Cheerio! Thanks to the dedicated souls who nominated it, this blog is a finalist in 2012 Web Bloggies Award. (Ta Pat, Val, Baa). 😀 ! That’s a success on its own (it’s already bringing in new readers). Cheers!
With your help, we can reach a wider crowd. The different traffic, new links and other bloggie-spin-offs can help your favourite sites rank higher in searches and means the messages you want to share travel past new eyes. (Shameless hinting…) And all you need to do is vote and spread the word (so email, facebook, letter boxing, billboards ;-)). Some excellent blogs have made the finals, it’s smorgasbord of skeptics, and Anthony Watts has helpfully listed my favourites, so below is his detailed guide to making your vote count. My one sentence version is: Click here to vote, put ticks in the grey circles next to your choices (one in each category you care about), do the “catcha” funny word to prove you are human, then wait for the email, AND verify the link to prove you are not a troll. You need to do all those steps to be counted. Thank you to all who take those few minutes.
It’s time to be savvy. As Anthony essentially says, we know people who don’t like free-speech and independent thinkers are good at networking and make the effort to run campaigns to sabotage another site’s successes. We don’t need to stoop to that, but it sure helps if we vote for the sites we like.
It’s your chance to guide the internet crowd in the direction you think is best.
Merci, Jo
[Here’s what the Australian and NZ category looks like. ]
Thirty eight of the worlds top, most consequential climate scientists sought to slap down the Nobel prize winner, astronaut and glitterati of science, and all they could come up with was a logical fallacy and a single paragraph of incohate, innumerate, and improbable evidence. It’s hand-waving on stilts.
Is that the best they can do?
Trenberth and co try to rebut No Need to Panic About Global Warming, but those 16 eminent scientists quoted evidence and pointed out major flaws in the assumptions of the theory. They described forms of scientific malpractice, and called for open debate. In comparison, the 38 climate “scientists” offered hardly more than argument from authority, “Trust Us: We’re Experts” they said as if the lesser beings, who were mere Professors of Astrophysics, Meteorology, and Physics, were too stupid to know the difference between a doctor and a dentist. I mean, sure the 16 skeptics could be wrong, but if the evidence is so overwhelming, why can’t the 38 experts find it?
Q: What kind of doctor is a scientist who can’t reason?
A witchdoctor.
First — the Fallacy
1. “Do you consult your dentist about your heart condition?”
If my dentist tells me that my heart surgeon was caught emailing other surgeons about how to use tricks to hide declines, that he broke laws of reason, that his predictions are basically all wrong, or that his model of understanding is demonstrably wrong, then I’m listening to the dentist.
Try this out: My dentist has no vested interest, but has provided years of trusted service and medical training — and he warns me there are doubts about my heart surgeon and I need to get a second opinion (say from a Dr Lindzen, Dr Christie, or Dr Spencer*). So I tell him to “go jump”, “what would he know”, and keep returning to the same heart surgeon even though my blood pressure doesn’t change and the pills cost $3 billion a month. Sure.
2. He uses fallacies to reason — like “argument from authority” instead of empirical evidence.
3. He’s been caught cheating “hiding declines”, trying to get dissenting doctors banned from publishing their work, and worrying what will happen if his patients realize how little he knows: “They’ll kill me probably.”
4. He refuses to debate his radical treatments publicly. “It’s beyond debate”.
7. When you ask him for evidence that the treatment works he keeps saying “Trust me, I’m an expert”.
8. The numbers don’t add up. Where’s the cost-benefit sums? (Like this or this?) His treatment plan means the nation needs to lower it’s quality of life now, … so … our children’s children will live ten minutes longer in 2100?
“America is now the land that rewards failure– at the personal, corporate, and state level. If you reward it, you get more of it. If you reward it as lavishly as the federal government does, you’ll get the Radio City Christmas Spectacular of Failure, on ice and with full supporting orchestra. The problem is in that abolishing failure, you also abolish the possibility of success, and guarantee only a huge statist sucking swamp. From Motown to No Town, from the Golden State to Golden Statists.What happens when the policies that brought ruin to Detroit and decay to California are applied to the nation at large?”
misanthropology (from Urban Dictionary): the scientific study of the origin, the behavior, and the physical, social, and cultural development of hatred in humans misanthropology-the opposite of optimistology.
For what it’s worth, I think misanthropology is often just a veneer, it’s not a real hatred at all, but just the semblance of it. It’s much more small minded. It’s not about “hating humans” so much as it is about impressing the chick (or boy) next door. A kind of competition to get to snob-land first: ‘I look down on humans more than you do.” (Which translates loosely as: I, the exalted one, speaks from a greater height, fellow misanthropist….)
During the last couple of weeks, truck-drivers in an advanced western region with 5 million people have blockaded roads and ports protesting at the sudden 40% rise in the fuel price (due to taxes) which is wiping out their business. The fishermen joined in, so did farmers. The area is heavily dependent on road transport, and was apparently paralyzed for days with fuel shortages, and empty supermarket shelves. On the internet, people are describing this as a middle class uprising, and on the verge of revolt. Can you name the location?
…shades of a magna-carta type moment
Possibly not. The mainstream media are not describing this uprising at all … it’s o’ so unnewsworthy. And you can imagine that readers might not care if this were taking place in the back-reaches of Venezuela, the slums of Chad, or the dark corner of Uzbekistan. But it wasn’t. It’s was in the West, in Sicily. Who knew?
Word on the internet is that the middle class producers are rising up en masse. It’s known as the ‘Movimento dei Forconi’ or ‘Pitchfork Movement’. Just like the The Convoy of No Confidence in Australia last August, it started with truck-drivers and farmers, and just like the Convoy, the media ignored it. Ultimately, the journalists are not on the same side as the working middle class.
There are shades of a magna-carta type moment.
These are some of their demands:
The arrest of all corrupt politicians.
To reduce the number of parliamentarians
To remove the provincial bureaucracy, as most of these politicians
have been there for over forty years.
To drastically cut the salaries and privileges of parliamentarians
and senators
To restrict politicians two only two terms in office
David Archibald, polymath, makes a bold prediction that temperatures are about to dive sharply (in the decadal sense). He took the forgotten correlation that as solar cycles lengthen and weaken, the world gets cooler. He refined it into a predictive tool, tested it and published in 2007. His paper has been expanded on recently by Prof Solheim in Norway, who predicts a 1.5°C drop in Central Norway over the next ten years.
Our knowledge of they solar dynamo is improving, and David adds the predicted solar activity ’til 2040 to the analysis. Normal solar cycles are 11 years long, but the current one (cycle 24) is shaping up to be 17 years (unusually long), and using historical data from the US, David predicts a 2.1°C decline over Solar Cycle 24 followed by a further 2.8°C over Solar Cycle 25. That adds up to a whopping 4.9°C fall in temperate latitudes over the next 20 years. We can only hope he’s wrong. As David says ” The center of the Corn Belt, now in Iowa, will move south to Kansas.”
He also predicts continuing drought in Africa for another 14 years, with droughts likely in South America too.
If he’s right, it’s awful and excellent at the same time. Cold hurts, but wouldn’t it be something if we understood our climate well enough to plan ahead?
See his post below for all the details…
– Jo
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Just how much cooler will it get?
Friis-Christensen and Lassen found the relationship between solar cycle length and temperature in 1991. In 1996, Butler and Johnson applied that theory to the 200 years of temperature data at Armagh, Northern Ireland and found a relationship of 0.4°C per extra year of solar cycle length. I showed that Friis-Christensen and Lassen theory could be used as a predictive tool in 2007. My methodology was copied by Professor Solheim in an article for a Norwegian astronomical magazine. His work predicts a 1.5°C decline, on average, in Norwegian temperatures over Solar Cycle 24 relative to Solar Cycle 23.
The CSIRO announced the discovery of a perverse, perplexing atom
The new element is Governmentium (Gv). It has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.
These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lefton-like particles called peons.
Since Governmentium has no electrons or protons, it is inert. However, it can be detected, because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A tiny amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction normally taking less than a second to take from four days to four years to complete.
Governmentium has a normal half-life of 3-6 years. It does not decay but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.
In fact, Governmentium’s mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes.
This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as critical morass.
When catalysed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons. All of the money is consumed in the exchange, and no other byproducts are produced.
Despite all the headlines we see, 2011 in Australia was remarkable for its extraordinary averageness. It is a rare year that is more average than 2011 was.
(This email was spotted on it’s way to various government officials. — Jo)
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Guest post from Steve Woodman
2011 was the 52nd coldest year on record in Australia, colder than 1912, 1914, 1915 & 1919
Alarmist propaganda outlets such as the ABC were clearly disappointed by 2011 and were forced to resort to decadal temperatures rather than individual years to provide it with its headlines 1:
“Last decade equals warmest on record: UN”
The article then goes on to say:
“2011 ranks as the 10th warmest year since 1850, when accurate measurements began”
That may be so in a global sense, but if the ABC took a more local perspective, in Australia, 2011 was below the 1961-1990 average (see the graph below) 2.
A new brief summary of the reasoning and evidence behind the skeptics case. –Jo
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The Skeptic’s Case
Who Are You Going To Believe – The Government Climate Scientists Or The Data?
Guest Post Dr David M.W. Evans
We check the main predictions of the climate models against the best and latest data. Fortunately the climate models got all their major predictions wrong. Why? Every serious skeptical scientist has been consistently saying essentially the same thing for over 20 years, yet most people have never heard the message — here it is, put simply enough for any lay reader willing to pay attention.
What the Government Climate Scientists Say
Figure 1: The climate models. If the CO2 level doubles (as it is on course to do by about 2070 to 2100), the climate models estimate the temperature increase due to that extra CO2 will be about 1.1°C × 3 = 3.3°C. [1]
The direct effect of CO2 is well-established physics, based on laboratory results, and known for over a century.[2]
Feedbacks are due to the ways the Earth reacts to the direct warming effect of the CO2. The threefold amplification by feedbacks is based on the assumption, or guess, made around 1980, that more warming due to CO2 will cause more evaporation from the oceans and that this extra water vapor will in turn lead to even more heat trapping because water vapor is the main greenhouse gas. And extra heat will cause even more evaporation, and so on. This amplification is built into all the climate models.[3] The amount of amplification is estimated by assuming that nearly all the industrial-age warming is due to our CO2.
The government climate scientists and the media often tell us about the direct effect of the CO2, but rarely admit that two thirds of their projected temperature increases are due to amplification by feedbacks. They admit there are discrepancies, and go to great lengths to resolve them (see for example, Thorne, Dessler, Sherwood).
Oil on Canvas George Crie (cropped). "Panic Attack or Anxiety PTSD" Neosurrealismart.com.
I just love some of these terms. Verity Jones (Diggingintheclay) and E. Michael Smith (Chiefio, see the postscript) are rolling on a neologistic wave, and they’re generating something special. The comments thread on Diggingintheclay is quite abuzz (and this comes from both that and Chiefio’s thread).
Adjixtered: Adjusted without adequate or meaningful explanation
Cliflation: The tendency for anything climate related to be inflated in importance, size, warming tendency, etc. (I think the pronounciation doesn’t capture the “climate” origin, hence I suggest “Climaflation” — as in “The clown fish research has been Climaflated.”)
Empixelated: To uncritically believe anything presented to you by the pixels on your screen. “Jones was sure Mann would be empixelated by the latest runs of HADcrut”. (I think this needs a different example: The Department of Climate Change produced brochureware websites designed to empixililate unsuspecting taxpayers.) (H/t Another Ian for the word “empixilated”)
Envirallax (noun) – the apparent shift in importance of a report, quotation or publication related to climate science due to the difference in belief or opinion on the causes of climate change between two readers (cf. parallax). Related terms – biased interpretation, confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance.). Alternate definition: That peculiar tendency to see things shifted through an environmental filter just out of kilter. Political parallax. (I like it. Methinks this word will stick, credit to Verity Jones.)
Farigle (verb): To inexplicably adjust data that is far enough away that nobody will notice, or, alternately, to alter data originating in a place distant from a research facility and difficult to verify, especially after the passage of time.“After farigling the Arctic Data, trends were warmer.” (ht Verity for the word, Judy F for the second definition).
Googlehuffing: To manipulate search engines so as to rank an article (especially one about climate) extra high for political / monetary purposes. “AlGore asked the programmer to googlehuff his latest book”. A non-standard usage is to down rate articles by skeptics or with a skeptical point of view. “Algore demanded WUWT be googlehuffed into the 20th page”. (credit Chiefio).
Panixilation: (Br. Sp. Panicselation) That peculiar tendency to turn anything into a Panic Attack, especially with some exhilaration about it. Often seen in the Warmers World. “Hansen was clearly panixilated about the coal trains”. (h/t Chiefio for this excellent word).
Wikimentia: A kind of dementia commonly seen in wiki articles reflecting bias in the various sorts of delving into too much detail, not enough detail, making up detail, deleting inconvenient facts, and generally being politically driven to excess.
Doomian (Doomsian): The world view that says anything we do can only lead to doom. Related to panixilation, but more operative in that an actual outcome of doom is predicted. Doomers is a related noun form. “The doomian result was clearly sea level rise of 1000 meters and the loss of all islands in the Pacific.” Or even “Jones, a clear doomer, looked at the printout, panixilated, and said ‘The end is near!’; yet Smith just thought him doomian.” j ferguson suggests “the Apocolypsters” and “Catastophers“. (The French came up with that already: catastropher vt. to devastate). Catastrophobes could study Catastrophology?
Gillard once lauded the genius of the carbon market. That part of the “free” market which is free to move, is moving — and right out. The smart money is saying that carbon trading is a dead dog. It’s a has-been-tulip, a sick puppy, a sinking ship.
The future of global carbon trading is so “certain” that Barclays Bank is not even bothering to leave one part time guy in the US office with a post box, so they can pretend they still have an interest in it. The mood has so changed, they see an advantage in letting the world know they’re not wasting a single cent more on carbon trading in the United States of America. Well that made my day. :-).
“That is not good news for carbon-dioxide trading, especially not in the US,”
Barclays was the first UK bank to set up a carbon trading desk, and fast to move into carbon trading: “Barclays Capital is the most active player in the emissions trading market, having traded some 300 million tonnes as at February 2007″.
They control our money, our armed forces, our tax inspectors, jails, and police. Against that, we the people wield our biggest weapon — information.
The biggest threat to people in positions of power is the flow of news and ideas. The internet is the largest menace, the most powerful tool of the people, so we always knew the pushback was coming. Those who control the net, control the ability of the people to organize en masse, and to judge who is being honest, and who can be trusted. The Internet was vital in publicizing the climate data that contradicts the government climate scientists, because the mainstream media sure didn’t do it.
If SOPA PIPA is stopped (as it appears it might have been, as 6 supporters pull out) the only thing we can be sure of is that there will be other attempts to stop us speaking freely. This is an unending battle.
How bad is SOPA PIPA?
On closer inspection, the legalese in the bill has the potential to eviscerate free speech….and like NDAA, without proof…only with suspicion of “wrong-doing”. It’s all about copyright infringement. If you tick off the powers that be, and you’ve quoted someone, somewhere, saying something, you may have infringed on their copyright. As a defendant, you are not even present at the legal proceeding allowing “them” to shut you down until you prove yourself innocent.
How do they shut you down? Search engines are required to remove you from their listings. Internet Service Providers can be ordered to block access to your site. Advertising networks and payment providers can also be forced to cease doing business with you. This continues until you are proven INNOCENT. Wait – I thought it was innocent until proven guilty….oh….that was “before” the NDAA.
SOPA and PIPA are proposed government regulations that go far beyond protection of IP.
The regulations in the act are clearly designed to be abused by the government to censor parts of the internet and require organizations such as Facebook and Google to become content policemen.
There are better ways to solve the piracy problem:
It’s easy to stop movie piracy, put all the movies online for a reasonable fee (say $3 to watch). Apple’s iTunes has mostly supplanted illegal music downloading by offering most of the worlds songs for $1+. — Matthew Lock
(Useful discussion on itunes and piracy here and here.)
Where will the demands end?
The establishment will keep asking for more until something stops it… and what stops it growing? Nothing except us. It grows until the protests become too strong. We must not only protest just to keep what is ours (our freedom) but we must teach our children that protesting unwanted laws is a fact of life.
It’s just as with the laws of physics: a body in space will move until a force opposes it, children will ask for more until they test the limits, and governments will grow until something stops them.
Protests work. More people are checking Wikipedia during the blackout, and the only pages they can see are SOPA PIPA ones. Better to protest loud and strong now than wait til our freedom to speak is reduced.
History repeats — Rulers opposed information flows
The LA Times laments the loss of the totalitarian educational view — pity the poor students subjected to hearing both sides of the story:
Texas and Louisiana have introduced education standards that require educators to teach climate change denial as a valid scientific position. South Dakota and Utah passed resolutions denying climate change. Tennessee and Oklahoma also have introduced legislation to give climate change skeptics a place in the classroom.
In May, a school board in Los Alamitos, Calif., passed a measure, later rescinded, identifying climate science as a controversial topic that required special instructional oversight.
The news itself is interesting, but sadly viewed through the usual green-colored glasses.
Is it “reporting” or a propaganda piece? Let’s check the three boxes:
Box 1: One half of the story is reduced to Orwellian nonsense. Tick yes! — who, exactly, teaches children to deny we have a climate? Johnny, there are no clouds… Which state passes resolutions declaring that the climate does not change? Henceforth California will be 78…
Box 2: Look for the Mandatory Ritual Pean:“scientific evidence increasingly shows that fossil fuel consumption has caused the climate to change rapidly”. Tick two! Ritual complete. Notice that daring sweeping conclusion, of course, is backed by pffft-puffery-nothin’. (Yes we believe that driving causes droughts, and heaters cause hurricanes. Storms are coming, switch off your air-con to save the world!)
Box Three: Find spurious tenuous associations of one view of climate change to a/ Tobacco-propaganda, b/ creationism or c/ Big-oil-profits. Tick b and c. Yessity yes. (How did they manage to leave out the tobacco slur?)
Despite the propaganda, the news is good news. The people are not fooled.
“Any time we have a meeting of 100 teachers, if you ask whether they’re running into pushback on teaching climate change, 50 will raise their hands,” said Frank Niepold, climate education coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who meets with hundreds of teachers annually. “We ask questions about how sizable it is, and they tell us it is [sizable] and pretty persistent, from many places: your administration, parents, students, even your own family.”
You’ve gotta love it.
But look out for the “New national science standards for grades K-12 (which) are due in December.” Since they are based on standards from the National Academy of Sorcery, we know logic, reason and evidence will need all the help they can get.
Ron Paul is painted as fringe by the Establishment. (If you’re not part of the establishment then you must be “fringe”, right?).
Ten years ago Ron Paul made long series of detailed economic and foreign policy predictions that he hoped he would be proven wrong on. It was a year before the US started action in Iraq. Five years before the housing bubble busted. Six years before the Global Financial Crisis. Nine years before the Arab Spring. (At least he was wrong on the US “draft”. So far).
How many mainstream politicians can point to a speech like this? How many presidential candidates saw it coming?
“Let it not he said that no one cared,
that no one objected once its realized that our liberties and wealth are in jeopardy”
Ron Paul
Ron Paul 2002 April 24th.
There’s a copy of the video of the speech without newspaper overlays, and background music, for those who prefer the uncluttered view.
“He saw these things coming because he reveres liberty above all else and when you cherish liberty you can see the things that threaten it. “John Carey
I have transcribed parts, but not all of his rapid fire delivery of specific point after point. The video above shows recent headlines to match the predictions as he made them. (The full transcript is here.)
This is a post for those who like the intellectual stimulation of unraveling the cause and effect links at the bleeding edge. It’s a weekend puzzle.
Frank Lansner (of Hidethedecline) wants to toss out his latest thoughts and findings for discussion. With a very simple equation he’s managed to recreate a curve just like Hadcrut temperature profile, using just the Nino 3.4 data (see Fig. 1). If it stands up, this would imply the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) pretty much determined a significant part of the climate — which is not a shock, but nonetheless there’s not a lot of room for CO2. The turning points do seem to match well (unlike the temperature versus CO2 “turning points”). As William Kininmonth reminded us, the oceans cover 70% of the planet, and are 4km deep, and most of that water is very very cold, even under the equator. If the surface of the central pacific cools by 1 degree does that drop global temperatures by 0.1C?
Of course, the mystery of what drives the PDO still stands. On that score, Frank looks at Siberia and Alaska, and finds an interesting correlation with the Nino3.4 when it is lagged by 15 -18 months. He’s chosen four zones in the Pacific and is looking for repeated sequences.
As I said, this is all speculation, but kind of like a climate crossword, only no one has the solution yet. It’s heavy stuff, but I know some people will enjoy the challenge of testing Frank’s ideas. The Dane and his insatiable curiosity.
Fig1. The SST of the Nino3,4 area (5S-5N / 120-170W) in the Pacific Ocean seems to hold information on how global temperatures evolve, at least since 1920 where the first somewhat reliable SST data from the Nino3,4 area begins.
The SST of the Nino3,4 area (5S-5N / 120-170W) in the Pacific Ocean might hold information on how global temperatures evolve, at least since 1920 where the first somewhat reliable SST data from the Nino3,4 area begins. For each month a constant fraction of the Nina3,4 index is added to global temperatures from the month before, and this approach seems to re-produce global temperatures rather well. The 1000 $ question is if this relationship will remain tomorrow ?
The relation on fig 1 – if true – has the following consequence:
La Niña: One year of average -1 K in the nino3,4 area changes global temperatures approx – 0,094 K El Niño: One year of average +1 K in the nino3,4 area changes global temperatures approx + 0,105 K
Due to the above finding I carried out just a rough analysis of the climatic patterns in the Pacific Ocean. There are different writings on the subject, but I like hands on myself so I can investigate exactly what I find relevant. I have divided up the Pacific into the three zones, along with the well known Nino3.4 area.
Nir Shaviv, the well known astrophysicist from Israel, points out that climate sensitivity (according to the IPCC and co) has barely changed in 33 years. Therefore their predictions from the FAR (IPCC, First Assessment Report) in 1990 ought to mean something. Yet observations are now tracking outside and below even their lowest bounds of estimates. When will the IPCC admit those models need to change?
–Jo
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On IPCCs exaggerated climate sensitivity and the emperor’s new clothes
A few days ago I had a very pleasant meeting with Andrew Bolt. He was visiting Israel and we met for an hour in my office. During the discussion, I mentioned that the writers of the recent IPCC reports are not very scientific in their conduct and realized that I should write about it here.
Normal science progresses through the collection of observations (or measurements), the conjecture of hypotheses, the making of predictions, and then through the usage of new observations, the modification of the hypotheses accordingly (either ruling them out, or improving them). In the global warming “science”, this is not the case.
What do I mean?
From the first IPCC report until the previous IPCC report, climate predictions for future temperature increase where based on a climate sensitivity of 1.5 to 4.5°C per CO2 doubling. This range, in fact, goes back to the 1979 Charney report published by the National Academy of Sciences. That is, after 33 years of climate research and many billions of dollars of research, the possible range of climate sensitivities is virtually the same! In the last (AR4) IPCC report the range was actually slightly narrowed down to 2 to 4.5°C increase per CO2 doubling (without any good reason if you ask me). In any case, this increase of the lower limit will only aggravate the point I make below, which is as follows.
Because the possible range of sensitivities has been virtually the same, it means that the predictions made in the first IPCC report in 1990 should still be valid. That is, according to the writers of all the IPCC reports, the temperature today should be within the range of predictions made 22 years ago. But they are not!
The business as usual predictions made in 1990, in the first IPCC report, are given in the following figure.
The business-as-usual predictions made in the first IPCC report, in 1990. Since the best range for the climate sensitivity (according to the alarmists) has not changed, the global temperature 22 years later should be within the predicted range. From this graph, we take the predicted slopes around the year 2000.
How well do these predictions agree with reality? In the next figure I plot the actual global and oceanic temperatures (as made by the NCDC). One can argue that either the ocean temperature or the global (ocean+land) temperature is better. The Ocean temperature includes smaller fluctuations than the land (and therefore less than the global temperature as well), however, if there is a change in the average global state, it should take longer for the oceans to react. On the other hand, the land temperature (and therefore the global temperature) is likely to include the urban heat island effect.
The NCDC ocean (blue) and global (brown) monthly temperature anomalies (relative to the 1900-2000 average temperatures) since 1980. The observed temperatures compared to the predictions made in the first IPCC report. Note that the width of the predictions is ±0.1°C, which is roughly the size of the month to month fluctuations in the temperature anomalies.
Years before Climategate, THAT email, from Phil Jones to Warwick Hughes told us everything we needed to know about the scientific standards at the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia. THAT email was the tip of the iceberg, and below is what lay underneath the surface — the things that were said behind the scenes at the time. Geoff Sherrington has pieced together a sequence of climategate emails, his own emails, and parts of Warwick Hughes work to recreate the sequence.
And for the true skeptic-aficionados, here’s a new layer of history to the skeptical chronology. Where did this volunteer audit movement begin?
Who would have guessed that at least one skeptic, Hughes, was asking for the data Phil Jones worked with, as long ago as 1991? (That was way back in the days where people worked with hard copy print outs, and drew graphs by hand!) Does Hughes rank as volunteer Skeptic Number 1?
UPDATE: I asked Warwick, and he thinks the first unpaid skeptic was Fred Wood in 1988*. — Jo
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Guest post by: Geoffrey H Sherrington, Scientist.
This is the longer story behind one of the more anti-science quotes in the short history of people attempting to be ‘climate scientists’, definition unclear. The pivotal short quote is in the opening email.
“Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.”
…
Here is a series of emails and articles with my interspersed comments in italics. Each email number is the one assigned in Climategate One and Two, presumably by the donor named FOIA. The Climategate emails are indented below, so the source can be picked up easily. There are sections cut from other emails as well. They are not indented. We start with the famous email, the one that some say was the start of the difficulty that scientists in general found when they tried to access data from some climate scientists.
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From Phil Jones to Warwick Hughes.
1299. Between July 2004 and Feb 2005. (Exact date not on my copy of the email.)
I should warn you that some data we have we are not supposed top (sic) pass on to others. We can pass on the gridded data – which we do. Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it. There is IPR to consider. You can get similar data from GHCN at NCDC. Australia isn’t restricted there.
ACRONYMS
WMO = World Meteorological Organisation.
IPR = Intellectual Property Rights.
GHCN = Global Historical Climatology Network.
NCAR = USA National Centre for Atmospheric Research.
WWR = World Weather Records of the World Meteorological Organization.
MCDR = WMO’s Monthly Climatic Data for the World.
Phil had had some prior thoughts about this.
0688. 16 July 2004.
The reason for emailing though is that I’m also being hassled by Warwick Hughes for the CRU station dataset. We put up the gridded fields, but not the station data. Over the last year or so, I’ve told people they can’t have the station data – go to the GHCN site and get it. I knew that avenue has been closed, but it got some of them off my back. I’m not that inclined to release it to Hughes (who Mike knows and maybe Tom). All he wants to do is to show how I’ve made some mistake or used some incorrect data for some stations.
There are a number of issues, though:
Until recently we had very little data about real time changes in ocean pH around the world. Finally autonomous sensors placed in a variety of ecosystems “from tropical to polar, open-ocean to coastal, kelp forest to coral reef” give us the information we needed.
It turns out that far from being a stable pH, spots all over the world are constantly changing. One spot in the ocean varied by an astonishing 1.4 pH units regularly. All our human emissions are projected by models to change the world’s oceans by about 0.3 pH units over the next 90 years, and that’s referred to as “catastrophic”, yet we now know that fish and some calcifying critters adapt naturally to changes far larger than that every year, sometimes in just a month, and in extreme cases, in just a day.
Data was collected by 15 individual SeaFET sensors in seven types of marine habitats. Four sites were fairly stable (1, which includes the open ocean, and also sites 2,3,4) but most of the rest were highly variable (esp site 15 near Italy and 14 near Mexico) . On a monthly scale the pH varies by 0.024 to 1.430 pH units.
Figure 1. Map of pH sensor (SeaFET) deployment locations.
The authors draw two conclusions: (1) most non-open ocean sites vary a lot, and (2) and some spots vary so much they reach the “extreme” pH’s forecast for the doomsday future scenarios on a daily (a daily!) basis.
At Puerto Morelos (in Mexico’s easternmost state, on the Yucatán Peninsula) the pH varied as much as 0.3 units per hour due to groundwater springs. Each day the pH bottomed at about 10am, and peaked shortly after sunset. These extreme sites tell us that some marine life can cope with larger, faster swings than the apocalyptic predictions suggest, though of course, no one is suggesting that the entire global ocean would be happy with similar extreme swings.
Even the more stable and vast open ocean is not a fixed pH all year round. Hofmann writes that “Open-water areas (in the Southern Ocean) experience a strong seasonal shift in seawater pH (~0.3–0.5 units) between austral summer and winter.”
This paper is such a game changer, they talk about rewriting the null hypothesis:
“This natural variability has prompted the suggestion that “an appropriate null hypothesis may be, until evidence is obtained to the contrary, that major biogeochemical processes in the oceans other than calcification will not be fundamentally different under future higher CO2/lower pH conditions””
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The establishment will keep asking for more until something stops it… and what stops it growing? Nothing except us. It grows until the protests become too strong. We must not only protest just to keep what is ours (our freedom) but we must teach our children that protesting unwanted laws is a fact of life.
The NCDC ocean (blue) and global (brown) monthly temperature anomalies (relative to the 1900-2000 average temperatures) since 1980. The observed temperatures compared to the predictions made in the first IPCC report. Note that the width of the predictions is ±0.1°C, which is roughly the size of the month to month fluctuations in the temperature anomalies.
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