One scientist’s perspective on the new Climategate emails

One scientist’s perspective on the new Climategate emails.

Long time readers will recall that in 2004 and 2005 (before Katrina), I led an interdisciplinary effort to review the literature on hurricanes and global warming. The effort resulted in a peer-reviewed article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. That paper, despite being peer-reviewed and standing the test of time (as we now know), was ignored by the relevant part of the IPCC 2007 that dealt with extreme events. Thanks to the newly released emails from UEA [University of East Anglia] (hacked, stolen, donated, or whatever) we can say with certainty why that paper was excluded from the IPCC 2007 report Chapter 3 which discussed hurricanes and climate change. Those various reviews associated with the release of the UEA emails that concluded that no papers were purposely kept out of the IPCC may want to revisit that particular conclusion.

Read the whole thing. It is worth it to get a real sense about how petty and political the IPCC process is. It has little to do with science, and everything to do with forcing a conclusion down everyone’s throat.

India pushes for a sharing of intellectual property rights at Durban climate talks

India pushes for a sharing of intellectual property rights at Durban climate talks.

If you ever had any doubts about the political goals behind the global warming movement, this headline and story should put those forever to rest. The advocates of climate change really don’t care about climate change. What they really want is to get their hands on other people’s success. Failing to get a deal that would limit the activities of the developed countries so that the developing countries would have an advantage in the free market, the effort is now aimed at attacking and even eliminating the property rights of private technology companies. What this has to do with climate change is beyond me.

That India is leading the way here is puzzling, however, as that country’s economic success in the past decade is solely due to its abandonment of communist ideals in favor of capitalism and the free market. You would think, with that experience, that India’s government would thus understand the importance of protecting property rights, not violating them.

Climategate 2

Having failed to clean up its act after the release of the climategate emails two years ago, the field of climate science is about to turned upside down all over again. Today there was another release of hacked emails, written by the same collection of global warming scientists. Once again, these emails show that these scientists are anything but scientists. Instead, they seem far more interested in campaigning for a certain result, regardless of the science. A few quotes:
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A new batch of hacked climategate emails have been released

A new batch of hacked climategate emails have been released. More info, including some examples from the emails, can be found here and here.

Update: A quick scan by me of these, hardly finished, reveals this one email from Phil Jones, demonstrating beyond doubt how much fraud is involved in climate science:

Basic problem is that all models are wrong – not got enough middle and low level clouds.

Stay tuned for more bombshells.

Uncertainty rules the day

The press reports have been unanimous:

Unfortunately, if you read the actual IPCC panel summary report, you find that, though the majority of the press stories accurately describe the report’s worst scenarios and predictions, all of them downplay the most important point of the report, that the uncertainties are gigantic and that the influence of human activity on the increase or decrease of extreme weather for the next few decades will be inconsequential. To quote the report:
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The global output of atmospheric carbon dioxide jumped in 2010 by the biggest amount on record, according to the U.S. Department of Energy

The global output of atmospheric carbon dioxide jumped in 2010 by the biggest amount on record, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

In 2007 when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its last large report on global warming, it used different scenarios for carbon dioxide pollution and said the rate of warming would be based on the rate of pollution. Boden said the latest figures put global emissions higher than the worst case projections from the climate panel.

And yet, the global temperatures are not rising, as also predicted by those same IPCC models.

The long minimum continues

Though it has been very clear for the past few months that the sun has finally transitioned from solar minimum and begun its ramp up to solar maximum, that ramp up has also been very slow and wimpy.

On October 9, 2011 the scientists at Physikalisch- Meteorologisches Observatorium Davos (PMOD) posted an updated summary of the satellite data that has been carefully measuring the variation of the sun’s total solar irradiance since 1978. The graph below, which can be found here [pdf], brings that data up through the present. (I had posted the previous update about a year ago.)

Total solar irradiance

I have added a brown line to illustrate how deep the recently ended solar minimum was, compared to previous minimums. Note also that this most recent minimum would also be far below the minimum prior to 1975. I have also added a blue line to show that the sun has only very recently finally brightened enough to finally exceed the previous minimum. All told, the sun remained dimmer than the previous minimum for over five years!
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Another global warming scientist is accused of hiding the decline

The lead scientist in a recent climate study has been accused of hiding the fact that the global temperature has been flat for more than a dozen years.

The new study, led by Richard Muller, had taken raw land data and re-analyzed it in an attempt to clear up the doubts caused by the climategate scandal. In an announcement last week, Muller claimed that their work had proven that the climate had been warming continuously since 1950.

Now, another climate scientist, Judith Curry, has accused Muller of failing to point out that his same re-analysis had also shown that climate temperatures have been totally flat for the past 13 years, even as carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere continue to rise. As Curry told the Daily Mail, “This is nowhere near what the climate models were predicting. Whatever it is that’s going on here, it doesn’t look like it’s being dominated by CO2.”

Curry is also accusing Muller of going to the press to spin the results in favor of global warming, before the research was complete.
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An independent study of climate suggests the climate has warmed 0.9 degrees Celsius since 1950

An independent study of land temperature records by a team led by Richard Muller concludes that the climate has warmed 0.9 degrees Celsius since 1950.

Does this prove that human-caused global warming is happening? No, not even close. The study has not yet been peer-reviewed, and others have not yet been able to duplicate its results. Also, a warming trending since 1950 can be caused many things, and it is only a very short snapshot of a vastly longer movie.

Nonetheless, it does appear that real science (open data, honest analysis, and a willingness to entertain opposing viewpoints) is beginning to return to the field of climate research. For this we should celebrate.

A UN report says that nearly one billion people are hungry because of biofuels such as ethanol from corn

A UN report this week says that nearly one billion people are hungry, partly because of biofuels such as ethanol from corn.

The findings are echoed in a report published today by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), based in Washington DC. Maximo Torero, one of the report’s authors, says policymakers must “curtail biofuels subsidies” and “discourage the use of food crops in biofuel production” to limit food price volatility.

Eco-friendly festival closes down due to lack of attendence

Eco-friendly festival closes down due to lack of attendance.

Reminds me of a local news piece here in Maryland last week, where a team from the University of Maryland in College Park won a Department of Energy competition for the best built solar powered house. The problem is that the house cost $330,000 to build, is only 920 square feet in size, and the best price they hope to get for it is $250,000, if that.

In other words, it appears that these ecological projects have little to do with the real world, where creating something that customers will want to buy is the only way to succeed. All else is fantasy.

The new hockey stick

Steven Hayward at Powerline has noted a new hockey stick graph, produced by scientists and described in detail by the journal Nature. This one is not specifically about climate, but about the reliability of science and the peer-review process itself. To quote the Nature article:

[Retraction] notices [of science papers] are increasing rapidly. In the early 2000s, only about 30 retraction notices appeared annually. This year, the Web of Science is on track to index more than 400 (see ‘Rise of the retractions’) — even though the total number of papers published has risen by only 44% over the past decade.

Below is the graph from the Nature paper. As Hayward says, “Lo and behold, it looks like a hockey stick! (Heh.)”
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Arctic ozone loss at record level

The ozone levels over the Arctic this past year were the lowest on record, caused by unusually cold temperatures.

No records for low temperature were set this year, but the air remained at its coldest for an unusually long period of time, and covered an unusually large area. In addition, the polar vortex was stronger than usual. Here, winds circulate around the edge of the Arctic region, somewhat isolating it from the main world weather systems.

“Why [all this] occurred will take years of detailed study,” said Dr. [Michelle] Santee [from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory]. “It was continuously cold from December through April, and that has never happened before in the Arctic in the instrumental record.”

Obama: “You’ve got a governor whose state is on fire denying climate change.”

Obama on Sunday at a fundraiser, attacking Rick Perry: “You’ve got a governor whose state is on fire denying climate change.”

Here is another example of a politician making a fool of himself. The wildfires in Texas have nothing to do with climate change. And if Obama thinks they do, he immediately shows himself to be completely ignorant of the science behind the Earth’s climate.

Faster than light?

Can neutrinos travel faster than light? After three years of gathering data, an experiment at CERN says they do, though by only a tiny amount.

[Physicist Antonio] Ereditato says that he is confident enough in the new result to make it public. The researchers claim to have measured the 730-kilometre trip between CERN and its detector to within 20 centimetres. They can measure the time of the trip to within 10 nanoseconds, and they have seen the effect in more than 16,000 events measured over the past two years. Given all this, they believe the result has a significance of six-sigma — the physicists’ way of saying it is certainly correct.

You can download and read a preprint of their paper here.

What I find intriguing about this result, other than its exciting groundbreaking possibilities, is how it illustrates sharply the contrast between normal and healthy science, and the sad and sick state of the field of climate science.
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