Tag: AGW/CC

The global medieval

While it is generally a category error to talk about the medieval period outside of Europe, it is perfectly appropriate to discuss the warming that took place during medieval times and has bedeviled the climate change propagandists. Unsurprisingly, the latest evidence indicates that the AGW/CC scammers are incorrect – again – and the warming period was not limited to Europe:

Current theories of the causes and impact of global warming have been thrown into question by a new study which shows that during medieval times areas as far apart as Europe and Antarctica both warmed up. It then cooled down naturally and there was even a ‘mini ice age’.

A team of scientists led by geochemist Zunli Lu from Syracuse University in New York state, has found that the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ approximately 500 to 1,000 years ago wasn’t just confined to Europe. In fact, it extended all the way down to Antarctica.

At present the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) argues that the Medieval Warm Period was confined to Europe.

It shouldn’t be at all surprising that the climate scientists have been shown to be wrong again. Remember, experiment-backed science is only about 11% reliable according to the scientific method itself, so you can safely expect that whenever scientists make a new public announcement, they’re going to be wrong around 90 percent of the time.

The rule of thumb is that if you can’t make a physical object or machine based on the scientific principles involved, the scientists are wrong. One can reasonably trust engineers, engineering, and technology, one cannot reasonably place any confidence in scientists, science, or the current scientific consensus.

The grand climate climb-down begins

It looks as if the global warming scammer who hoped to concoct a reverse Climategate may have been identified:

FEBRUARY 20, 2012: Earlier this evening, Peter Gleick, a prominent figure in the global warming movement, confessed to stealing electronic documents from The Heartland Institute in an attempt to discredit and embarrass a group that disagrees with his views.

Gleick’s crime was a serious one. The documents he admits stealing contained personal information about Heartland staff members, donors, and allies, the release of which has violated their privacy and endangered their personal safety.

An additional document Gleick represented as coming from The Heartland Institute, a forged memo purporting to set out our strategies on global warming, has been extensively cited by newspapers and in news releases and articles posted on Web sites and blogs around the world. It has caused major and permanent damage to the reputations of The Heartland Institute and many of the scientists, policy experts, and organizations we work with.

A mere apology is not enough to undo the damage.

In his statement, Gleick claims he committed this crime because he believed The Heartland Institute was preventing a “rational debate” from taking place over global warming. This is unbelievable. Heartland has repeatedly asked for real debate on this important topic. Gleick himself was specifically invited to attend a Heartland event to debate global warming just days before he stole the documents. He turned down the invitation.

Gleick also claims he did not write the forged memo, but only stole the documents to confirm the content of the memo he received from an anonymous source. This too is unbelievable. Many independent commentators already have concluded the memo was most likely written by Gleick.

We hope Gleick will make a more complete confession in the next few days.

There are several interesting things about this action and subsequent confession, which it appears may soon be followed by further confessions. They are as follows:

1. Contra their feverish insistence that the Climategate emails didn’t reveal anything significant or do any serious harm to their cause, it’s obvious that the global warming scammers believe that they did. Hence the document theft and release.

2. The stolen Heartland documents that were released didn’t actually do any harm to the anti-AGW cause or it would have been unnecessary to forge any documents.

3. The global warming scammers understand that they have failed to convince enough people that the scientific consensus is settled. In fact, they’ve now reached the point that so many people reject these assertions that they’re doing damage to the credibility of science and scientists by association. This is why Gleick is, as the Heartland press release correctly points out, ludicrously trying to claim that it is HEARTLAND that is attempting to stifle “rational debate”.

4. They’re getting seriously desperate. Which makes sense. In times of severe economic contraction, there will be significant pressure to stop funding all science that isn’t of immediate practical benefit, to say nothing of obvious junk science like what passes for climate science.

The consequence of this is that more scientists – who are herd animals, after all – are going to find that they cannot participate in the scam any longer. We’ll know that it’s over when clueless science fetishists like PZ Myers belatedly admit that because there isn’t any global warming, Man isn’t causing it and the science that they claimed was definitively settled never existed in the first place.

General Franco is still dead

As it happens, so is global warming.

Snowfall in the Sierra Nevada has remained consistent for 130 years, with no evidence that anything has changed as a result of climate change, according to a study released Tuesday. The analysis of snowfall data in the Sierra going back to 1878 found no more or less snow overall – a result that, on the surface, appears to contradict aspects of recent climate change models.

John Christy, the Alabama state climatologist who authored the study, said the amount of snow in the mountains has not decreased in the past 50 years, a period when greenhouse gases were supposed to have increased the effects of global warming.

As I have previously noted, the death of global warming also puts a bullet in the head of the concept of “scientific consensus”. Global Warming fabulists can either a) admit that they were lying and there never was any scientific consensus, or b) scientific consensus that differs from mainstream consensus is no more intrinsically reliable than astrology.

There is a word we use when science reaches the point of reliability. That word is “engineering”.

There is still no global warming

I hope the readers here will never, ever forget how the AGW/CC story has played out, especially the next time that the usual suspects start babbling about another “scientific consensus”.

The world’s greatest snow-capped peaks, which run in a chain from the Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan, have lost no ice over the last decade, new research shows. The discovery has stunned scientists, who had believed that around 50bn tonnes of meltwater were being shed each year and not being replaced by new snowfall.

The study is the first to survey all the world’s icecaps and glaciers and was made possible by the use of satellite data. Overall, the contribution of melting ice outside the two largest caps – Greenland and Antarctica – is much less then previously estimated, with the lack of ice loss in the Himalayas and the other high peaks of Asia responsible for most of the discrepancy.

I hope you will also remember this the next time that critics complain that I think I am smarter and more likely to be correct about a scientific matter than the scientists who actually specialize in the subject. How can I possibly assert that I am correct when all the experts say otherwise? Because, as has been chronicled in some detail, I was the last time. And the time before that. And the time before that….

What people often tend to forget is that scientists are people. And while one may not have the wherewithal to examine the actual scientific experiments or assess the relevant facts, one always has the ability to observe the behavior of the individuals citing them as evidence. There are a plethora of indications that an individual is not telling the straightforward truth, be it in person or in print. An ability to read those signs is all that is required to recognize when scientists are attempting to skate on their perceived authority rather than on any actual science, in which case one can always safely conclude that their claims are false. Observing the behavioral patterns was how I was able to correctly conclude that Man is not causing global warming because there is no global warming.

Scientists spend an awful lot of time being stunned because they are some of the most naive, credulous, and easily manipulated beings on the planet. That’s why they tend to inordinately fall for every nonsensical philosophical and political ideology that crosses their paths. The average reader of The National Enquirer probably has a better and more-developed sense of skepticism than the average scientist.

UPDATE – Even some of the former champions of global warming are now turning against the fake science.

One of the fathers of Germany’s modern green movement, Professor Dr. Fritz Vahrenholt, a social democrat and green activist, decided to author a climate science skeptical book together with geologist/paleontologist Dr. Sebastian Lüning. Vahrenholt’s skepticism started when he was asked to review an IPCC report on renewable energy. He found hundreds of errors. When he pointed them out, IPCC officials simply brushed them aside. Stunned, he asked himself, “Is this the way they approached the climate assessment reports?”

No global warming since 1997

As I have been repeatedly saying from the start, global warming has never been anything but another scientific hoax and an excuse to push global government:

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years. The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

Everything about the scientific consensus has been wrong, right down to their basic foundational assumption that CO2 levels produced higher temperatures. They don’t, and moreover, the conceptual model behind the theory has always been false.

This underlines one of my previous assertions. Science can only be trusted at the point when it becomes engineering. Which, of course, is another way of saying that science per se is not intrinsically reliable.

Climate change is the new evolution

I couldn’t agree more, considering that they’re both most likely little more than pseudo-scientific fiction.

Is climate change education the new evolution, threatened in U.S. school districts and state education standards by well-organized interest groups? A growing number of education advocates believe so, and yesterday, the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) in Oakland, California, which fights the teaching of creationism, announced that it’s going to take on climate change denial as well.

NCSE expects this task to be much harder than fighting creationism. “The forces arrayed against climate science are more numerous and much better funded,” Scott says, and are better able to get their message across in the mainstream media than creationism supporters.

The reason the task will not only be much harder, but impossible, isn’t because of the more formidable nature of “the forces arrayed against climate science”, but because it is significantly harder to lie to people about something that they can readily observe, at least in part, for themselves. That is why I am merely deeply skeptical about evolution by natural selection whereas I completely reject the observably false assertion of anthropogenic global warming.

That is why AGW/CC will go the way of phrenology, the global Ice Age, the food pyramid, and other past scientific consensuses sooner than TE(p)NS. I’m confident that genetic science will eventually shoot down the latter, but it’s going to take a considerable weight of incontrovertible evidence to finally root out the die-hard Neo-Darwinian dogmatists, considering how they are still clinging so desperately to their evolutionary epicycles.

So much for “scientific consensus”

The models were wrong, the predictions were wrong, and now the basic assumptions underlying the hypotheses appear to be wrong too:

The Economist reports on some new cutting-edge climate research published in a peer-reviewed article in Science that challenges some core green doom warnings. In particular, the study suggests that the probable sensitivity of the earth’s climate to increases in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is far lower than the assumptions traditionally used by the (already discredited) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Not only that, the authors find that the existence of a so-called “fat tail” — the notion that extreme temperature changes in response to increases in atmospheric CO2 are likely — is illusory.

The failure of the global warming “science” needs to be rubbed hard and repeatedly into the noses of all the scientists and science fetishists who claim that science cannot be questioned by non-scientists, or indeed, that their statements bear any more weight than those made by the fat homeless guy living in van DOWN BY THE RIVER!

Open letter to a climate charlatan

Willis Eschenbach calls out the foremost science scammer and “serial liar”, Dr. Phil Jones:

Here’s my problem with all of this, Dr. Jones. You tried out a variety of claimed reasons for not responding to a request for your data. None of them were even remotely true. They were all intended to hide the fact that you didn’t know where the data was. Dave clearly spelled out the problem: “we don’t know which data belongs to which stations, right?”

You claimed that the data was out there on the web somewhere. You claimed you couldn’t send any of it because of restrictions on a few datasets. You claimed it came from GHCN, then you said from NCAR, but you couldn’t say exactly where.

You gave lots and lots of explanations to me, everything except the truth—that your records were in such disarray that you could not fulfill my request. It is clear now from the Climategate emails that some records were there, some were missing, the lists were not up to date, there was orphan data, some stations had multiple sets of data, some data was only identified by folder not by filename, you didn’t know which data might have been covered by confidentiality agreements, and the provenance of some datasets could not be established. The unfortunate reality was that you simply couldn’t do what I asked.

Rather than just saying that, however, you came up with a host of totally bogus reasons why you could not give me the data. Those were lies, Phil. You and David Palmer flat-out lied to my face about why you couldn’t send me the data.

Now, I’ve come to accept that you lied to me. Here’s what I think. I think you are a scientist, and a reasonably good one, who was hard squeezed by two things—the Peter Principle, and Noble Cause Corruption. When you began your scientific career, your sloppy record keeping didn’t matter much. And you didn’t want to be the record keeper in any case, you wanted to do the science instead, but you kept getting promoted and you ended up curating a big messy dataset. Then things changed, and now, climate decisions involving billions of dollars are being made based in part on your data. Disarray in your files didn’t make a lot of difference when your work was of interest only to specialists. But now it matters greatly, money and people’s lives are at stake, and unfortunately you were a better scientist than you were a data manager.

So when my FOI request came along, you were caught. You were legally required to produce data you couldn’t locate. Rather than tell the truth and say “I can’t find it”, you chose to lie. Hey, it was only a small lie, and it was for the Noble Cause of saving the world from Thermageddon. So you had David tell me the data was available on the web. You knew that was a lie. David, apparently, didn’t realize it was a lie, at least at first. You hoped your Noble Lie would satisfy me, that I would get discouraged, and you could move on.

But I asked again, and when I called you on that first answer, you thought up another Noble Lie. And when that one didn’t work, you invented another Noble Lie.

OK, so you are a serial liar. Like I said, I’ve made my peace with that. It used to rankle me, but not any more. I just accepted that you can’t be trusted and I moved on. I do have compassion for you, Dr. Jones. None of you guys set out to do the ugly things you ended up doing. You all got caught by Noble Cause Corruption, by the vision of being smarter than everyone else and of being the only people standing between us and global destruction. It’s heady, treacherous stuff.

I have been a victim of that same self-delusion myself. I understand the sweet seduction that arises from the conviction that your mission is of vital, crucial importance to the whole planet. However, I quit that kind of nonsense around the time the sixties wound down … but again I digress. I have compassion for your position, and I was, although not satisfied, at least at ease with the outcome.

So if I made my peace with you, why am I writing this letter now?

I’m writing because in response to the new Climategate 2.0 email release, over at the UEA website, you have a new post in which you are up to your old tricks, trying to peanut-butter up the cracks in your stories.

Again, I repeat: there is no global warming outside of the usual range of temperature fluctuations caused by natural process. Contra all the climacaustal predictions, there has been no global warming at all for the last decade. There being none, it is not caused by human activity. What is described as “climate science” is not science, but corrupt government-funded scientific fraud and the greatest science scandal in the history of science.

If you still believe in “anthropogenic climate change” at this point, you obviously possess far more blind religious faith than the average illiterate religious fundamentalist.

Scientific projection

Have you noticed that the globocaustals always insist that scientists who are skeptical about the “science” of global warming must be in the pocket of Big Oil? As is so often the case when criticism is coming from the Left, it’s merely an assumption that their critics must be doing the same thing they are:

It recently came out that James Hansen, one of the two or three most prominent global warming alarmists on whose work the IPCC reports rest, “forgot” to report $1.6 million in outside income, as required by his government contracts. Is that significant? Well, yes: A handful of scientists, including Hansen, have gotten wealthy on climate alarmism. They have an enormous financial interest in the faux science they have done so much to perpetrate. It is more likely that the Pope would renounce Christianity than that Hansen, Michael Mann, etc., would change their minds about global warming, regardless of the evidence. (I say that because the Pope has far more intellectual integrity than the climate alarmists.)

Al Gore has gotten rich off his “warnings” of nonexistent global warming. James Hansen has gotten rich off his “warnings” of nonexistent global warming. And yet none of the Bezemer 12 happened to get rich off their warnings of a global financial crisis that actually happened. I haven’t either.

Now, why would it be more profitable to provide warnings of something imaginary than it is to provide warnings of something real. And why would anyone assume that either Al Gore or James Hansen, neither of whom are actual scientists, are neither corrupt nor motivated by the pecuniary gain they have demonstrably realized?

Hiding the decline again

Richard Muller is the latest “scientist” to attempt to pass off another an AGW/CC fraud:

Last week, a research team at Berkeley led by a former climate change skeptic released a study of global temperatures that intended to set the record straight on controversial data collected by the East Anglia Project, NASA, and other organizations that have acted as advocates for action based on anthropogenic global warming. Professor Richard Muller put together a graph of the data that supposedly showed warming from 1800 (roughly the beginning of the Industrial Era in Europe) through 1975, and then a steeper rise in temperatures that appears unstopped. When this data was released, newspapers and other media proclaimed it the end of AGW skepticism and demanded capitulation from the “deniers.”…

A closer look at the data and a Daily Mail interview with one of Muller’s team shows that the chart hides the fact that no warming has occurred in the last 11 years, as has been repeatedly pointed out:

Prof Judith Curry, who chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at America’s prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology, said that Prof Muller’s claim that he has proven global warming sceptics wrong was also a ‘huge mistake’, with no scientific basis. Prof Curry is a distinguished climate researcher with more than 30 years experience and the second named co-author of the BEST project’s four research papers.

Her comments, in an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday, seem certain to ignite a furious academic row. She said this affair had to be compared to the notorious ‘Climategate’ scandal two years ago. …

In fact, Prof Curry said, the project’s research data show there has been no increase in world temperatures since the end of the Nineties – a fact confirmed by a new analysis that The Mail on Sunday has obtained. ‘There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped,’ she said. ‘To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.’

Let’s take a look at Muller’s chart, and then compare it to the chart for the last 13 years — which the Daily Mail labels an “inconvenient truth”:

First, let’s look at the top chart. A closer reading of the top chart shows that, relative to the 1950-1980 average baseline BEST uses, temperatures didn’t actually warm at all until sometime during the Great Depression, so the entire first century of the Industrial Era apparently had no impact — in a period where the dirtiest of mass energy production processes was in widest use (coal). Temperatures then started to slowly rise during an era of significantly reduced industrial output, thanks to a lengthy economic depression that gripped the entire world. What we end up with is a 30-year spike that also includes a few years of reduced industrial output, starting in the stagnating 1970s where oil production also got restricted thanks to onerous government policies and trade wars.

In climate terms, a 30-year spike is as significant as a surprisingly warm afternoon in late October. Man, I wish we were going to have one of those today.

But then look what happens in the past 11 years in the bottom chart. Despite the fact that the world’s nations continue to spew CO2 with no significant decline (except perhaps in the Great Recession period of 2008-9), the temperature record is remarkably stable. In fact, it looks similar to the period between 1945 and 1970 on the top chart. If global temperature increases really correlated directly to CO2 emissions, we wouldn’t see this at all; we’d see ever-escalating rates of increase in global temperatures, which is exactly what the AGW climate models predicted at the turn of the century. They were proven wrong.

And in fact, Curry explains that the failure of those models finally has some scientists going back to the drawing board….

And what of Muller? When confronted by the Daily Mail about the data from the past 11 years, he denied that temperatures had plateaued, and then admitted that the data shows exactly that.

And yet the unthinking, unquestioning science fetishists still wonder why rational observers are deeply skeptical when scientists seeking huge quantities of money and global fame, and demanding massive societal change on the basis of what provides them with the aforementioned money and fame, are repeatedly caught out faking and misrepresenting the data.

The CO2 model is obviously wrong. It has completely failed as a predictive model. And, as I have been saying for years, global warming isn’t even taking place and hasn’t been for longer than I have been posting on this blog.

Richard Muller may have once been a climate skeptic, (his biography suggests he is either lying or being misrepresented by others), but if so, the evidence suggests that he was not so much convinced by the data as corrupted by the benefits of jumping aboard the AGW/CC gravy train. The increasingly inescapable conclusion, based on this and the increasing reports of scientific fraud, is that science should be considered intrinsically unreliable until it is successfully applied and is considered engineering.

And speaking of hiding the decline, Muller’s fellow-in-fraud, Michael “hockey stick” Mann appears to be losing his battle to hide the data:

“Discredited global warming scientist, Michael Mann, sees his last-ditch efforts to hide data fall apart as legal experts reveal a mountain of legal precedents against him. In his recent papers (filed on September 2, 2011) Mann claims ‘academic freedom’ and ‘proprietary materials’ as his defense. But legal experts who have since reviewed Mann’s submission to the Circuit Court of Prince William County, Va., say they are so full of holes they are doomed to fail.”

These “scientists” are all about the science and expanding human knowledge, aren’t they! Let’s revisit a few of my favorite global warming quotes, shall we?

1. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event. Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.

2. “Yes, it is quite probable that global warming has a significant anthropogenic component. About as probable as the idea that HIV causes AIDS, species diversity is driven by evolutionary processes, and that the world is round.” – PZ Myers

3. RT: Is global warming a threat to the human species?

Richard Dawkins: Yes.

4. “The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. – American Physical Society

5. “The scientific evidence is clear: global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now, and it is a growing threat to society.” – American Association for the Advancement of Science

6. The Geological Society of America (GSA) supports the scientific conclusions that Earth’s climate is changing; the climate changes are due in part to human activities; and the probable consequences of the climate changes will be significant and blind to geopolitical boundaries. – The Geological Society of America

7. “The scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify taking steps to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.” – U.S. National Academy of Sciences

8. Do you consider teaching someone about global warming, ozone holes, or ongoing extinctions, all established facts about our natural world, to be indoctrination?” – PZ Myers

Established facts… established scientific facts are indeed indoctrination. This means that we have no choice but to conclude that the definition of “established scientific fact” is sufficiently broad to include outright fiction and that appeals to “scientific consensus” possess no more legitimacy than appeals to reality TV.