electric vehicles, or EVs, is that awful secret that batteries don’t grow on trees, don’t recharge spontaneously either, and need replacing every five years or so. There is no getting around the fact that electric vehicles need electricity. They may not emit any evil CO2 themselves, but they have to get those electrons from somewhere, and in most places that’s from coal.
And it wasn’t just the coal, it was other stages of the “life-cycle” too. The production of EVs produced about twice as much CO2 (which makes me think the headline is wrong, and actually Electric Cars are better for the environment). But it’s not just about carbon emissions, it about the batteries, the minerals, the magnets, nearly everything really.
“Across the other impacts considered in the analysis including potential for effects related to acid rain, airborne particulate matter, smog, human toxicity, ecosystem toxicity and depletion of fossil fuel and mineral resources, electric vehicles consistently perform worse or on par with modern internal combustion engine vehicles, despite virtually zero direct emissions during operation,” according to Prof Stromman.
Figure 1 (below) compares different kinds of cars, different fuel sources, different batteries, and looks at the life-cycle total damage. Normal cars are labelled ICEV (internal combustion engine vehicle). Electric vehicle = EV. So note the difference between the gas guzzling type of car (“IECV D” for diesel and “IECV G” for gasoline) and the EV type of cars powered by NG (Natural Gas) or C (Coal). Source .
 Figure 1 compares six transportation technologies in terms of ten life cycle environmental impact categories. The cases represent an LiNCM or LiFePO4 EV powered by European average electricity (Euro), an LiNCM EV powered by either natural gas (NG) or coal (C) electricity, and an ICEV [normal internal combustion engine car] powered by either gasoline (G) or diesel (D). Impacts are broken down in terms of life cycle stages and normalized to the greatest impact. Differences between the impacts of the two EV options arise solely from differences in the production of the batteries. Figure 1. Normalized impacts of vehicle production. Results for each impact category have been normalized to the largest total impact. Global warming (GWP), terrestrial acidification (TAP), particulate matter formation (PMFP), photochemical oxidation formation (POFP), human toxicity (HTP), freshwater eco-toxicity (FETP), terrestrial eco-toxicity (TETP), freshwater eutrophication (FEP), mineral resource depletion (MDP), fossil resource depletion (FDP), internal combustion engine vehicle (ICEV), electric vehicle (EV), lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4), lithium nickel cobalt manganese (LiNCM), coal (C), natural gas (NG), European electricity mix (Euro). Here in Australia, 85% of the electricity comes from coal. For electric cars downunder, the message is clear:
…in regions where fossil fuels are the main sources of power, electric cars offer no benefits and may even cause more harm, the report said.
In the end, it’s not that you can pick between a petrol, diesel or electric car, its that you can choose fossil fuels or fossil fuels. Will that be liquid fuel or the solid burned-at-a-distance kind? It’s a coal-powered-car indeed.
Luckily for the environment, there aren’t many electric cars on the road downunder. Better Place (that’s a company name) are trying to set up a network in Melbourne.
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8.8 out of 10 based on 62 ratings
At the end of next week, the Australian Environment Foundation is hosting its annual conference. I had such a good time at the last one I attended (in 2009) that I’m going again, this time, not as a speaker, but just to be there. Bob Carter is attending too. This is one of the rare events this year to spend time with passionate rational people in Australia — people who are interested in the outcomes, not just the intentions. Find out the latest developments in protecting the environment with a pragmatic, science-based approach. And it’s not just about the speeches, the conference also includes a Tall Ships Cruise, a Gala Dinner, informal drinks, and an open forum.
The conference covers the science of fisheries, wind farms, water resources, temperature records, indigenous land-management and the economics (from a former reserve bank board member) of the carbon tax.
Costs between $85 – $250 (depending on membership and the events chosen). Details: Word, pdf or PayPal
 Little Green Lies, by Jeff Bennett Professor of Environmental Management in the Crawford School of Economics and Government, ANU Saturday October 20th
The annual conference will be addressed by the following speakers:
- Former diplomat and Trade Commissioner, Alan Oxley on Greens and sustainable development
- Carbon modeller, Dr David Evans on demonising carbon dioxide
- Former Reserve Bank board member, Dick Warburton AO on taxing carbon dioxide
- Acoustical engineer, Steven Cooper will pose the question: Are wind farms too close to communities?
- Associate Professor Stewart Franks will discuss water security and climate change
- Marine biologist Dr Walter Starck will ask: Are fisheries or science in decline?
- Dr David Stockwell will discuss his latest paper: Is the temperature or the temperature record rising?
3 pm – 5.30 pm Tall Ship Discovery cruise on Sydney Harbour
7.00 pm Gala Dinner. Dinner Speaker Professor Jeff Bennett (Author of Little Green Lies)
Sunday October 21st
7.30am Conference Breakfast
8.00am Author of The Biggest Estate on Earth— Bill Gammage
9.30am Annual General Meeting followed by an Open Forum
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7.8 out of 10 based on 40 ratings
Some skeptics wonder why I bother pursing and documenting the problems with Lewandowsky et al 2012 and with the blog ShapingTomorrowsWorld. They figure that all skeptics now know the papers dismal failings, and it’s clear that Lewandowsky is unlikely to be grateful for the help.
But Lewandowsky exposes people higher up to awkward questions. Why do they fund work so unscientific? Why do they allow such hypocrisy and bias on a government funded publication? Are standards at the University of Western Australia (UWA) so low that they can’t find a Professor who understands the scientific method, and can reason without name-calling? Aren’t other statisticians at UWA concerned at what Lewandowsky is doing to the reputation of “UWA Statistics”? Finally, aren’t the scientists who missed out on ARC funding angry that our taxpayer funds are given instead to someone who apparently uses the funds to promote his personal political views, instead of in the pursuit of knowledge? (See: Lewandowsky gets $1.7m of taxpayer funds to denigrate people who disagree with him)
The abject incompetence is a gift to us. Rarely is a study so outrageously bad that people with no scientific background can understand why it has no value and was never likely to produce anything useful. Behind the scenes, people are writing to the staff at the University of Western Australia at several levels.
Michael Kile (see below) has gone a step further and has raised the issue at the last UWA Convocation meeting on Sept 21 to put it on the official document trail. The Vice Chancellor was in attendance. The Chairman, who is Warden of Convocation, also happens to be on the board of the blog: ShapingTomorrowsWorld, where Lewandowsky writes. Hmm.
It may be purely coincidental, but since this meeting Lewandowsky has not posted anything on his blog. Steve McIntyre has posted two further articles (here and here). Has someone had a quiet word to Lewandowsky? Plus, we note, Psychological Science must be due to release its October journal, but there is no mention of the paper … yet.
I particularly like Kile’s point that the blog policy declares that No ad hominem attacks are allowed (Note 4). So commenters are warned against using the words conspiracy or denier, and yet Lewandowsky himself can write a peer reviewed paper which does exactly that. His research apparently amounts to rank namecalling, discussing “deniers” who believe in any conspiracy — as such, the paper is just peer reviewed defamation by any other name.
If no further progress is made there is an option to call an Extraordinary Meeting of Convocation at UWA to resolve this issue, which would attract attention. Oh yes, this would be quite unusual step. When I searched for ‘“Extraordinary meeting of convocation” UWA’ it turns up only one hit globally (which, as it happens, is for a different university).
If you happen to be a member of Convocation at UWA please get in touch with me, “joanne AT joannenova.com.au”. We would like to hear from you.
— Jo
Guest Post by Michael Kile
STATEMENT TO THE SECOND ORDINARY MEETING OF CONVOCATION FOR 2012
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9 out of 10 based on 87 ratings
 Credit: S. Ross et al., UNCW We already know that pH varies naturally across the oceans of the world. In some sites, it varies more in a single day than global oceans are likely to face in a century.
But cold water corals live in deep water, are slow growing, and hard to study.
Six years ago, experts in cold water corals were telling us how they would be likely to fall victim to ocean acidification first, and that they believed this for good reasons but with little experimental data. But about a year ago data came out (by one of those same experts) showing that rather than being the badly affected, cold water corals adapted to effectively very high levels of CO2 and possibly even increased their calcification rates. Eight days after the pH was changed suddenly, the corals did worse. But when the experiment was continued for six months, the results turned right around. The researchers pointed out how useful longer studies are: “This is the first evidence of successful acclimation in a coral species to ocean acidification, emphasizing the general need for long-term incubations”. The paper is called “Acclimation to ocean acidification during long-term CO2 exposure in the cold-water coral Lophelia pertusa.” The pH fell as low as 7.75 in the long term study (from the normal pH of about 8.1).
It’s highly unlikely the atmospheric levels of CO2 will reach 1,000 ppm in the next couple of centuries, but if they did, it appears that at least one major and widespread species of cold water coral can adapt within six months. Co2 feeds plant life above the water, and atmospheric levels were much higher during the time that corals evolved. That doesn’t guarantee anything, but suggests scientists could have been more cautious in predicting a disaster when they didn’t have the data.
 In short term studies the growth of a major cold water coral slows as CO2 levels rise The results:
 In 6 month studies, even very high levels of CO2 were not detrimental to cold water corals. Indeed the corals appeared to grow faster. In 2006 experts thought Cold Water Corals would be some of the first to suffer
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9.5 out of 10 based on 52 ratings
Good on you Chris Tangey.
 Chris Tangey captured moving images of a dust storm picking up a bushfire. He’s turned down some income to stand on his principles.
Al Gore wanted to use the awesome shots of a dust devil picking up a bushfire, which happened on Sept 11, 360km southwest of Alice Springs at Curtin Springs Station. When Al Gores office asked for rights to use the footage, Tangey knocked him back. He felt its use in a climate change setting would be “deliberately deceptive” and that it was “difficult for me to imagine a fire event less relevant”.
“I am aware that you may have missed the reporting on the very localised nature of this firestorm,” Tangey wrote. “However, in any case, I am confused as to why you would offer to buy a licence to use it at all unless you had conducted even elementary research which might indicate that this Mt Conner event had direct linkage to global warming/climate change.”
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9.3 out of 10 based on 120 ratings
by Joanne Nova and Anthony Cox
UPDATED: See also Has the EPA done due diligence on the IPCC Report.
The theory that failed
It takes only one experiment to disprove a theory. The climate models are predicting a global disaster, but the empirical evidence disagrees. The theory of catastrophic man-made global warming has been tested from many independent angles.
The heat is missing from oceans; it’s missing from the upper troposphere. The clouds are not behaving as predicted. The models can’t predict the short term, the regional, or the long term. They don’t predict the past. How could they predict the future?
The models didn’t correctly predict changes in outgoing radiation, or the humidity and temperature trends of the upper troposphere. The single most important fact, dominating everything else, is that the ocean heat content has barely increased since 2003 (and quite possibly decreased) counter to the simulations. In a best case scenario, any increase reported is not enough. Models can’t predict local and regional patterns or seasonal effects, yet modelers add up all the erroneous micro-estimates and claim to produce an accurate macro global forecast. Most of the warming happened in a step change in 1977, yet CO2 has been rising annually.
Observations from every angle point to a similar conclusion
Studies involving 28 million weather balloons, thousands of satellite recordings, 3,000 ocean buoys, temperature recordings from 50 sites in the US and a 1,000 years of temperature proxies suggest that the Global Climate Models overestimate positive feedback and are based on poor assumptions. Observations suggest lower values for climate sensitivity whether we study long-term humidity, upper tropospheric temperature trends, outgoing long wave radiation, cloud cover changes, or the changes in the heat content of the vast oceans.
Continued faith in flawed models breaks central tenets of science
The two things which make science different from religion are that nothing in science is sacred, and everything in science must ultimately fit with observations of the real world. While a theory may never be 100% proven, it can be disproven. The pieces of the climate jigsaw are coming together. The observations suggest that the warming effect of man-made emissions of CO2 has been exaggerated by a factor of 3 – 7 in computer simulations.
Observations show major flaws
- The missing heat is not in the ocean 8 – 14
- Satellites show a warmer Earth is releasing extra energy to space 15 -17
- The models get core assumptions wrong – the hot spot is missing 22 – 26, 28 – 31
- Clouds cool the planet as it warms 38 – 56
- The models are wrong on a local, regional, or continental scale. 63- 64
- Eight different methods suggest a climate sensitivity of 0.4°C 66
- Has CO2 warmed the planet at all in the last 50 years? It’s harder to tell than you think. 70
- Even if we assume it’s warmed since 1979, and assume that it was all CO2, if so, feedbacks are zero — disaster averted. 71
- It was as warm or warmer 1000 years ago. Models can’t explain that. It wasn’t CO2. The models can’t predict past episodes of warming, so why would they predict future ones?
 Figure 1 Climate Sensitivity Comparison (empirical methods versus models, for a doubling of the CO2 level). The direct effect of CO2 is only 1.2C
The IPCC estimates that carbon dioxide’s direct effect is 1.2 °C1 of warming (that is, before feedbacks are taken into account) for each doubling of the carbon dioxide level. Models amplify that warming with assumptions about positive feedback (see the blue region of model estimates in the graph below). But observations show that net feedback is probably negative, which would instead reduce the direct effect of the extra carbon dioxide.
While independent scientists point to the empirical evidence, government funded scientists argue that a majority of scientists, a consensus, support the theory that a man-made catastrophe is coming.2 This is plainly unscientific and a logical fallacy. The test of scientific knowledge is through experiment and observation. The only evidence the government scientists provide on the key points of attribution (the cause of the warming) come from simulations of the climate done with computers. Those models are unverified, and when tested, have “no skill” at predicting the climate. Scientists may claim otherwise, but no single model is proficient, rather a selection of models has “success” with a few parameters.
A multitude of observations are in rough agreement that any increase in global average temperature caused by a doubling of CO2 is more likely to be about half a degree than the 3.3 degrees determined by the IPCC3.
The major problem for models: Feedbacks
Our climate changes because of outside effects, called forcings: the sun grows brighter, or its magnetic field changes, ocean currents shift, vegetation changes, or continents move. The Earth is a ball of magma, is a 12,000 km thick, with a thin crust about 12 km of rock on top, who knows what effects come from within? The IPCC recognizes only two types of forcings: greenhouse gases and solar luminosity.
Forcings are difficult to unravel. Harder still are feedbacks, as systems all over the planet simultaneously adjust to changing conditions. In a warmer world, for instance, less ice and more plant-life means less sunlight is reflected to space, which creates more warming. The oceans release carbon dioxide, more water evaporates, humidity changes, sea-levels rise, and all of those consequent changes further affect temperatures.
The feedbacks are not just icing on the cake, but in the IPCC’s view, collectively more powerful than any forcing due directly to CO2. Indeed while CO2 may cause one degree of warming, the feedbacks amplify this – theoretically anyway – by up to three degrees. The major agent of feedback, according to the IPCC, is water vapor (ie. humidity).4 The IPCC could be right about one hundred factors, but if they are using the wrong assumptions about the way clouds and humidity behave, the forecast of an alarming three degrees could be reduced to a forecast of a mere half-a-degree. Some details matter more than others.
Not only is it hard to put a value on all the feedbacks, it’s difficult to know if some changes are a feedback or a forcing5 or even both at once — for example, clouds. Clouds’ impact on climate would obviously change as the world warms (a feedback) but, if solar-magnetic effects change clouds, as now seems likely, clouds could also drive climate change (a forcing).6, 7
The references here independently show that core model assumptions are wrong. Models assume that relative humidity will stay the same over the tropics as the world warms, that clouds are a positive feedback and not a negative one, and that cloud changes are a feedback and not a forcing in their own right. These are three critical and demonstrable errors.
Conclusion
Every which way we measure it, the models predictions don’t match the observations.
The warming we’ve had in the last thirty years implies that at best, we could expect 1°C from a doubling of CO2, but observations from eight natural experiments around the globe, and even on Mars and Venus suggest that 0.4°C is the upper bound of climate sensitivity to any cause. In addition, if Miscolscki is right, and an increase in carbon dioxide leads to a decrease in water vapor, then the sensitivity due to CO2 could be close to zero.
The global warming predictions are contradicted by the data. The vast funding which is now being directed to ‘solving’ global warming should be redirected to researching hypotheses which are consistent with empirical data and confirmed by observable evidence.
The exception proves that the rule is wrong. That is the principle of science. If there is an exception to any rule, and if it can be proved by observation, that rule is wrong.
Richard Feynman, according to The Meaning of it All, 1999
REFERENCES
Combined references from the linked articles.
- Hansen J., A. Lacis, D. Rind, G. Russell, P. Stone, I. Fung, R. Ruedy and J. Lerner, (1984) Climate sensitivity: Analysis of feedback mechanisms. In Climate Processes and Climate Sensitivity, AGU Geophysical Monograph 29, Maurice Ewing Vol. 5. J.E. Hansen and T. Takahashi, Eds. American Geophysical Union, pp. 130-163 [Abstract]
- Anderegg, William R. L., James W. Prall,Jacob Haroldand Stephen H. Schneider(2010). Expert credibility in climate change, PNAS, 10.1073 [PDF]
- IPCC, Assessment Report 4, 2007, Working Group 1, The Physical Science Basis, Chapter 10 Box 10.2 p798 [PDF]
- IPCC, Assessment Report 4, 2007, Working Group 1, The Physical Science Basis, Chapter 8. Fig 8.14, p631 [PDF] see also Page 632.
- Andrews, T. and Forster, P.M. (2008) CO2 forcing induces semi-direct effects with consequences for climate feedback interpretations , GeoPhys Res Letter, 35. [abstract]
- Svensmark, H., Bondo, T. and Svensmark, J. 2009. Cosmic ray decreases affect atmospheric aerosols and clouds. Geophysical Research Letters 36: 10.1029/2009GL038429.
- Kirkby, J. et al. (2011) Role of sulphuric acid, ammonia and galactic cosmic rays in atmospheric aerosol nucleation, Nature 476, 429-433 (2011). [Article]
- Pielke Sr., R.A., (2003): Heat storage within the Earth system. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 84, 331-335.
- Chapter 1 of the: Annual Report on the State of the Ocean and the Ocean Observing System for Climate. OCO, NOAA. [HTML]
- Loehle, C., (2009) “Cooling of the global ocean since 2003,” Energy and Environment, Vol. 20, 101–104.
- Douglass, D.H. and Knox, S.R. (2009) “Ocean heat content and Earth’s radiation imbalance,” Physics Letters A, Vol. 373, pp3296–3300.
- Pielke, R. A.., (2008)“A broader view of the role of humans in the climate system,” Physics Today Vol. 61, no. 11, 2008, pp. 54-55.
- von Schuckmann, K., F. Gaillard and P.-Y. Le Traon [2009] Global hydrographic variability patterns during 2003-2008. J. Geophys. Res., 114, C09007, doi:10.1029/2008JC005237 [Abstract] [discussion] [other PDF]
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- Chen, J., B.E. Carlson, and A.D. Del Genio, (2002): Evidence for strengthening of the tropical general circulation in the 1990s. Science, 295, 838-841.
- Cess, R.D. and P.M. Udelhofen, (2003): Climate change during 1985–1999: Cloud interactions determined from satellite measurements. Geophys. Res. Ltrs., 30, No. 1, 1019, doi:10.1029/2002GL016128.
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- Clement, A.C. and B. Soden (2005) The sensitivity of the tropical-mean radiation budget. J. Clim., 18, 3189-3203.
- IPCC, Assessment Report 4, (2007), Working Group 1, The Physical Science Basis, Chapter 8. Fig 8.14 [PDF] Page 631
- NOAA Satellite and Information Service, Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive, Data Coverage. June 8th 2010. [Link]
- Karl et al (2006), Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) 2006 Report, Chapter 1, 1958-1999. Synthesis and Assessment Report 1.1, 2006, CCSP, Chapter 1, p 25, based on Santer et al. 2000; [PDF]
- Karl et al (2006) Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) 2006 Report, Chapter 5, part E of Figure 5.7 in section 5.5 on page 116 [PDF]
- Douglass, D.H., J.R. Christy, B.D. Pearson, and S.F. Singer. (2007). A comparison of tropical temperature trends with model predictions. International Journal of Climatology, Volume 28, Issue 13, pp. 1693-1701, December 2007. [Abstract] [PDF]
- Santer, B. D., P. W. Thorne, L. Haimberger, K. E Taylor, T. M Wigley,. L. Lanzante, J. R. Solomon, M. Free, P. J Gleckler, P. D. Jones, T. R Karl, S. A. Klein, C. Mears, D. Nychka, G. A. Schmidt, S. C. Sherwood and F. J. Wentz (2008), Consistency of modelled and observed temperature trends in the tropical troposphere. International Journal of Climatology, 28: 1703–1722. doi: 10.1002/joc.1756 [Abstract] [PDF]
- McKitrick, R., S. McIntyre, and C. Herman, (2010), Panel and multivariate methods for tests of trend equivalence in climate data series. Atmospheric Science Letters, 11: 270–277. doi: 10.1002/asl.290 [PDF]
- McKitrick, R., McIntyre, S., and Herman, C. (2011) Corrigendum to Panel and multivariate methods for tests of trend equivalence in climate data series, Atmospheric Science Letters, Vol. 11, Issue 4, 270–277. [Abstract]
- Christy J.R., Herman, B., Pielke, Sr., R, 3, Klotzbach, P., McNide, R.T., Hnilo J.J., Spencer R.W., Chase, T. and Douglass, D: (2010) What Do Observational Datasets Say about Modeled Tropospheric Temperature Trends since 1979? Remote Sensing 2010, 2, 2148-2169; doi:10.3390/rs2092148 [PDF]
- Fu, Q, Manabe, S., and Johanson, C. (2011) On the warming in the tropical upper troposphere: Models vs observations, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 38, L15704, doi:10.1029/2011GL048101, 2011 [PDF] [Discussion]
- McKitrick, R. and Vogelsang, T. J. (2011), Multivariate trend comparisons between autocorrelated climate series with general trend regressors, Department of Economics, University of Guelph. [ PDF]
- Stockwell, David R. B. and Cox, A. (2009), Structural break models of climatic regime-shifts: claims and forecasts, Cornell University Library, arXiv10907.1650 [PDF]
- Miskolczi, Ferenc M. and Mlynczak, M. (2004) The greenhouse effect and the spectral decomposition of the clear-sky terrestrial adiation. Idojaras Quarterly Journal of the Hungarian Meteorological Service Vol. 108, No. 4, October–December 2004, pp. 209–251 [PDF]
- Miskolczi, Ferenc M. (2007) Greenhouse effect in semi-transparent planetary atmospheres. Idojaras Quarterly Journal of the Hungarian Meteorological Service Vol. 111, No. 1, January–March 2007, pp. 1–40 [PDF]
- Miskolczi, Ferenc M. (2010), The Stable Stationary Value of the Earth’s Global Average Atmospheric Planck-Weighted Greenhouse-Gas Optical Thickness. Energy & Environment Vol. 21, No. 4, 2010 pp 243-263 [PDF and Discussion]
- Paltridge, G., Arking, A., Pook, M., 2009. Trends in middle- and upper-level tropospheric humidity from NCEP reanalysis data. Theoretical and Applied Climatology, Volume 98, Numbers 3-4, pp. 351-35). [PDF]
- IPCC, Assessment Report 4, 2007, Working Group 1, The Physical Science Basis, Chapter 8. [PDF] Page 610 8.3.1.1.2 “The balance of radiation at the top of the atmosphere”
- IPCC, Assessment Report 4, 2007, Working Group 1, The Physical Science Basis, Chapter 8. [PDF] Page 636 8.6.3.2 “Clouds”
- Zhang, M.H., Lin, W.Y., Klein, S.A., Bacmeister, J.T., Bony, S., Cederwall, R.T., Del Genio, A.D., Hack, J.J., Loeb, N.G., Lohmann, U., Minnis, P., Musat, I., Pincus, R., Stier, P., Suarez, M.J., Webb, M.J., Wu, J.B., Xie, S.C., Yao, M.-S. and Yang, J.H. 2005. Comparing clouds and their seasonal variations in 10 atmospheric general circulation models with satellite measurements. Journal of Geophysical Research 110: D15S02,
- Randall, D., Khairoutdinov, M., Arakawa, A. and Grabowski, W. 2003. Breaking the cloud parameterization deadlock. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 84: 1547-1564.
- Allan, R [2011] Combining satellite data and models to estimate cloud radiative effects at the surface and in the atmosphere. University of Reading [Abstract] [Discussion]
- Croke, M.S., Cess, R.D. and Hameed, S. 1999. Regional cloud cover change associated with global climate change: Case studies for three regions of the United States. Journal of Climate 12: 2128-2134
- Herman, J.R., Larko, D., Celarier, E. and Ziemke, J. 2001. Changes in the Earth’s UV reflectivity from the surface, clouds, and aerosols. Journal of Geophysical Research 106: 5353-5368
- Spencer, R.W., Braswell, W.D., Christy, J.R., Hnilo, J. (2007). Cloud and radiation budget changes associated with tropical intraseasonal oscillations. Geophysical Research Letters, 34, L15707, doi:10.1029/2007/GL029698. [PDF]
- IPCC, Assessment Report 4, 2007, Working Group 1, The Physical Science Basis, Chapter 8. (see 8.6.3.2) [PDF]
- Kirkby, J. et al. (2011) Role of sulphuric acid, ammonia and galactic cosmic rays in atmospheric aerosol nucleation, Nature 476, 429-433 (2011). | Article
- Svensmark, H. 1998. Influence of cosmic rays on earth’s climate. Physical Review Letters 81: 5027-5030. [Discussion CO2Science]
- Svensmark, H. and Friis-Christensen, E.: Variation of cosmic ray flux and global cloud coverage – a missing link in solar-climate relationships, J. Atmos. Sol. Terr. Phys., 59, 1225–1232, 1997.
- Mauas, P., Flamenco, E., Buccino, A. (2008) “Solar Forcing of the Stream Flow of a Continental Scale South American River”, Instituto de Astronomı´a y Fı´sica del Espacio, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Physical Review Letters 101 [http://www.iafe.uba.ar/httpdocs/reprint_parana.pdf])
- Alexander, W., Bailey, F., Bredenkamp, B., van der Merwe, A., and Willemse, N. (2007) Journal of the South African Institution of Civil Engineering, Vol. 49 No 2 [PDF]
- Shaviv, N.J. (2008) Using the oceans as a calorimeter to quantify the solar radiative forcing. Journal of Geophysical Research 113: 10.1029/2007JA012989. [CO2 Science discussion]
- Herschel, W. 1801, in Philosphical Transactions of the Royal Society, London, 265 and 354. (See here, and here)
- Spencer, R., and W.D. Braswell. (2008). Potential biases in feedback diagnosis from observations data: a simple model demonstration. Journal of Climate, 21, 5624-5628.
- Spencer, R.W., and W.D. Braswell, (2010), On the diagnosis of radiative feedback in the presence of unknown radiative forcing, J. Geophys. Res, 115, D16109
- Spencer, R. W.; Braswell, W.D. (2011) On the Misdiagnosis of Climate Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance, Remote Sens. 2011, 3, 1603-1613. [PDF]
- Pielke Sr., R.A., 2003: Heat storage within the Earth system. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 84, 331-335.
- Chapter 1 of the: Annual Report on the State of the Ocean and the Ocean Observing System for Climate. OCO, NOAA. [HTML]
- C. Loehle, “Cooling of the global ocean since 2003,” Energy and Environment, Vol. 20, 2009, 101–104.
- D. H. Douglass and R. S. Knox, “Ocean heat content and Earth’s radiation imbalance,” Physics Letters A, Vol. 373, 2009, 3296–3300.
- R. Pielke Sr., “A broader view of the role of humans in the climate system,” Physics Today Vol. 61, no. 11, 2008, pp. 54-55.
- von Schuckmann, K., F. Gaillard and P.-Y. Le Traon [2009] Global hydrographic variability patterns during 2003-2008. J. Geophys. Res., 114, C09007, doi:10.1029/2008JC005237 [Abstract] [discussion] [other PDF]
- Anagnostopoulos, G. G., D. Koutsoyiannis, A. Christofides, A. Efstratiadis, and N. Mamassis, (2010). A comparison of local and aggregated climate model outputs with observed data’, Hydrological Sciences Journal, 55: 7, 1094 — 1110 [PDF]
- Koutsoyiannis, D., Efstratiadis, A., Mamassis, N. & Christofides, A.
(2008) On the credibility of climate predictions. Hydrol. Sci. J.
53(4), 671–684. changes [PDF]
- Real Climate: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/08/hypothesis-testing-and-long-term-memory/langswitch_lang/th/
- Idso, S.B. 1998. CO2-induced global warming: a skeptic’s view of potential climate change. Climate Research 10: 69-82. [abstract] [Discussion]
- Idso SB (1982) A surface air temperature response function for earth’s atmosphere. Boundary-Layer Meteorol 22:227–232
- Quirk, T. (2009). The Australian temperature anomaly, 1910 – 2000. Energy & Environment, 20 (1-2), 97 – 100. [PDF]
- Stockwell, David R. B. and Anthony Cox, [2009], Structural break models of climatic regime-shifts: claims and forecasts, Cornell University Library, arXiv10907.1650 [2009] [PDF] [Discussion]
- McKitrick, R. and Vogelsang, T. J. (2011), Multivariate trend comparisons between autocorrelated climate series with general trend regressors, Department of Economics, University of Guelph. [Discussion paper PDF]
- Douglass, D.H., and J.R. Christy (2008): Limits on CO2 Climate Forcing from Recent Temperature Data of Earth. Energy and Environment, Vol 20, No 1. [Abstract] [Discussion]
- Loehle, C. and J.H. McCulloch. 2008. Correction to: A 2000-year global temperature reconstruction based on non-tree ring proxies. Energy and Environment, 19, 93-100. [Discussion WCR]
- Ljungqvist, Fredrik Charpentier, 2010, A New Reconstruction Of Temperature Variability In The Extra-Tropical Northern Hemisphere During The Last Two Millennia , Geografiska Annaler: Series A, Physical Geography, Volume 92, Number 3, pp. 339-351(13) [abstract]
- Zu, L., et al (2012) An ikaite record of late Holocene climate at the Antarctic Peninsula, Earth and Planetary Sciences Letters, Volumes 325–326, 1 April 2012, Pages 108–115
- IPCC, Assessment Report 4, 2007, Working Group 1 Understanding and Attributing Climate Change, Chapter 9. section 9.4 [IPCC site] Page 684
- Mann, M.E., Bradley, R.S. and Hughes, M.K. (1998) Global scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries. Nature 392: 779-787
- McIntyre, S., and R. McKitrick, 2003. Corrections to the Mann et. al. (1998) Proxy database and Northern Hemispheric average temperature series. Energy & Environment,14, 751-771 [PDF].
- McIntyre, S., and R. McKitrick, 2005. Hockey sticks, principal components, and spurious significance. Geophysical Research Letters, 32, doi:10.1029/2004GL021750. [discussion]
- McShane, Blakely B. and Abraham J. Wyner [2010] A Statistical Analysis of Multiple Temperature Proxies: Are Reconstructions of Surface Temperatures Over the Last 1000 Years Reliable? The Annals of Applied Statistics 2011, Vol. 5, No. 1, 5–44 [PDF]
FOOTNOTES
“Climate Sensitivity” refers to the warming produced by a doubling of CO2 levels.
Forcing is a factor external to or introduced to the climate system which affects, for a period, the radiative balance at the tropopause (the boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere).
A feedback is a change in another quantity in the climate system as a response to a change in a forcing.
Thanks to Tony Cox for his patience.
Thanks to Tony Thomas for editing advice.
9.5 out of 10 based on 240 ratings
Report your site and email troubles here (if you can). I gather some people are getting patchy access, and having trouble emailing me.
We moved the site again last night, and the changes propagate throughout the global network some people appear to be losing access temporarily. As it happens my access is faster than ever — so hopefully yours will be too, soon. (Thank Andrew for that).
Perhaps clear those caches… (yes, that’s a message for all the people who can’t read this ;-)).
Somehow I have about ten articles in draft and none of them quite ready. There is a lot on the boil…
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Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.
Two hundred and fifty years ago the pamphleteers were the bloggers of the day. The Finkelstein plan in Australia is a modern version of the License of the Press under George III. Another excuse to tell people what they are allowed to read.
One John Wilkes was elected MP for Aylesbury in 1757. George III soon-to-be-crowned King, arranged for his friend the Earl of Bute to get the job of PM. Wilkes wasn’t too happy with that. He thought Bute was incompetent, and so when one supporter of Bute started a newsletter called The Briton, it was only eight days later that Wilkes started his own newsletter, called the North Briton in response. Wilkes wrote anonymously each week, but his 45th edition was too much for George III and Wilkes was charged with Libel for accusing the George of lying, and he was tossed in the Tower. He challenged the arrest and won (eventually). His speeches during the trial became famous and had people chanting “liberty and Wilkes” in the streets. Sadly troops fired on the protesters, killing seven, in the Massacre of St George’s Field. The cry of “45” (from the 45th edition) became synonymous with freedom of speech. Wilkes fled at one point to France, but was imprisoned again. The North Briton was then published by William Bingley, who also ended up in goal, and spent two years there without trial. Risky practice, what, speaking your mind.
 (Click to enlarge) Britain has a proud history of democracy, but true democracy is such a fragile construct. Wilkes was initially protected by his position in Parliament, but it didn’t last. Apparently he was also challenged to a duel which left him wounded, expelled from the House of Commons, and though he was re-elected three times, the result was overturned repeatedly by Parliament. So much for the choice of the people. Sheer persistence, and masses of protestors meant eventually Wilkes took his place, and went on to create legislation to stop the government from punishing people who wrote political commentary.
Partly thanks to Wilkes, I can write without fear of being tossed in the Tower. But lest we forgot how fragile that freedom is, we ought revisit the struggle. Andrew Bolt may not face gaol, but he is not free to write his considered opinion either. The Irish voted against the EU so the referendum was rerun, but the British haven’t even had the chance to vote once yet, as apparently it’s beyond the United Kingdom’s elected reps to arrange one. The Australians voted against a Carbon Tax, and got one anyway. And just as it was 250 years ago, the tool of pillory keeps many people from speaking their mind. Political correctness being just another form of bullying opponents.
Recently I was lucky enough to handle an original bound volume of these newsletters. The quote below comes from page 1 of the first. I’ve transcribed the first page here (errors are all mine). Click on the image to read the original.
Thanks to Mark
THE NORTH BRITON
Numb. I. Saturday, June 5, 1762
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There are many details to iron out, but thanks to some pesky hacks, I now have a bigger support team, a larger network of shared expertise, a much larger server and eventually, as we work through the site, a more efficient, faster site, that is more resilient, more stable, with a better back up system. I’ve also had a few very helpful donations.
We’re not protected by a soft media, a large public purse, and we don’t hide behind a censored fake debate as so many do.
They can attack, but it only makes us stronger.
More soon…
Please report things you notice here that need a fix.
We are aware of the thumbs up, and a few missing image links. Tell us how the service works for you.
The Temporary site is still up, and may stay there indefinitely. So if you had a comment or conversation there: Not there yet, Still not there yet, I needed a holiday and “Sunny Days” . Thanks for your patience.
Australian Environment Foundation Conference in Sydney
Meet like-minded people and be a part of some rational science in Sydney on Oct 20 & 21.
David Evans is a keynote speaker, along with Stuart Franks, Alan Oxley, Walter Stark & David Stockwell too. I’ll have more to say on this conference soon. Book your tickets now! Late bookings will miss out on the Harbor Cruise.
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From the file of “Things that would really be catastrophic”. Did a meteor have a role in a major shift in Earth’s Climate?
The start of the Quaternary period (2.588 million years ago, where the Pliocene became Pleistocene) coincides with evidence of a mega tsunami in the South Pacific.
The Eltanin Meteor fell into the South Pacific 2.5 million years ago setting off a (likely) tsunami that was hundreds of meters high and theoretically pushed mass material into the atmosphere which may have contributed to the cooling the globe had already started on. This meteor was hard to detect because it hit the ocean rather than the land. But researchers have pieced together evidence of the mass tsunami on continents around the pacific rim.
 Figure 1. Possible effects of the Eltanin megatsunami. (A) Composite model of wave amplitudes for the South Pacific [modified after Ward and Asphaug (2002) but with a greater decay rate of wave amplitude away from the impact point; this produces lower wave amplitudes on affected coasts, more in line with recent findings but not as low as those proposed by Shuvalov and Trubetskaya (2007)]: ANT, Antarctica; AU, Australia; NZ, New Zealand; SA, South America. (B) Map of
the South Pacific region showing sites discussed in the text (the red dot and concentric red circles highlight the approximate location of the Eltanin asteroid impact, the red dashed line encompasses the geographical extent of
possible Eltanin megatsunami evidence discussed in the text and open blue dots mark locations of sites discussed in the text. (C) Inset of all Antarctic sites discussed in the text. AC, Alexander Channel; BI, Bahia Inglesa; BT, Biscoe Trough; BTr, Bounty Trough; C, Concepcion; Ca, Caldera; CI, Cockburn Island; Cis, Chatham Islands; CR, Chatham Rise; ERS, Eastern Ross Sea; KU, Kurotaki unconformity; MP, Mejillones Peninsula; NSW, New South Wales; PB, Prydz Bay; PC, Prydz Channel; TAM, Transantarctic Mountains; TP, Taitao Peninsula; WB, Wanganui Basin; WI, Windmill Island; WL, Wilkes Land; WRS, Western Ross Sea; WS, Weddell Sea. This figure is available in colour online at wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jqs Bob Beale of UNSW via Science Daily.
“This is the only known deep-ocean impact event on the planet and it’s largely been forgotten because there’s no obvious giant crater to investigate, as there would have been if it had hit a landmass,” says Professor James Goff, lead author of a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Quaternary Science. Goff is co-director of UNSW’s Australia-Pacific Tsunami Research Centre and Natural Hazards Research Laboratory.
“But consider that we’re talking about something the size of a small mountain crashing at very high speed into very deep ocean, between Chile and Antarctica. Unlike a land impact, where the energy of the collision is largely absorbed locally, this would have generated an incredible splash with waves literally hundreds of metres high near the impact site.
As a ‘cene’ changer — that is, from the Pliocene to Pleistocene — Eltanin may have been overall as significant as the meteor that took out the non-flying dinosaurs 65 million years ago. We’re urging our colleagues to carefully reconsider conventional interpretations of the sediments we’re flagging and consider whether these could be instead the result of a mega-tsunami triggered by a meteor.”
From the paper (paywalled)
The Eltanin asteroid is currently the only known impact into a deep ocean (4–5 km) basin, striking the Southern Ocean about 1500 km SSW of Chile (Fig. 1). Although there is no crater on the seafloor, meteoritic material was found in sedimentary rocks
collected at three places 500 km apart. There were also traces of intense erosion as well as the deposition of eroded material
(Gersonde et al., 1997). Gersonde et al. (1997) estimated the asteroid to be between 1 and 4 km in diameter.
Other more recent estimates suggest it must have been less than 2km “a larger size would cause impact melt on the seafloor and create a bottom crater…”
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The Lewandowsky view is Drilling into noise. The McIntyre response: Lewandowsky’s Fake Correlation
My favourite Lewandowsky line is: “We cannot get into the details here…”
McIntyre can and does in gory depth. He posts the equations, the code, the tables, everything. He graphs the residuals, and shows the “severe non-normality” of them. He tests the correlation and finds that the two most obvious fake responses heavily affect the results:
“Lewandowsky is absolutely off-base in his assertion that the examination of outliers is inappropriate statistical analysis. In fact, exactly the opposite is the case: proper statistical analysis REQUIRES the examination of outliers.”
“One can readily see that the two super-scammers (889, 963) contribute essentially 100% (over 100%) actually of the negative correlation between CauseHIV and CYMoon in this calculation.”
Lewandowsky says: “no one who has toyed with our data has thus far exhibited any knowledge of the crucial notion of a latent construct or latent variable.”
McIntyre replies: “Principal components, a frequent topic at this blog, are a form of latent variable analysis.”
As a former graduate of UWA, this is embarrassing. Does UWA not teach and use rigorous statistical methods? Is there no one who can help him?
Plus, when will that “in press” paper be published?
Lewandowsky’s paper was in press as of July 27th, when the Guardian announced its results. But it doesn’t seem to have been published in the September edition of Psychological Science. Nor is it mentioned in the “early releases”. Stan points out most of the September stories were first published in late July. It may mean nothing (a delay of a month), or it may mean the paper is being rewritten, or possibly presages a silent “withdrawal”? Certainly skiphil found a comment by Lewandowsky that suggests the moonlanding paper was being “extended” and was not quite the complete and settled science it was presented as being at The Guardian by Adam Corner, and The Telegraph too. h/t to Stan, Barry, Wayne and Skilhil in comments at CA.
64. Stephan Lewandowsky at 22:04 PM on 14 September, 2012
Questions continue to be raised for further information relating to this paper. My response is threefold:
1. I see little merit in treading over ground that is already clearly stated in the paper (e.g., the elimination of duplicate IP numbers).
2. Several questions concern material that is presently subject to an FOI request. I will let that process run to completion rather than pre-empt it.
3. The supplementary online material for the article is being extended to contain additional information (e.g., the outlier analysis from the preceding post). The online supplement will be released when the typesetting of the article is complete.
Time permitting, I may also write another post or two on topics relating to this paper that are of general interest.
This Friday it will be eight weeks since The Guardian article. In this modern era where anyone can self-publish a book in a day on their home computer, it does seem odd that Psychological Science needs nearly 2 months to typeset an article.
Note point 2 also: No Stephan, no one cares if you “preempt the FOI” — there is no penalty for releasing information that is public property. As a public servant and a scientist(?) the emails, the data and the methods belong to all Australians. Sure, redact the private details, but no one should have to FOI those answers in the first place. That you use the FOI as an excuse to delay providing the answers you owe the public sends a message about your dedication to the honest process of discovery and your conscientious duty as a man who is supposed to serve the public. If you had a clear conscience, and were proud of your work, you’d be only too happy to help people understand your careful responsible impartial dependable work, right?
Lewandowsky’s forgotten warning about computer models
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While stories of the Arctic record fall in sea-ice have been all over the news, all over the world, it’s almost as if the Southern Hemisphere didn’t exist. Right now, this week apparently, the sea ice is at or near record highs (bearing in mind that we’re still only talking 30 years of satellite records, but then, these are the same satellites lapping over the arctic, and if the records are longer there, I expect it’s only by an hour and a half).
 …
h/t Steve Goddard who asks when the National Snow & Ice Data Centre ( NSIDC) will send out the press releases. They appear to be more concerned about the effects of the Antarctic “thinning” trend on penguins this week. Sunshine hours has graphed it in detail.
Cryosphere compares the relentless fall and rise of Antarctic ice here. Millions of square kilometers in staggering, dramatic melts every spring manage to return in staggering dramatic ice formations each and every year.
 (Click to enlarge) I expect that our non-hemispherist unbiased and diligent newspapers will be running with matching ones very soon. Based on news stories like this:
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