See the new year in with Lindzen

While Richard North deals with the solicitors' letter he has received about his Pachauri postings, see the new year in with an interview given by Richard Lindzen - covers science, Gore, Europe's priorities, life, the universe, everything ... oh, and did I mention climate change?

Happy new year.

Capitalism and global warming

Richard North is documenting ways in which businesses are positioning themselves to profit from concern about global warming.

This does not mean that Munich Re and others like them are promoting a scam. But insurers naturally tend to emphasise any risks in order to encourage people to insure against them. It's their business. It's how their markets work.

What it does mean is that comments by an insurance company about 'climate change' (or indeed any other risk) are not to be taken as disinterested scientific statements. Insurers are in business, and every business has an agenda.

So where would you go for impartial science? To a UN body headed, not by an academic scientist, but by a ... businessman?

Global warming rears its head again

The People reports that "new freeze could bring a month of misery".

Half the country is expected to be blanketed with up to 4in of snow, it says. And the freeze could last until February, making this one of the longest cold winters in 20 years. I thought we were expecting a second successive year of record warmth?

The new cold snap is aparently due to hit Kent and Sussex on Tuesday and move northwest within three days. Wind-chill could bring overnight temperatures of -18°C in the North.

Castles built on sand

If a UN body such as the IPCC is to provide advice to policymakers, it must follow the evidence wherever it leads. This requires an expert and disinterested membership, and certainly not a chairman whose accumulating vested interests, and open and (as Lord Monckton has pointed out) dodgy advocacy of a particular line on global warming  binds him to one trend of thought and is sure to make him less willing to respond open-mindedly to new evidence - of which plenty is coming in.

Turns out the giants of science - whose climategate emails reveal their unacademic tribalism - demand our belief in their global warming religion without allowing us to see the temperature data it's based on. It defies common sense that voters would agree to turn their society upside down to make life harder for themselves on the basis of secret information; yet that is what politicians think we should do.

No thanks.

While those in favour of open science (aka sceptics, for what else should a scientist be?) chip away at the fortress walls of secrecy about temperature data, Terence Corcoran refers to the second leg of the IPCC thesis - that is after the physical science was supposedly settled. This focused on social and economic solutions to the supposed global warming problem, and required wider scientific expertise to formulate and validate models whose complexities and unknowns rivalled those of trying to predict the weather decades hence.

Only four scenarios were developed, called A1, B1, A2, and B2.

In the 1998 draft, the A1 scenario is called the Golden Economic Age. It describes a period of “rapid and successful economic development,” brought on by the economic structures that have been successful in the past: free markets, global free trade, innovation. “Free trade enables each region to access knowledge, technology, and capital to best deploy its respective comparative economic and human advantages.” By 2100, it said, the developed world under free global trade, would have annual per capita income approaching $100,000 and the developing world $70,000.

The trouble with this Golden Economic Age, a name that was dropped in the final IPCC report on scenarios in 2001, is that it produced a lot of carbon emissions — thus making free trade, open markets and globalization a non-starter. The alternatives were variations on slower growth. Scenario B1, called Sustainable Development, involved “high levels of environmental and social consciousness” along with reductions in income and social inequality. Average per capita income would rise only to $40,000 by 2100. But the good news, from the IPCC perspective, is that carbon emissions were a lot lower.

The upshot of these scenarios, writes Corcoran, is a deck stacked against free markets and globalization.

Emails cataloguing the weaknesses in the scenarios project are numerous. ... While the scientists balked at simple numbers and sought qualification, the IPCC wanted precision. Geoff Jenkins, a former head of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction, where CRU is housed, wrote to Mike Hulme: “Getting away from single number answers is very laudable scientifically, but it presents policymakers (for whom the whole IPCC exercise is undertaken) with a problem.” ...

The IPCC’s 2001 Synthesis Report concluded that carbon concentration in the atmosphere could rise to 1,250% above the pre-industrial year of 1750 under the free market A1 scenario, with temperatures rising as much as 5.8 degrees Celsius. Capitalism clearly ruins everything.

The economic analysis by the IPCC was as - um - questionable as their physical science. The underlying assumptions were gently but devastatingly exposed by Lord Lawson in his book An Appeal to Reason.

As Richard North chases down Pachauri, and the physical scientists worry away at the global temperature data, don't forget that the economic and social changes being pushed are as rickety as the physical science.

Truly castles built on sand.

I'm a jolly important climate scientist

Well no, not me, but Bob Watson, DEFRA's chief scientific advisor must be - the government evidently paid for nine flights in six months this year.

He flew to Helsinki, New York, New Zealand, Washington DC, Beijing, Cape Town, Edinburgh and Madrid between April and September.

The man's a saint.

His three-day trip to China in July to attend a meeting of the “China-UK Sustainable Agriculture Innovation Network” cost £3,664.

His week-long visit to South Africa later the same month, to chair an “International Ad-Hoc Technical Expert Group Meeting” cost £5,387. A note on his file states that the £5,001 flight was the only one available.

Carbon footprint, anyone!

The perils of forecasting

A bit of warming doesn't seem a bad idea this morning.

The Met Office - which tells us what temperatures will be across the world at the end of the century - says it is too early to tell whether there will be a white Christmas - next week.

Questions crowd in on AGW

The Daily Express report on Russian allegations that Russian temperature data was cherry-picked (linked to by Richard North) is sober and succinct, including the qualification that

Critics of the Russian report also point out the huge vested interests of the Russian state, which is rich in oil, coal and gas, to avoid action needed to fight man-made climate change.

Richard also reports on the rage of LDCs' (often corrupt) governments that the dangled pots of money may be snatched from their grasp. Their beef is not about justice or about the science (that's the cover story) but about money.

In any case, Lord Monckton has filletted the science of the opening presentation at Copenhagen by Dr Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, who as Richard points out stands to make a lot of money from action on AGW. Pachauri's exaggerations and lies are of Goreian proportions, while inconvenient truths are ignored.

Doubtless the ruinous faith of King David and the scots expenses chiseller remains unshaken.

King David

Richard North points to David Cameron's hubristic attitude on green policies:

Faced by a mini-revolt from climate change sceptics within his own party, he said: "A very small number of people take a different view on the science, but the policy is driven by me, and that is the way it is going to be."

This may play well with the Guardian readers he was courting, but it is another wound to any idea that we have a functioning democracy. If you're in the majority who don't believe in man-made global warming, or who don't want tighter integration within the EU - tough. No party thinks they need you. You can't vote for what you want.

Meanwhile hard-ball negotiations continue at Copenhagen, with the MSM pliantly warning of failure and certain bloggers who should know better rubbing their hands. At this stage, it looks like standard negotiating tactics. If you get what you asked for at this stage, you didn't ask for enough to start with.

It's not as if turning our industrial society upside down would produce the result the greenies claim is necessary. The Guardian tells us that

Low-lying island nations such as the Maldives are pushing to limit the temperature rise to just 1.5C, to avoid them being inundated by rising seas.

To achieve that, they report, global emissions would have had to peak, according to one estimate, in the middle of last week. Do they think nobody read Nils-Axel Morner on Why the Maldives aren't sinking? The LDCs just see a great chance to get a lot of money.

The greenies want to overturn the basis of western society in pursuit of a highly dubious scientific theory. As Bishop Hill points out:

The GISS figures are out for November and Lucia reports that they are highish, at 0.68°C, but not high enough to stop the IPCC's hypothesis from being remaining in falsified territory. I wonder why I don't read this in the newspapers?

Christmas tree watch

The Department of Health has spent £2,485 on a ‘dressed tree’ at its Skipton House offices in London, where 950 staff work, and a further three trees costing £250 each have been bought for the department’s Whitehall HQ. Even more ludicrous are the attempts to justify this spending.

And the Serious Fraud Office is hiring a decorated tree this year at a cost of just over £400 - almost six times what it would cost to buy one. In 2007 the SFO spent a maximum of £70 purchasing one but only last year it spent nearly £300 renting an artificial tree. They defend spending this money with irrelevancies.

htp Dave

Al Gore - figure of fun? Or just a liar?

Al Gore recently said the leaked CRU emails were “10 years old”, when there were even some in the last month. Gore also said on television recently that the temperature of the Earth’s mantle was “several million degrees”, probably making it hotter than the sun. Global warming indeed!

Now he has said at Copenhagen:

Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.

And he called the figures "fresh". But they are no such thing - and the scientist doesn't accept this figure.

No wonder Al Gore refuses public debates. No wonder he insisted his appearance before a US Senate committee be in closed session.

So how should we regard Al Gore? Is he just incompetent, or is he is a charlatan? Here's a clue: all these mistakes had the effect of making 'global warming' appear more serious.

Coincidence? You decide.

Temperature data totters

Today's Mail on Sunday has a long piece about the background to claims of global warming, bringing the shape of the debate to a much wider audience.

(Ignore the article's headline 'Climate change emails row deepens as Russians admit they DID come from their Siberian server' - that just reflects the small add-on at the end.)

There's a lot in the article - do read it all - but two things stand out.

First, the UEA's 'original' temperature data hasn't been destroyed:

Yesterday Davies [the university’s Pro-Vice Chancellor] said that, contrary to some reports, none of this data has in fact been deleted.

But in the wake of the scandal, the paper adds, the reliability of the data is questionable. Stunningly, we are told:

At the CRU, said Davies, some stations’ readings were adjusted by unit and in such cases, raw and adjusted data could be compared.

But in about 90 per cent of cases, the adjustment was carried out in the countries that collected the data, and the CRU would not know exactly how this had been done.

Davies said: ‘All I can say is that the process is careful and considered. To get the details, the best way would be to go the various national meteorological services.’

As Philip Stott says, the consequences may be 'explosive'.

Even when outsiders can obtain what is allegedly original, unaltered data from the CRU, it may not be the original temperature readings. CRU don't know what the quality of their data is. Davies calls the process "careful and considered". But they don't know what the different processes in the different countries were!

And on this is based their global warming scare.

It will take time to analyse the data site by site - that has started in a small way, but of course there are a lot of sites to check. And while Mr Brown's 'flat earthers' go back and check the basic data underlying the global warming hype, the bien pensant global warming juggernaut is likely to roll on, to the expense of us all.

Cities are warmer than the countryside

We know that. But there are suggestions that temperatures may be rising faster in urban areas than in the countryside. For instance, over time buildings are put up closer together, high buildings replace low ones, and they expel more heat. So temperatures in cities may rise faster than in the countryside. But if it's global warming you're interested in, it's presumably the rural temperatures you have to look at.

These pockets of warmth called cities are also labelled Urban Heat Islands (UHIs). One desktop review has proposed that temperature readings are rising faster in some US cities than in (fairly) nearby rural sites.

The word desktop is a clue that the characteristics of each pair of sites will have to be looked at individually. Are they reasonably true comparators?

Richard North has found one temperature recorder at a UK airport. Most of them have more traffic and development now than they used to. How do the scientists adjust for that?

But if temperatures are rising faster in UHIs than in the countryside, what adjustments are climate scientists making behind the scenes to the two temperature series? We don't know yet, so it's odd to say the least that more than 1,700 scientists have agreed to sign a statement defending the "professional integrity" of global warming research. How would even the climate scientists among them know?

As I blogged previously, appeals to authority like this don't work any more. The doubt is out there. But even when the unadjusted temperature readings are eventually released, it may take some time for a clear view of the validity of individual sites' readings to emerge.

Meanwhile, the statisticians will doubtless be poring over the validity of the statistical adjustments. In principle you'd expect urbanisation effects to be adjusted out somehow. Maybe we'll see someday soon.

It's not The Sun wot done it

The Sun headlines recent (fairly global, it says) warming, in a piece which will baffle some of its readers as it includes decimal points.

But commenters there will have none of it (open in IE). It may be warming, they say, but if it is ... why? They know climate change isn't a new phenomenon.

Famously the paper likes to follow its readers. Could this be a straw in the wind?

The flat-earthers strike back

World striding colossus Gordon Brown has pronounced that the scientific consensus has won the day over the 'flat earthers' who continue to resist its long march to the drumbeat of history.

Pesky of them (141 of them) to have issued the Copenhagen Climate Challenge calling for observational evidence to demonstrate that

1. Variations in global climate in the last hundred years are significantly outside the natural range experienced in previous centuries;
   
2. Humanity’s emissions of carbon dioxide and other ‘greenhouse gases’ (GHG) are having a dangerous impact on global climate;
3. Computer-based models can meaningfully replicate the impact of all of the natural factors that may significantly influence climate;
4. Sea levels are rising dangerously at a rate that has accelerated with increasing human GHG emissions, thereby threatening small islands and coastal communities;
5. The incidence of malaria is increasing due to recent climate changes;
6. Human society and natural ecosystems cannot adapt to foreseeable climate change as they have done in the past;
7. Worldwide glacier retreat, and sea ice melting in Polar Regions , is unusual and related to increases in human GHG emissions;
8. Polar bears and other Arctic and Antarctic wildlife are unable to adapt to anticipated local climate change effects, independent of the causes of those changes;
9. Hurricanes, other tropical cyclones and associated extreme weather events are increasing in severity and frequency;
10. Data recorded by ground-based stations are a reliable indicator of surface temperature trends.

If you advocate something piffling like changing the industrial basis of society, the least you can do is to provide evidence. And there's the problem!

Government sets out to persuade us that action on global warming climate change is urgent. In the absence of evidence, all they can appeal to is their sagacity and moral authority - which is risible. So, in redoubling their efforts to convince us, they import scientists to bolster the argument by shaking their heads seriously. Evidently that's not working either, so we are invited to swallow on trust the views of Conservatives such as John Selwyn Gummer.

But where's the evidence, guys?

As Philip Stott remarked on Today, climate science resembles an inverted pyramid. It's all founded on the work of a small number of scientists on temperature data which we have not been allowed to see.

Now, doubtless Gordon Brown and John Selwyn Gummer have satisfied themselves about its integrity. They'll obviously be keen, then, to investigate Anthony Watts' filletting of the temperature data at Darwin, where he peels away changes made to the original temperature readings to reveal what he elegantly terms "irrational data adjustment".

This opens a whole new line of probing and investigation of the warmists' case. Which is how science should work.

Meanwhile, this blog wears the flat earther badge with pride.

htp Richard North

More climate change clarity

When you read Booker (who's really on form this week), don't miss the first comment, from NucEngineer, right at the foot of the page. It disappears and reappears, so here is just part of it.

1. The elimination of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age (the handle of the hockey stick) was necessary so that past solar effects could be minimized, thereby allowing almost all of the warming in the last 75 years to be blamed on Greenhouse Gasses. Raw data (like tree-ring thickness, radioisotope of mud layers in a lake bottom, ice core analyses, etc.) are used as a proxy for reconstruction of the temperature record for 1000 AD to 1960 AD. To ensure desired results, statistical manipulation of the raw data and selecting only supporting data, cherry-picking, was suspected and later proved to make the hockey stick graph. Look closely at the plot here where the hockey stick is one of the plots:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/16/cern_cloud_experiment/

2. The slope of long-term 10-year running average global temperature using thermometers from 1900 to present (the blade of the hockey stick) was maximized with the sloppy gridding code, Urban Heat Island effects, hiding the declines, and even fabricating data (documented in the leaked source code comments revealed with ClimateGate). This ensured that the Greenhouse Gas sensitivity coefficients in all 21 of the super computers was maximized, and that maximizes the temperature result at year 2100 based on Greenhouse Gas increases. This thermometer data was used to replace the tree ring-divergence after 1960 and plot this over the climate history data of (1) above giving the false impression that the reconstructed 1000 AD to 1960 AD results are more accurate than they are.

3. Because tuning of the super computer programs uses back casting, the computer outputs could always replicate the 20th Century (by design); therefore it was assumed that the models had almost everything in them. Because of (1) and (2) above, nearly all climate change predicted by the models was due to CO2 and positive feedbacks and hardly any of the climate change was for other reasons like solar, understood or not.

4. Over the years, when better numbers for volcanic effects, black carbon, aerosols, land use, ocean and atmospheric multi-decadal cycles, etc. became available, it appears that CRU made revisions to refit the back cast, but could hardly understand what the code was doing due to previous correction factor fudging and outright fabricating, as documented in the released code as part of ClimateGate.

5. After the IPCC averages the 21 super computer outputs of future projected warming (anywhere from 2-degrees to 7-degrees, not very precise), that output is used to predict all manner of secondary effects / catastrophes. (Fires, floods, droughts, blizzards, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, insects, extinctions, diseases, civil wars, cats & dogs sleeping together, etc.) This results in massive amounts of government funding for the study of secondary effects, employing tens of thousands of scientists and engineers worldwide, thus the consensus.

An anonymous climate scientist writes ...

Watts Up With That highlights this comment as "devastating". For instance:

Long before ClimateGate it was known that the IPCC people were trying to fudge the data to get rid of the [Medieval Warm Period]. And for good reason. If the MWP is “allowed” to exist, this means that temperatures higher than today did not then create a “runaway greenhouse” in the Middle Ages with methane released from the Arctic tundra, ice cap albedo lost, sea levels rising to flood London, etc. etc.), and means that Jim Hansen’s runaway greenhouse that posits only amplifying feedbacks (and no damping feedbacks) will not happen now. We now know that the models on which the IPCC alarms are based to not do clouds, they do not do the biosphere, they do not explain the Pliocene warming, and they have never predicted anything, ever, correctly.

And "we have known for years that CO2 increases have never in the past 300,000 years caused temperature rise (CO2 rise trails temperature increase). ... We have also known for years that the alleged one degree temperature rise from 1880 vanishes if sites exposed to urban heat islands are not considered."

And "the computer code is transparently fraudulent".

There's more, much more. A must read.

A great read on climate and carbon dioxide

The Skeptics Handbook II

Google on climategat

Harold Ambler has been asking Google why 'climategate' doesn't feature in search suggestions.

A search on Google UK just now for climategat offered just two suggestions:

climate guatemala

climate guatemala city

You’d think Google's al-gore-ithms could do better than this....

Hurrah the Maldives aren't sinking

That's the message from Nils-Axel Mörner in The Spectator.

So that's one Commonwealth country which won't need to tap our taxpayers' bailout sinking fund, isn't it. Nor Tuvalu, nor Vanuatu. So can we have our money back, please? (Not that we had it to give in the first place.)

What's that? The science is settled, you say...?

More climategate disinformation from Prof Jones - maybe!

According to Lord Lawson's Global Warming Policy Foundation, Professor Jones told The Times that he questioned the timing of the leak, just two weeks before the climate change conference to be held in Copenhagen, saying it could be a 'concerted attempt' to undermine the science behind global warming in the lead up to the summit.

Hang on - Paul Hudson at the BBC had sat on the emails for several weeks. Is Professor Jones trying to spin climategate?

UPDATE In what appears to be a later version of this article (with the byline of Ben Webster, Environment Editor, rather than Abhinav Ramnaraya), the paper expands on the timing of the alleged hacks and no longer attributes speculation about the timing to Prof Jones.

Early version

Professor Jones denied manipulating data, saying that claims of collusion were "absolute rubbish".

"We are, and have always been, scrupulous in ensuring that our science publications are robust and honest," he said.

He questioned the timing of the leak, just two weeks before the climate change conference to be held in Copenhagen, saying it could be a 'concerted attempt' to undermine the science behind global warming in the lead up to the summit.

Later version

The computer was hacked repeatedly, the source close to the investigation said: “It was hacked into in October and possibly earlier. Then they gained access again in midNovember.” By not releasing the e-mails until two weeks before Copenhagen, the hacker ensured that the debate about them would rage during the summit. Very few of the e-mails are recent. One, in which Professor Jones mentions a “trick” which could “hide the decline” in temperatures, was sent in 1999.

Bob Ward, director of policy at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change, based at the London School of Economics, said: “From the timing of the release of the e-mails, it seems that the intention was not just to inform the public but to undermine mainstream climate researchers and influence the process in Copenhagen.”

Richard North points out a Times leader comment.

Then his e-mail was hacked. Overnight, an online army of climate change sceptics rose up and declared him a villain.


They should not be alone. The charge against Professor Jones is that he was unscientific, by virtue of being uncritical. In one e-mail, he wrote of keeping two papers out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). “I can’t see either . . . being in the next report,” he wrote. “Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peerreview literature is!”

In fact the sceptics are not alone. For all the paper's prim attempt to be first onto the disinterestedly moral high ground on climategate, it is in fact already crowded with scientists appalled at this attempt to twist the process of scientific enquiry. The 'sceptics' v. 'warmists' narrative does not play (unless you understand the word 'sceptic' in the sense that a good scientist is sceptical about every fact and theory, because that's how science advances).

The press prefers the simple narrative of two groups of people with opposing opinions about 'global warming'. They need to make room for scientists appalled by CRU's distortion of scientific enquiry.