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Ray Evans writes a review below of Robert Manne’s essay in The Monthly entitled A Dark Victory: How vested interests defeated climate science. (Forgive me Ray for slipping in one or two thoughts of my own below). Ray Evans is the secretary of The Lavoisier Group one of the first original skeptical groups in Australia (I’ve put a few notes on that at the base of the article). It was Graham Readfearns review (ABC Drum) that apparently brought the Manne article to Ray’s attention.
Dear All,
Readfearn’s review was a lamentation of defeat and disappointment. So I immediately bought a copy of The Monthly and with eager anticipation began to read Robert Manne’s account of the tragedy which he claims has befallen him and his fellow warmists. It was a disappointing read.
There was nothing new in Manne’s arguments seeking to legitimize his passionate belief in imminent climate catastrophe. His palpable anger, bordering on hatred, of the global warming sceptics, or to use his loaded term, denialists, all of whom were Americans, was unsettling.
“While climate change denial . . . exists almost exclusively in the English speaking democracies . . and although it has spread to Canada, Australia and the UK, within the Anglosphere its place of origin and heartland is the US.”
Robert Manne places the sceptical scientists from the US in a political context. He names Frederick Seitz, Fred Singer, William Neirenberg and Robert Jastrow as attached to the Marshall Institute and as “Cold Warriors who had once supported the Vietnam War and the neo-conservative hawkish policies of the early Reagan administration”. As far as I am aware, neither Neirenberg nor Jastrow have played any part in the global warming debate* (See update below).
Richard S Lindzen is undoubtedly the most distinguished scientist within the ranks of the scientifically qualified global warming sceptics. He is Professor of Meteorology at MIT, his publication record is awesome, and his leadership role in sustaining what was originally a small band of scientific brothers (but now much larger) was critical. Robert Manne, although admitting Lindzen’s scientific eminence, then dismissed him as “the fanatically anti-communist Lindzen.”
An important weapon in the warmist armory is the accusation that global warming sceptics are in the pay of the fossil fuel industries; Big Oil is usually cited as the primary villain. The Lavoisier Group whose annual income rarely exceeded $20,000, was routinely dismissed by every Green organisation in Australia as in the pay of the fossil fuel industries. The ratio between the financial resources enjoyed by the warmists (most of their money – including Robert Manne’s salary – comes from the taxpayer) and the sceptics, is at least 100 to 1 [JoNova thinks it’s closer to 5,000 to 1]. And yet, despite this huge advantage, despite the enthusiastic support of the chattering class elites who control the ABC, the Fairfax media, the universities, and what is left of the protestant churches, Manne concludes his lamentation with these two sentences :
The long war the denialist movement had fought against science and against reason, in the US and throughout the English-speaking world, has indeed achieved a famous victory. This is a victory that subsequent generations cursing ours may look upon as perhaps the darkest in the history of humankind”
[Darkest in the history of humankind? Deniers are worse than Pol Pot and The Black Plague? — Jo]
How was this victory possible? There are, in my view, two reasons. The first is mentioned by Manne.
“More importantly, it was becoming clear that the most important effective denialist media weapon was not the newspapers or television but the internet”.
Manne is right here. Just as Gutenberg destroyed the monopoly which the Church had enjoyed for many centuries on publishing the Bible, the writings of the church fathers, and other religious documents, so the internet has destroyed the power which was described in the Climategate emails. This is the power which a small group of people in key institutions such as the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, the Hadley Centre at the UK Met Office, and which, across the Atlantic, included James Hansen at NASA, and Michael Mann, now of Penn State University, (but in 2000 at the University of Virginia), were able to wield by excommunicating (to use religious terminology) any scientist who did not subscribe to the warmist doctrines they were promoting throughout the Anglosphere.
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9.2 out of 10 based on 104 ratings
The Australians must have said something awful.
In the never ending quest to hide information that the taxpayer paid for, the New Zealand trial of skeptics vs alarmists is rising to new heights.
This is a legal case asking for discovery of documents, which is much harder to dodge than a simple FOI. Yet NIWA are putting in an Olympic effort to hide what the Australian BOM (their allies?) have said about their work.
The bottom line is that the NIWA team peer reviewed Australia’s new ACORN temperature set and endorsed it as being “worlds best practice” which (judging by what we’ve seen) it clearly is. What a damning review. The NIWA practice is so bad, that even the Australian BOM can’t return the favor and pretend to say something good about it.
NIWA (New Zealand’s National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research) is the official New Zealand organization responsible for climate pronouncements. They pronounced that the country had warmed almost 1°C during the twentieth century, but, oh dear, when skeptics looked, the raw data showed a rise of only 0.23°C in the same time period. And in the full record, the trend was only a 0.06°C per century since 1850. (During the 20th Century that’s only a 400% exaggeration of the observed trend. It’s more if we look at the whole record.)
This is extreme man-made global warming in action in New Zealand.
This is what the thermometers recorded from 1850 – 2000.
 This is NZ unadjusted temperatures recorded at the sites used in the official 7SS series.
Here another version of those thermometers after adjustments.
This is what man-made global warming looks like.
 This is what man-made global warming looks like. Graph: Warwick Hughes. See the official version on the NIWA site.
The entire NZ record was based on adjustments described in an annex in James Salinger’s 1981 thesis. When the skeptics asked for information on the adjustments they became very difficult to find. After years of searching, NIWA finally admitted the statistical calculations were entirely lost. [See “New Zealand – Unaffected by Global Warming”]
Faced with such an inexplicable, hard-to-believe record, the logical next step was to get justice. (If only that were easy). Read on for a brief summary of the High Court action and the latest news.
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8.5 out of 10 based on 109 ratings
Well well. It is confirmed, this site was hacked at about 11am EST Australia this morning (9pm NY Time). We do not know what the motive was. It appears to be an XSS (Cross Site Script) type hack — for those who are interested. There are many log files to go through. News was posted on WUWT also.
Thanks to the expert help of my Webmaster, it’s been mostly restored within only 3 hours.He was onto it immediately and worked non-stop to unravel the mess. (Some comments are still missing from the weekend threads, we hope we can restore them too.)
UPDATE from my webmaster:
“The attack was undertaken over a 9 hour period using proxy servers from around the world including universities, schools and broadband providers. Unfortunately, hackers believe themselves to be smarter than they are. In this instance they have used the web01.defence.gov.au web server as a proxy which is located at the Woomera Air Force Base. No doubt the Department of Defence will be interested in all the data collected by the jonannenova.com.au web server pertaining to its machines. Additional confirmation will be sought from private broadband suppliers who keep detailed logs of their web traffic.”
Thanks for the patience of readers.
Jo
9.5 out of 10 based on 99 ratings
For all those thoughts that don’t fit somewhere else… –
7.9 out of 10 based on 32 ratings
Firstly — No one wins anything while the people who slag off at scientists get their denigrating name-calling on the front cover of magazines. That said, I’m smiling. Beaming. The man who doesn’t know what science is, admits his team is failing. That has to be good. Real scientists everywhere, smile!
Manne’s argument appears to rest entirely on his mistaken belief that “science” is What The Gods Declare it To Be. For Manne, the Gods are “official climate scientists”. Apparently, only those who are anointed by Government funding have access to The Truth — and their declarations must be obeyed. Manne is so completely under their spell, he is incapable of figuring out how anyone could think anything else.
“For reasonable citizens there ought to be no question easier to answer than whether or not human-caused global warming is real and is threatening the future of the Earth.”
For Manne, planetary atmospheric dynamics are so blindingly clear that only unreasonable citizens could question it. And if there is “no easier question”, then it follows that those who get this question wrong are not just unreasonable but quite possibly, brain dead. Manne’s writing is thick with insults, but thin on reasons.
So how does the arbiter of the reasonable, reason it? Like this:
” Thousands of climate scientists in a variety of discrete disciplines have been exploring the issue for decades. They have reached a consensual conclusion whose existence is easily demonstrated.”
He’s right that the consensus is real (among government funded climate scientists). But that’s not evidence about the climate, it’s evidence about scientific processes, monopoly science, and university culture — not the climate. The problem for Manne is that this assumes that 1/ science-the-human-practice is uncorruptible, and 2/ scientists are unaffected by human ambitions, money, fame, bias or …uh… simple error. Can humans be human? We skeptics think so.
His reasoning is the fallacy known (for a couple of thousand years) as Argument from Authority. The single point that makes science different from a religion is that in science, opinions are always trumped by evidence. There are no high Priests. Manne thinks evidence means studies of the consensus — of how many scientists vote “Yes”. The entire philosophy of science is that evidence comes from things like thermometers, satellites and weather-balloons, not from internet surveys.
It’s an anti-science position. The surveys he quotes are ones like Anderegg, and Doran and Zimmerman. The latter was a two minute survey sent to 10,257 scientists, but the figure of 97% of climate scientists only came from 75 of those people. Comments from scientists outside the 75 are scathing at times. The former study (Anderegg) was a blacklist of scientists, is useless for understanding feedbacks, though works as a proxy for government funding: it shows that more funding of one side of the debate means more papers published from that point of view. To complete the trifecta of trivia, he also quotes Oreskes, whose work was equivalent to a google search on words. Again, confused researchers study proxies for grants instead of proxies for temperature.
The sad thing about the “intellectual left” is that not only does Manne not understand how to do the maths, the sums, and the physics of the climate, but he’s not much good at the human insights into the process of climate research either. Indeed the irony, given the Church’s history of friction with science, is that Archbishop George Pell has a much better grip on both.
Governments have funded thousands of scientists to study one sort of problem. The unwritten rules of climate “science” research are fairly clear: workers will be rewarded if they find one kind of answer, and called a denier, defunded, sacked, and basically exiled in the tea-rooms of universities around Australia if they find any other kind of answer.
What could possibly go wrong?
As always, with “intellectuals” when they analyze their failure, it’s impossible for them to have been defeated by better arguments and stronger evidence. Manne’s synopsis:
“A Dark Victory: How vested interests defeated climate science”
So even though evidence shows the vested interests are 3500 times larger on the believer side, and a $176 billion dollar market hangs for it’s very life on the truth (or not) of the great climate scare, Manne thinks he was beaten by big money. And that kind of thinking is why the intellectuals keep coming up with potty ideas.
I’m guessing Manne has never spoken to a real skeptic, at least not for long. Only someone who studies skeptics through the DeSmog portal could define “denialists” as “orthodox members of a tightly knit group whose natural disposition is not to think for themselves”.
We’re so tightly knit, all 10,000 of us meet in an exotic location for two weeks every year with a mass media congregation, dinners and drinks — no wait, that’s what they do.
Skeptics don’t think for themselves, he declares. It’d be a tad more convincing if it didn’t come from the man who parrots a consensus. He’s the one outsourcing his thinking. It’s psychological projection run riot. Those who think — check the data; those who don’t — poll the crowd.
And as for “orthodox” and organized – any random group of a hundred skeptics would argue 120 different positions. Go on ask them: What’s the most powerful flaw in the man-made warming scare? Is it the economics, the failure of renewables, the irrational need to ignore nuclear energy, or perhaps the thing that really bugs them is the fake nature of the so called “free market solution” — where everything that matters is fixed by the bureaucrats rather than the market? Could the most silly thing about the climate debate be the fact that temperatures have been flat for a decade; the ocean isn’t warming much; the hot spot is missing; the thermometers are next to heat sinks; the ice cores show CO2 rises after the temperature (not before); the thermometer results were always adjusted up and the alarmists hide declines and results, reviews, codes or datasets or all of the above; alarmists also bully and call people names (denier) — boy that’s a red flag for some skeptics. For others ,in the end, even if we behave as obedient pussies and do everything the Gods of science tell us too, we all know that in a hundred years the world will cool by 0C and the seas will fall by no centimeters. (Yes, I’m rounding, but do you really want to fight over those details?)
Skeptics are not the team which has a UN coordinating panel, government funded institutions, or associations, committees, and NGO’s worth hundreds of millions that are devoted to propagating their words. Nor do skeptics have a sympathetic media, or multimillion dollar ad campaigns funded by taxpayers.
Dear Robert, No, you weren’t defeated by a wall of money. You lost, despite your wall of money.
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Most of the 7000 word article is paywalled, but Readfearn also writes at the ABC about it.
REFERENCES
Anderegg, W.R., Prall, J.W. Harold, J.., Schneider, S. (2010) Expert Credibility in Climate Change, Proc Nat Acad Sci. [Abstract] [PDF] [Discussion -Pielke]
Doran and Zimmerman (2009) Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change, Eos, VOLUME 90 NUMBER 3 20 JANUARY 2009 [PDF]
Oreskes, N. (2004), Beyond the ivory tower: The scientific consensus on climate change, Science,
306, 1686–1686 [Full text]
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H/t to Pat for the correction of George Pell’s status: “current Archbishop” it is.
UPDATE: Robert Manne replies at #29. See my reply to that. – Jo
8.7 out of 10 based on 152 ratings
UPDATE: Richard Muller, the man running BEST (Berkley Earth Surface Temperatures) pretends to have been a skeptic who “converted” to believing in man-made global warming. But this was a fake narrative, easily shown by his past quotes. Many major newspapers ran with his propaganda, but now are trying to cover up their failure as “fact checkers”. They did not even do the most basic of investigations. And let’s not forgot that virtually none of them (or Muller either) point out his daughter profits from consulting on “Green” projects.
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It appears skeptics are getting to the Fairfax press (finally!)
The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age both ran with Muller’s claims of being a converted skeptic who found the world was warming (and the preposterous leap that “therefore” we were to blame).
“I saw past the Hot Air on Climate“ is gone (The SMH and The Age return a 404 error).
The SMH even arranged triumphant artwork, the article was given a big splash. But hello, hello, those articles are disappearing down the memory hole. Presumably neither newspaper is proud of having been fooled by Muller — the articles were so quickly blown away when skeptics pointed out that Muller was a fake skeptic, and that his results were highly dubious (special achievement award to Anthony Watts). It can’t help that the other BEST co-founder turned out to have had a career consulting about carbon footprints and green schemes.
If there were hundreds of comments under those articles, they are all gone too.
The original story is still at Berkley Blogs. The story appeared on The New York Times.
Hat tip to reader Hereward Fenton who edits Truth news for the tip-off and the photo above.
“Call me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.” (From the disappeared article.)
If the SMH and Age have been burnt by the Muller experience, that’s an excellent development. All they had to do was check with skeptics before they ran the story and we would have told them that Muller was never a skeptic, and his results depended on thermometers near fermenting sewage vats and square kilometers of tarmac.
That’s three wins for skeptics this week in the Fairfax press
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9.3 out of 10 based on 104 ratings
Today in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, for the first time, David Evans has been published in the Op-Ed section. Something is going on in those newsrooms…? This article, below, simply makes the point that the models amplify the direct effect of CO2 by a factor of three and that is where the most important uncertainties lie. This key factor in the debate — which we cover repeatedly on this blog– has virtually never been made before in these newspapers which are the major dailies for Australia’s two largest cities. Any debate about the effects of CO2 needs to start with the fact that most of the warming in the models comes from amplification of humidity and clouds. If the models were right about water vapor, we would have found that missing hot spot. — Jo PS: The SMH and The AGE have both closed comments already! Have they run out of electrons? Oh my? Or were they afraid the comments looked like a debate?
UPDATE: I’ve just posted that these major dailies have “disappeared” the Muller conversion article too!
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Dr David M.W. Evans
31 Jul 2012
Climate scientists’ theories, flawed as they are, ignore some fundamental data.
Sydney Morning Herald The Age WA Today
In the theory of manmade climate change, two thirds of the predicted warming comes from changes in humidity and clouds, and only one third comes directly from the extra carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
The theory assumes that humidity and clouds amplify the warming directly due to CO2 by a factor of three: extra CO2 warms the ocean surface, causing more evaporation and extra humidity. Water vapor, or humidity, is the main greenhouse gas, so this causes even more surface warming.
Not many people know that. It is the most important feature of the debate, and goes a long way to explaining why warmists and skeptics both insist they are right.
The warmists are correct that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and it causes warming, that CO2 levels have been rising, and that it has been warming.
Serious skeptics agree with all that, but point out that it does not prove that something else isn’t causing most of the warming. As a thought experiment, suppose that the main cause of warming was actually Venusians with ray guns. Then all those things would still be true!
The skeptic’s main suspect is the sun. While the sun’s radiation is roughly constant, its magnetic field varies considerably. This field shields the earth from cosmic rays that, according to recent experiments at the world’s premier atom smasher CERN, might seed clouds. Clouds cool the planet, so if the sun’s magnetic field wanes then it might get cooler here on earth.
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9 out of 10 based on 64 ratings
How independent is this project?
Would BEST have ever seriously published a study showing anything other than a scary warming trend?
This is emblematic of how fans of Climate Change Scares present their efforts with half-truths — lines that are technically “correct” but leave an impression that may be the opposite of the real situation.
Elizabeth Muller is listed as “Founder and Executive Director” of the Berkeley Earth Team along with her father Richard Muller. But since 2008 it appears she’s been earning money as a consultant telling governments how to implement green policies, how to reduce their carbon footprint and how to pick “the right technologies” – presumably meaning the right “Green” technologies.
 Richard and Elizabeth Muller. Image: Paul Sakuma/AP She registered their website and tried to register the trademark herself.
“GreenGov™ is a service offered by Muller & Associates for Governments, International Organizations, non profits, and other organizations that work with Government. The aim is to provide politically-neutral counsel that is broad in scope while rooted in the hard facts of state-of-the-art science and engineering. The key is to make the right patch between the best technologies and the strengths of the government. We know that to be effective the political dimension must be integrated into the technical plan from the start.”
Muller and Associates helps investors profit from investments in alternative energy.
From her “speakers profile”:
“GreenGov provides interdisciplinary knowledge that helps clients determine the best technology for their specific need.
Elizabeth has designed and implemented projects for public sector clients in the developed and in the developing world, helping them to build new policies and strategies for government reform and modernization, collaboration across government ministries and agencies, and strategies for the information society. She has developed numerous techniques for bringing government actors together to build consensus and implement action plans, and has a proven ability to deliver sustainable change in government.”
“Green can be profitable”
“Making Green ICT a Government priority”
“It’s not just about reducing the Carbon footprint for information and communication technologies – though this is also important. But the real breakthrough for Green ICT will be in helping build consensus among stakeholders, and to bring clarity and transparency to “Green” projects.”
Strangely, Elizabeth forgot to mention this on her Berkeley Biography. She said she has advised governments, but not that the aim of that advice was to reduce their carbon footprint, and to select the right green technology. The current organization she lists on her Bio is called CSTransform which is neutrally vague about its aims, except that it’s obviously feeding off Big-Government, so scientific results that suggested that Governments don’t need to save the world by taxing and charging people would not seem to be her first priority. In her bio on the CSTransform site, it does mention her green desires: Elizabeth Muller is a ” leading expert in how governments can use ICT to develop a more sustainable, lower-carbon future.“ Evidently she has not had a skeptical conversion anytime in the last four years, but was happy to work with her Dad, which presumably would have been a very non-obvious thing to do if he was a “skeptic” as he claims he was.
Naturally Elizabeth would be delighted to discover that there was little evidence that a low carbon future was beneficial, necessary or even worth promoting and we are sure she would have overseen BEST in an utterly impartial light. /sarc
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9.2 out of 10 based on 95 ratings
Almost all the coverage of the Muller and BEST results confounds three different points, is poorly researched and mixes up cause and effect. Richard Muller is shamelessly promoting himself as something he is not, and his conclusions are nonsense on stilts that defy rational explanation.
Everyone knows hot air rises off concrete, yet scores of people get befuddled by statistics. The maths-talk is irrelevant. If your analysis tells you that thermometers next to combustion engines and industrial exhaust vents is recording global warming — your analysis is bunk, and we don’t need a peer reviewed paper to say so.
Muller’s three claims:
- He’s a converted skeptic. (Naked, demonstrably wrong, PR.)
- The world has warmed by 0.3C/decade. (He’s half right — he’s only exaggerating 100%.)
- That it’s mostly due to man-made emissions. (Baseless speculation.)
As far as public policies go the only point that matters is 3, but most of the conversation is about 1 and 2. Worse, most journalists and many so-called scientists think evidence for warming is the same as evidence that coal fired power stations did it. How unscientific.
We need to deal with each claim separately.
1. He’s a converted skeptic. No he’s a dishonest alarmist.
Thanks to PopTech for compiling the “Truth on Muller”.
No skeptic I’ve met said that “… carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels will prove to be the greatest pollutant of human history. It is likely to have severe and detrimental effects on global climate.” (Richard Muller, 2003). So perhaps he became a skeptic later? Not so much. Richard Muller, 2008: “There is a consensus that global warming is real. …it’s going to get much, much worse.”
The defining mark of a skeptic is that they never believe simply because there is a “consensus”.
That Muller allows himself to be referred to as a skeptic in publication after publication says it all really. He’s not concerned about accuracy, he’s in this for the PR. We can’t trust the man on anything. If he’ll lie to save the planet, he’ll lie to save the planet. Enough said. I have no respect for him.*
UPDATE: See my new post on how Impartial his daughter and co-founder of BEST is: Elizabeth Muller (Director of BEST) ran a “Green government” consultancy.
2. The world has warmed by 0.3°C/decade. “Half right”.
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9.3 out of 10 based on 83 ratings
It’s all up on Watts Up now.
What Anthony Watts and Evan Jones have revealed is breathtaking.
[Art thanks to: Cartoons by Josh]
This new pre-print paper by Anthony Watts accomplishes so much. Assuming that no major problems are found, the pieces of the jigsaw fit and pass the common sense test. Yes, hot air rises off concrete.
- There goes half the warming trend. The most accurate thermometers in the right places are not recording high trends. High estimates come from combining good records with poor ones then adjusting that up.
- They show Muller and BEST’s latest exaggerated claims of 1.5C are meaningless.
- They show that only class 1 and 2 stations (which are placed well, not next to concrete, car-parks, or air-conditioners) give reliable data and the warming trend from these stations is much lower than the warming trend from Class 3, 4 or 5 stations. It’s what we always knew — thermometers near artificial heat sources are measuring artificial warming, but it’s not the global kind.
- Mueller, BEST, GISS, Hadley and all the others should have removed the data from poor stations entirely. No amount of statistical chicanery can correct the artificial warming effect no matter how you adjust, blend, or homogenize the data.
- Worse, the adjusted data shows an even warmer trend than the warmest and worst stations. That casts a very dark shadow indeed. How honest or impartial are the scientists who adjust data from stations with thermometers near air-conditioners and create more warming? Bad stations have been adjusted up, instead of down, and then the good stations were adjusted up to match the now-really-awful-bad ones. The stench of failure and a lack of dedication to the truth in on show…
You don’t need a PhD to know that thermometers placed in car parks are not measuring global warming.
Only gullible fans of authority would believe the incredulous claim that statistics can correct for gross mismeasurements. Unless those researchers had details about when air-conditioners went on and off, when concrete was laid, relaid, changed to asphalt, when cars parked nearby, and how windspeed affected that warming on an hourly basis — they can’t correct for the errors introduced by those things. They don’t have that data, and even if they did it would be exceedingly unlikely it would be sufficient to extract the signal of regional warming from the noise of the artificial heat sources around the thermometer. It would be a whole PhD thesis just to accurately account for a single surface station, and that’s if they had the data on that minutae, and we know they don’t.
This is a paper that will be quoted and requoted. It’s five years worth of work, unpaid, done late at night, entirely redone in the last year. We all owe Anthony Watts and Evan Jones, plus Steve McIntyre and John Christie, plus many others (like all the volunteers who did site-surveys) more than a huge thank you. Watts has taken on giant institutes like NOAA, GISS, Hadley, East Anglia, they with billions at their disposal – and he’s won. Sure, this won’t be the last word on it, but where are the real climate scientists who say enough is enough and they want junk thermometer records deleted from “high quality” compilations and they want adjustments for artificial warming to cool the result, not exacerbate the error?
There’s a newer method to categorize stations into five classes and this makes all the difference.
Leroy’s 1999 classification system is out and Leroy 2010 is in. Menne 2010 and Muller et al 2012 both used the old system. Anthony Watts uses the new system and says it makes all the difference:
“Using the new Leroy 2010 classification system on the older siting metadata used by Fall et al. (2011), Menne et al. (2010), and Muller et al. (2012), yields dramatically different results.”
 The new Leroy 2010 classification system of surface weather stations shows that only 20% of stations are adequate (Class 1 plus Class 2). The trends as recorded by good thermometers are very different to the trends recorded by the bad ones. Class 1 & 2 show only 0.15C warming per decade (which is slightly less than what happened in the 1870’s). Class 3 – 5 (the badly sited thermometers) recorded 0.25C per decade. There goes nearly half of all the catastrophic warming. Worse though, is the miracle of modern adjistering – where two lower numbers are “averaged” up to an even higher one. Post-normal maths?
The new official adjusted result bears no resemblance to the observations. Why bother having thermometers?
..
 Figure 19 – Comparisons of regions and gridded values for all CONUS compliant stations, all CONUS non-compliant stations, and final USHCNv2 adjusted CONUS data Airports can make even a good thermometer useless
On a micrositing level some airport stations may appear to be ok. But on a mesositing level they affect the results, rather a lot and since about half of global stations are based at airports this is rather a killer point. Airports are excluded from this graph below. Compare it to the graph below that. The blue bars are the trends in the mean temperature for the best thermometers (class 1 & 2) in different US regions. The yellow bars are the class 3 – 5 stations — the badly sited ones — and obviously they are higher.
Ominously, the red bars are the adjusted combination of the two lower bars. Its what happens when you mix good data with bad data and then multiply the errors with statistics. It’s possible to turn out truly awful “results”.
 Figure 5 – Station Class comparisons of decadal trends by region with airport stations excluded …
When airports are included the raw readings in the well sited thermometers are much higher (below). The pilots all need to know the temperature of the airport, but as far as taxpayers are concerned, the airport does not represent the environment of the surrounding 100km (or 1200km give or take the smoothing techniques you care to use).
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9.1 out of 10 based on 120 ratings
What Anthony Watts and Evan Jones have revealed is breathtaking, a must see. Half of the warming trend has gone. 92% of the artificial rise was due to” erroneous adjustments of well sited stations”. Muller et al used an older siting classification system. The new classification system shows that siting does have a major impact on the data.
We always knew thermometers were never meant to be stuck next to air-conditioners. Now we know they shouldn’t be recording global warming near airports either.
[Art thanks to: Cartoons by Josh]
Go and Visit Watts Up and enjoy!
I’ll be posting my own analysis with graphs and information soon.
This is one of those blockbuster moments when the pieces come together. For Anthony it’s five years work, and overturns so many studies all at once. This graph rather sums it all up. Raw well placed thermometers recorded 0.15C per decade. Badly sited thermometers recorded 0.25C, and adjusted ones recorded 0.3C! Fully twice the warming trend.
 Figure 19 – Comparisons of regions and gridded values for all CONUS compliant stations, all CONUS non-compliant stations, and final USHCNv2 adjusted CONUS data —————————————————-
PRESS RELEASE – July 29th, 2012 12PM PDT – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
A reanalysis of U.S. surface station temperatures has been performed using the recently WMO-approved Siting Classification System devised by METEO-France’s Michel Leroy. The new siting classification more accurately characterizes the quality of the location in terms of monitoring long-term spatially representative surface temperature trends. The new analysis demonstrates that reported 1979-2008 U.S. temperature trends are spuriously doubled, with 92% of that over-estimation resulting from erroneous NOAA adjustments of well-sited stations upward. The paper is the first to use the updated siting system which addresses USHCN siting issues and data adjustments.
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9.3 out of 10 based on 87 ratings
Müller lite: Why Every Scientist Needs a Classical Training
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
About 18 months ago, as soon as I heard of Dr. Richard Müller’s Berkeley Earth Temperature project, I sent an email to several skeptical scientists drawing their attention to his statement that he considered his team’s attempt to verify how much “global warming” had occurred since 1750 to be one of the most important pieces of research ever to be conducted in the history of science. This sounded too much like propaganda.
“…from 1695 – 1735 Central England warmed seven times faster than what Muller finds in the 262 years during which we are supposed to have influenced the weather.”
He was posing, I said, as a skeptical scientist; his results would broadly confirm the pre-existing temperature series; when his research ended, he would declare himself to have been converted from scepticism to the belief that merely because the world had warmed the warming must be our fault; and publication of his results would be exploited as a triumphant and final confirmation of the “global warming” orthodoxy.
 My doubts about Dr. Müller’s motivation intensified after I met him at the Los Alamos Climate Conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, late last year. We lunched. He was visibly disappointed when I said that I was happy to accept the official temperature record, at least for the sake of argument. And he subsequently seemed uninterested in getting to grips with the real divide between skeptics and true-believers, which has little to do with the accuracy of the temperature record and much to do with climate sensitivity – the question how much warming we will cause.
In this reply to Dr. Müller’s much-touted editorials in the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, I shall demonstrate by Classical methods that his principal conclusion “that global warming is real, that the prior estimates of the rate were correct, and that the cause is human” is incorrect a priori.
Yes, the world has warmed since 1750. However, even if one accepts Dr. Müller’s estimate of 1.5 C° warming since then, that rate is indeed well within the natural variability of the climate. Indeed, in the 40 years from 1695 to 1735, Central England (not a bad proxy for global temperature change) warmed naturally at 0.4 C° per decade, seven times faster than the 0.057 C° per decade he finds in the 262 years during which we are supposed to have influenced the weather.
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7.8 out of 10 based on 106 ratings
Watts Up Suspended
You know you’re going to speculate. The emails started coming in to me early this morning ten minutes after the unusual WUWT post was published. No — it’s not ClimateGate III, not FOIA. I have my theories. 🙂
Rereke calculates the release time for WUWT In New Zealand it will be 7.00 am.
Officially the release is listed for: “Sunday July 29th, around Noon PST in California”
Rereke notes: “Anthony Watt’s site does say PST, which would be 8.00am NZT. The question is, “Is that a typo?” I assumed that it was, because people just look at the clock. It is only people like me who are anal enough to worry.
By assuming that it should be PDT, I might be watching an hour early.”
So here are some other times (assuming it is PDT):
- California: Sunday 12:00 noon
- New Zealand: Monday 7 am
- Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane Australia : Monday 5am
- Perth, Australia: Monday: 3am
- Delhi, India: Monday 12.30am
- Jerusalem Israel, Helsinki Finland: Sunday 10pm
- Paris , France; Berlin Germany; Rome, Italy: Sunday 9pm
- London, UK: Sunday 8pm
- New York, USA: Sunday 3pm
- Corresponding GMT Sunday 7pm
Times thanks to Timeanddate.com
So do tune in to WUWT… 🙂
9.3 out of 10 based on 42 ratings
With all the corruption and failures in climate science, sometimes it’s nice to read about how some areas of science are still working, and developing something that matters.
There are thousands of people working on a frontier of science that promises to revolutionize medicine. We are living in the last days of what we’ll come to know as the “old medicine” where surgeons do the unthinkable — cutting out healthy blood vessels to get spare parts for more important sites, or treating people with drugs that affect cells all over the body (with many unwanted side-effects) when what we need is a way to get the right molecules into a tiny percentage of cells. Then there is the devastating cost of using transplants from other people (deceased or not), and then having to use immune-suppressant drugs for life. Growing your own spare parts — customized and make to order — is the brilliant alternative.
Our lives would be so much better if the money used to install vast inefficient solar arrays, or bird-breaking windfarms was used instead on gene therapy. That doesn’t mean everything about this is unquestionably good, like any powerful tool, gene therapy can kill as well as save. That’s why we need to do the research, and the sooner the better.
Virtually all our cells contain all the genes that make us. So if we learn how to switch the right genes on and with the right timing, in theory, with the right scaffolding, we can build any body part. Growing a full liver is a long way off, but it’s coming. We are at the stage of building simple parts like bladders and blood vessels.
To give you some idea of how huge this field is, here are just a few stories released in the last week: Making new blood vessels from fat cells, turning skin cells into the neurons that are affected by Parkinsons, and figuring out which genes are involved in growing new teeth.
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9 out of 10 based on 26 ratings
For every three degrees F warmer (or cooler), about 1 % of respondents in surveys think there is more (or less) evidence that the Earth has been getting warmer (3 F = 1.6 C).
Alarmists will use this survey to tell us how dumb the punters are, but remember that even if temperatures are 10 degrees C hotter or colder than normal that still means 94% of people answering the survey have not changed their position, and that the question itself largely misses the point. The important factor is whether human emissions caused the warming, and if so, what percentage of the increase was due to man-made effects.
Local weather patterns temporarily influence people’s beliefs about evidence for global warming, according to research by political scientists at New York University and Temple University. Their study, which appears in the Journal of Politics, found that those living in places experiencing warmer-than-normal temperatures at the time they were surveyed were significantly more likely than others to say there is evidence for global warming.
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9.1 out of 10 based on 24 ratings
We know the answer is always that they are smart, and that if we don’t “get their vision” they just need to explain it better.
“Australians have limited understanding of climate change, Climate Institute finds”
A new survey by the Climate Institute on attitudes to climate change shows the majority are concerned for the environment, but confusion reigns supreme.
After years of vigorous and at times toxic debate, more than 1000 people surveyed gave an amazing array of answers …. Sixty-nine per cent thought humans were causing it. But when asked to explain the Gillard Government’s carbon pricing scheme, focus groups returned blank stares.
The reality is of course that climate scientists have a limited understanding of our climate, and that most Australians are suspicious that a tax can change the weather.
Try not to throw up reading the actual report: Climate of The Nation. For starters, the low contrast colors in baby blue and penitentiary-grey-brown are designed not to be read, but to be absorbed. The layout and feel is very much the style of a baby formula brochure. Bask in the “atmosphere” as you scan, but bring out your magnifying glass if you actually want to read it. The sickly sweet, staged photos announce that The Climate Institute has money to waste — your money. Only the most ultra trendoid marketing and PR agencies need apply for the job of selling The Carbon Pox to the nation.
What do these results mean? Who knows? I can’t find the actual survey questions, so at this stage: nothing. I mean “two thirds say climate change is occurring”. Really? (So 36% think Climate Sameness is a possibility?) The language and the mindless labels wait like trolls under the bridge to suck any sane analysis out of loaded questions on a road to nowhere.
Nearly all skeptics think the climate is changing, so when faced with an inanity like “do you believe in Climate Change?”, a skeptic can be either literal and straight, or play the game where they try to guess what the researchers were really attempting to find.
On the plus side, the way I read these results suggests:
- That 45% of the population is not concerned about climate change.
- Only 28% support the carbon pricing laws. (28%? that’s the number today of the ALP primary vote). The 28% rises when people are falsely told that all the money goes to households and the poor renewables lot. How many would support it if they knew 10% was feeding the UN bureaucrats, and another large slab would go to major financial brokers, auditors, lawyers, accountants, media, marketing and advertising campaigns? (Can we get some lawyers onto this point? Is this false advertising coming from The Climate Institute? Can they really claim that “all the revenue goes to support households, business and clean, renewable energy”?)
On the down side, we still have 20 years of propaganda to overcome and really only about 10% of the population are aware of just how scandalously vacant this issue and the Green NGO’s are. There is a lot of work to do.
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9.2 out of 10 based on 70 ratings
Believers really do have trouble with numbers. Today 400 is apparently a lot like zero.
Since when was 400 years a gap that anyone called “close”? Especially when we are talking about a molecular effect that works in microseconds (or hey, even less).
Newspapers today are full of the spin that an Antarctic survey by Pedro et al, that found CO2 only lagged temperature by a mere tiny 400 years ‘… “addressed the argument of “climate sceptics” that CO2 increases did not lead to temperature rises because the temperature rise must come first.’ [The Australian]. Didn’t the editor notice that a lag of 400 years is still a lag? Did the journalist (Rosanne Hunt) not realize that even if the lag was measured in hours it still means temperature drives carbon dioxide, and not the other way around? This is nonsense on stilts. The Australian only published 6 lines, and one of them is barking.
 The “lag” might be small on this scale, but it’s long compared to a taxpayers lifespan. Graph from the Australian Antarctic Division
The Australian Government (Antarctic Division) says it “closes the gap” and “Their findings suggest that feedbacks in the climate system – in which warming is linked to natural carbon dioxide increase, driving further warming – may operate faster than previously thought.”
But wait, if we only have to wait 400 years for this feedback to kick in, it won’t be disastrous in 2020, it will be 2345 before it starts (that’s the post WWII coal fired boom in emissions, plus 400). I just can’t see the electorate getting too worked up about it.
The gap was estimated to be 800 years previously.
Synchronous? Since when was 4 centuries “near-synchronous”?
Watch the language – they are so sloppy with it.
“The ice cores reveal a near-synchronous temperature and carbon dioxide increase. If there was a lag at all then it was likely no more than 400 years,” says Joel Pedro from the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems CRC, in Hobart, who led the study.
[Aust Govt Antarctic Division site]
For alarmists, numbers are not important, it’s all in the “words”. Eric Steig can’t emphasize how important this is.
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8.3 out of 10 based on 63 ratings
Get ready — for all the fears of extreme weather coming our way — studies of Queensland, Victoria, the whole of SE Australia, New Zealand, and Perth show that either nothing is changing (there have always been bad storms) or possibly, the weather is better now than it used to be. Where is the evidence to support the claims by alarmists that increasing CO2 will make “extreme weather” more common?
It’s less windy now across South East Australia than it was in the 1920’s. It’s less stormy on the southern coast of Victoria, and records that go back 7000 years in New Zealand and 5000 years in Queensland show repeated examples of monster storms that — should they hit today, would be described as being “likely” due to coal fired power stations and excessive use of SUV’s.
The Science and Public Policy Institute published Historical storm trends in Australia and New Zealand in June. This post builds on that publication.
 … It’s less windy across South East Australia
Alexander et al 2011 looked at locations from Port Lincoln (SA) to Goondiwindi (QLD), to Hobart (Tas) which pretty much covers everything anyone could call South East Australia. They used wind speeds from as far back as records could go (1890 onwards) and the results showed the wind speeds have declined across the whole region. Furthermore it doesn’t matter what season you study. The trends are the same.
For those who are old enough to say so, “yes” it really was stormier and windier back in the 1920’s in Australia.
 Fig. 3 Southeast Australian region averages of seasonal P95 and P99 storm indices, along with Gaussian filtered curves and linear trends for the indicated seasons over the period of 1885–2008. (Alexander et al 2011) But what about the long long trend? Say 5000 years?
Hayne and Chappell (2001) looked at deposits left from storm surges on Curacoa Island (one of the Palm Islands of far north Queensland). They found that large cyclones have been hitting the coast at a statistically constant rate for 5000 years. This includes the earliest times when the sea surface temperature appear to have been about 1°C warmer (Gagan et al 1998). At Palm Island, sea levels were apparently 70cm higher back in that warm Holocene era (Chappell et al 1983). Somehow the Great Barrier Reef survived.
Haynes writes: ” This suggests that cyclone frequency may not have been affected by sea surface temperatures in the region.”
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8.9 out of 10 based on 38 ratings
Indur Goklany calculated that biofuels policies killed nearly 200,000 people in 2010 alone. That was before this study showed things may be worse than we suspected.
Brazil is the largest sugar cane ethanol producer in the world, but people are burning four times the area of sugar cane plantations than previously realized, and it’s producing far more pollution than they thought. For every unit of energy generated, the ethanol-biofuel use produces a lot less CO2 (plant fertilizer) but more volatile organic compounds (VOC’s), more carbon monoxide, more nitrous oxides, as well as more sulphur dioxides. (See Graph b below).
Compared to gasoline and diesel, over its whole life cycle, every unit of energy produced with sugar cane produces 10 times as much volatile organic compounds (VOC’s), carbon monoxide, and nitrous oxides. The amount PM10’s and PM2.5’s produced with ethanol fuels is even higher. Most of the pollution comes from burning fields of sugar cane (see graph a). Hence the people suffering the most from ethanol production will be villagers and rural farmers living near areas of sugar cane production. While there have been efforts to encourage farmers to produce cane without burning fields, over half of sugar-cane crop loads continue to be burned. Presumably there is a cost to producing sugar cane without burning. Perhaps sugar-cane production is viable and competitive without burning but this study does not discuss the reasons farmers prefer to burn fields.
If you care about pollution, and want less of it, and you care about the health of people in developing countries then clearly we should encourage gasoline and diesel use, and discourage production of ethanol that involves burning sugar cane-fields.
Likewise, to promote growth in the Amazon (by increasing CO2 levels), we ought to be burning fossil fuels and not fields of cane.
If global policies devalue concentrated energy underground and prize diffuse photosynthetic sources of energy above ground, will we protect and retain dirty rocks deep below the surface at the expense of biodiversity and health of plants and people? It seems so.
 Figure 1 Comparisons of life-cycle emissions for sugar-cane ethanol in Brazil and conventional liquid fuels. a, Life-cycle emissions per unit energy of sugar-cane ethanol produced within five life-cycle phases. Although our life-cycle emissions account for a mix of sugar-cane fields where the burning practice is used and not used, the burning-phase emissions shown here are for ethanol produced from croplands that are burned. T/D, transportation/distribution; BTU, British thermal units. b, Comparisons of life-cycle emissions for conventional gasoline, diesel and sugar-cane ethanol. Estimates from the GREET model include six air pollutants (VOC, CO, NOx, PM10, PM2:5, and SOx) and greenhouse gases (as CO2 equivalent, CO2e). Right axis is for greenhouse-gas emissions. The empirical evidence is consistent. Emissions of black carbon, organic carbon and carbonyl sulphide are rising rapidly over Brazil and the increase occurs during the months of peak sugar cane production.
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8.2 out of 10 based on 58 ratings
O woe betide those who are losing. Graham Readfearn moans and laments the Green-Labor losses that are likely to come nationally in the near future. Readfern packs the whole kit-and-kaboodle of fallacies, misnomers, and confounded reasoning into one article.
“Anyone who places any stock in safeguarding the current and future climate (and for that matter anyone who doesn’t) should prepare themselves for the risk that very soon, climate science deniers, contrarians and sceptics will be running the show.
But who are the deniers here? Readfearn fashions himself as a bit of an expert on deniers, so you’d think he’d be able to say what they deny. But Readfearn thinks skeptics deny that CO2 absorbs infra red:
“To Pearson and others, the experiments of John Tyndall in 1859 which established the warming properties of what we now know to be greenhouse gases just didn’t happen.
Dear Graham, if you bother to get accurate you’ll note that Spencer, Lindzen, Monckton, Michaels, Douglass, Singer, Idso, Knox, Soon, Svensmark, Christie, Watts, Carter, Giaever, Schmitt and I could go on (Evans, and dare I say Nova in that list) — all agree that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. It may come as a surprise to you — a shock by golly — but the debate (which you evidently aren’t aware of) is not about whether CO2 absorbs infra red, but whether that warming effect is significant.
It’s the feedbacks Graham. Feedbacks. It’s time to admit that the debate is about the amplifying feedbacks (present in simulations of the climate, but not so in the real climate). Graham, as long as you pretend that “Tyndall denial” is what the debate is about, you are misrepresenting the science. What can I say? You are in denial.
Readfearn can’t name any evidence to back his faith, or presumably he would have rushed to send me that mystery paper with evidence I’ve been asking for for 30 months. Yet despite his “scientific analysis” being nothing more than an obedient yes-man for committees and associations, he thinks people who disagree with him are deluded and taking science towards astrology.
9.1 out of 10 based on 149 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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