Monday, November 30, 2009

ClimateGate Jones wanted global warming to happen no matter the consequence

  • It appears Soros and Maurice Strong found a soul mate in East Anglia. Phil Jones wanted global warming to happen no matter what (end of following article). Some form of emotional abuse had to befall these three as children. Somehow they became monsters.
"Perhaps the real scandal is the dependence of media and politicians on their academics' work - an ask-no-questions approach that saw them surrender much of their power, and ultimately authority. This doesn't absolve the CRU crew of the charges, but might put it into a better context.
  • After a week of scrutiny of the emails, attention is now turning to the programming source code. Three quarters of the material released is the work of the academics,
  • much of which they had jealously guarded.

This includes a version of the world's most cited and respected temperature record - HADCRUT - and a number of surveys which featured prominently in the reports of the

  • UN's climate change panel, the IPCC. The actors here shaped the UN reports,
  • and ultimately - because no politician dare contradict the 'science' -
  • shaped global policy.

The allegations over the past week are fourfold: that climate scientists controlled the publishing process to discredit opposing views and further their own theory; they manipulated data to make recent temperature trends look anomalous; they withheld and destroyed data they should have released as good scientific practice, and they were generally beastly about people who criticised their work. (You’ll note that one of these is far less serious than the others.)

But why should this be a surprise?

The secretive Jones is no secret

The secretive approach of CRU director Jones and his colleagues, particularly in the paleoclimatology field, is not a secret. Distinguished scientists have testified to this throughout from the early 1990s onwards.

A report specifically commissioned four years ago by Congress, the Wegman Report, identified many of the failings discussed in the past week.

Failings are understandable, climatology is in its infancy, and the man-made greenhouse gas theory is a recent development. However no action was taken. A little like Goldman Sachs, the group that includes

A lightning recap of what CRU is, and what role it plays, helps bring the puzzle out of the shadows.

  • CRU was founded in 1972 by the 'Father of Climatology', former Met Office meteorologist Hubert Lamb. Until around 1980, solar modulation was believed to be the driving factor in climatic variation....

But CRU's increasing influence, according to its own history,

"The UK Government became a strong supporter of climate research in the mid-1980s, following a meeting between Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher and a small number of climate researchers, which included Tom Wigley, the CRU director at the time. This and other meetings eventually

Lamb (who died in 1997), however remained sceptical of the greenhouse gas hypothesis to the end.

  • In addition to inheriting all the problems of climatology, the greenhouse gas hypothesis has several unique issues of its own, and addressing them is a challenge for the most scrupulous researcher.
  • How CRU addressed them was to define climatology for two decades - and ultimately

  • defined the public debate and policy, too.

The gas theory is based on an elegant 'energy budget' model, but it leans heavily on positive feedbacks resulting from greenhouse gases such as CO2 in order to produce the warming CO2 cannot do by itself. Yet no simple empirical laboratory tests are of use here. Nor is there a ‘fingerprint’ or tell-tale signal that anthropogenically produced gases are the primary forcing factor. Hence climatology's increasing reliance, since 1980, on a range of anecdotal evidence and computer modelling.

In a fiercely contested field, both methods were fiercely guarded.

  • The result of this was the blurring of the line between correlation and causation, and hindcasting and forecasting.
  • Slowly, but surely, an "assertion" was becoming "proof".

The first IPCC report in 1990 used the established temperature record created by Lamb. It's very different to the one we're familiar with today - and that's the work of CRU director Phil Jones, CRU's pioneer dendrochronologist Keith Briffa, and their colleagues in (mainly) US institutions.

  • You can see the difference here.




Although Lamb's version is supported by historical accounts, archaeology, geology and even contemporary literature,

  • two key differences are the decreased significance of the Medieval Warming Period (CRU and its allies prefer the term 'MCA', or "Medieval Climate Anomaly") and a radically warmer modern period.

Jones and his team began to produce work that contradicted the established picture in 1990 - and CRU was able to do so from both ends. By creating new temperature recreations, it could create a new account of history. By issuing a monthly gridded temperature set while

  • making raw station data unavailable for inspection, it defined contemporary data. So CRU controlled two important narratives: the "then", and the "now".

In the FOIA.ZIP archive, we find Jones unambiguous in an email: "We will be rewriting people's perceived wisdom about the course of temperature change over the past millennium," he wrote.

  • In text books co-authored with Ray Bradley (1992 and 1996) and a landmark paper with Ben Santer (1996), Jones described artificial reconstructions that questioned the established historical record. Jones and Briffa were both co-authors of a 1995 paper for Nature - Unusual Twentieth-century Summer Warmth in a 1,000-year Temperature Record from Siberia - that
  • used a tree ring reconstruction from the Urals to claim that the mean 20th Century temperature is higher than any period since 914. Sympathetic researchers in the US produced similar graphs, again emphasising that modern warming (0.7C in the 20th Century), was anomalous.

Since these scientists declined to document their methodology and the raw sample, they were difficult to dispute.

That resulted in the Wegman report. Although CRU hadn't produced the Hockey Stick (the work of American metereologist Michael Mann) or used his statistical techniques,

  • Wegman implicated leading CRU figures as part of a close knit network.
In our further exploration of the social network of authorships in temperature reconstruction, we found that at least 43 authors have direct ties to Dr. Mann by virtue of coauthored papers with him. Our findings from this analysis suggest that authors in the area of paleoclimate studies are closely connected and
  • thus ‘independent studies’ may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface.

Wegman also criticised their workmanship:

[...]the paleoclimate community; even though they rely heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community. Additionally, we judge that the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done. In this case we judge that there

was too much reliance on peer review,
which was not necessarily independent.

Moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized

that this community can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility.

Wegman had identified other networks in climate science which also "peer reviewed" each other's work,

  • removing criticism from the record, and
  • acting as gatekeepers.

Over four years later the 'Climategate' archive provides evidence to support this.

  • We find Jones discussing how to avoid FOIA requests, advising the deletion of email and telling his own information officers not to release data to critics.
  • Earlier this summer, CRU said that it had failed to maintain the raw station data it had gathered,
  • citing lack of storage space.

But to what purpose were these networks acting?

Playing politics - or feeding a demand?

'Climategate' raises far more questions than it answers, and one of the most intriguing of these is how a small group (backing a new theory, in an infant field) came to have

Is it fair to hang CRU Director Jones and his colleagues out to dry - as some climate campaigners such as George Monbiot have suggested? If the buck doesn't stop with the CRU climatologists - then who or what is really to blame?...

The CRU team may have stepped into a scientific vacuum, but that doesn't account for the qualities of the climate debate today.

  • It is beset with a sense of crisis and urgency, and the ascendancy of a quite specific and narrow set of policy options that precludes

the cool and rational assessment of the problem that an engineer might employ. Or equally, the cost/benefit calculations that an economist might use. (Actually, many have, and here's a good recent example from Richard Tol - but this is not part of the public discourse, or diplomatic agenda as illustrated by the Copenhagen Conference, where the focus is on emissions reductions).

  • Briffa himself apparently found being "true" to his science and his customer difficult.
  • "I tried hard to balance the needs of the science and the IPCC, which are not always the same," he writes,

after wrapping up the chapter on which

The ignorance of the natural world displayed by the scientists is remarkably at odds with the notion that the science is "settled". Where's the Global Warming, asks NCAR's Tom Wigley. His colleague Kevin Trenberth admits they can't answer the question. "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't...

  • Our observing system is inadequate."

Trenberth goes on further, and admits the the energy budget hasn't been "balanced". Wigley paraphrases him: "we are nowhere close to knowing where energy is going". It is climate experts admitting that they don't know what they're doing.

  • But were such reservations communicated to the policy makers or media?

As I mentioned earlier, the very nature of the problem itself has led the "science" onto shaky ground - onto modelling (which has no predictive value) and anecdotal evidence (which merely demonstrates correlation, but not causation).

if fossil fuel emissions affected the climate at all significantly, this remained a future threat, and certainly not an urgent one.

  • The demand from institutions, (principally the UN, through its IPCC), national policy makers and the media has taken climate scientists into areas where they struggle to do good science.
  • Add professional activists to the mix - who bring with them the Precautionary Principle - and the element of
  • urgency is introduced.

The situation is largely self-inflicted. The scandal is that science has advanced through anecdote and poorly founded conjecture - and on this slender basis, politicians and institutions lacking vision and confidence (and given the lack of popular support, legitimacy too) have found a cause.

  • Perhaps some readers may find this too forgiving of the participants. Three years ago Jones confessed to climatologist Christy both the state of the "science", and some of his own motivations.

"As you know, I’m not political. If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right,

  • regardless of the consequences.
  • This isn’t being political, it is being selfish".
Bootnote To get a sense of the scope of the code, see Bishop Hill (and again here) and the remarkable four year log file by 'Harry' discussed here and here."

Thursday, November 26, 2009

So-called 'climate change' has nothing to do with climate


  • It's just another gambling casino for billionaire manipulators and the corrupt UN.
"The graph on the homepage and in our market reports shows daily price movements in the most-traded European Union Allowances (EUAs), the emissions permits issued under the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS). The graph also shows the secondary market
The EUA prices reported refer to those in futures contracts called carbon financial instruments (CFIs),
The most traded is the December 2009 forward contract, the second year of the current second phase of the EU ETS coinciding with the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol.
  • CER prices are increasingly important in the EU and
  • global carbon markets.
CERs can be substituted for EUAs by European
  • emitters
to meet obligations under the EU ETS. The prices shown are are those under forward contracts for December 2009 delivery of CERs issued from
  • Kyoto CDM* projects. They have been historically cheaper than EUAs.
*CDM, part of UN thugs.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Global Warming has stopped--'BILLIONS OF EUROS AT STAKE' Der Spiegel


  • The author seems to believe in global warming and is genuinely stumped by reality....unlike Goldman Sachs and the US government who will keep the fraud going.
  • photo above from March 2009, via Tom Nelson

"Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average

  • global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years.

Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents.

  • At least the weather in Copenhagen is likely to be cooperating. The Danish Meteorological Institute predicts that temperatures in December, when the city will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference, will be one degree above the long-term average.

Otherwise, however, not much is happening with global warming at the moment. The Earth's
  • average temperatures have stopped climbing since the beginning of the millennium,
and it
  • even looks
  • as though global warming could come to a standstill this year.

Ironically, climate change appears to have stalled in the run-up to the upcoming world summit in the Danish capital, where thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, business leaders and environmental activists plan to negotiate a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

Reached a Plateau

The planet's temperature curve rose sharply for almost 30 years, as global temperatures increased by an average of 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.25 degrees Fahrenheit) from the 1970s to the late 1990s. "At present, however, the warming is taking a break," confirms meteorologist Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in the northern German city of Kiel. Latif, one of Germany's best-known climatologists, says that the temperature curve has reached a plateau.

Even though the temperature standstill probably has no effect on the long-term warming trend, it does raise doubts about the predictive value of climate models, and it is also a political issue.

  • For months, climate change skeptics have been gloating over the findings on their Internet forums.

This has prompted many a climatologist to treat the temperature data in public

  • with a sense of shame,
  • thereby damaging their own credibility.

"It cannot be denied that this is one of the hottest issues in the scientific community," says Jochem Marotzke, director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. "We don't really know why this stagnation is taking place at this point."

  • Just a few weeks ago, Britain's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research added more fuel to the fire with

its latest calculations of global average temperatures. According to the Hadley figures, the world grew warmer by 0.07 degrees Celsius from 1999 to 2008 and

And, say the British experts, when their figure is adjusted for two naturally occurring climate phenomena, El Niño and La Niña, the resulting temperature trend is reduced

  • to 0.0 degrees Celsius -- in other words, a standstill.

The differences among individual regions of the world are considerable. In the Arctic, for example, temperatures rose by almost three degrees Celsius, which led to a dramatic melting of sea ice. At the same time, temperatures declined in large areas of North America, the western Pacific and the Arabian Peninsula. Europe, including Germany, remains slightly in positive warming territory.

Mixed Messages

But a few scientists simply refuse to believe the British calculations. "Warming has continued in the last few years," says Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). However, Rahmstorf is more or less alone in his view. Hamburg Max Planck Institute scientist Jochem Marotzke, on the other hand, says: "I hardly know any colleagues who would deny that it hasn't gotten warmer in recent years."

  • The controversy sends confusing and mixed messages to the lay public. Why is there such a vigorous debate over climate change, even though it isn't getting warmer at the moment? And how can it be that scientists cannot even arrive at a consensus on changes in temperatures, even though temperatures are constantly being measured?

The global temperature-monitoring network

  • consists of 517 weather stations. But each reading is only a tiny dot on the big world map, and it has to be extrapolated to the entire region
  • with the help of supercomputers.

Besides, there are still many blind spots, the largest being the Arctic,

  • where there are only about 20 measuring stations to cover a vast area.
  • Climatologists refer to the problem as the "Arctic hole."

The scientists at the Hadley Center simply used the global average value for the hole, ignoring the fact that it has become significantly warmer in the Arctic, says Rahmstorf. But a NASA team from the

  • Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, which does make the kinds of adjustments for the Arctic data that Rahmstorf believes are necessary,
  • arrives at a flat temperature curve for the last five years that is similar to that of their British colleagues.

Marotzke and Leibniz Institute meteorologist Mojib Latif are even convinced that the

  • fuzzy computing done

by Rahmstorf is counterproductive. "We have to explain to the public that greenhouse gases will not cause temperatures to keep rising from one record temperature to the next, but that they are still subject to natural fluctuations," says Latif. For this reason, he adds, it is dangerous to cite individual weather-related occurrences, such as a drought in Mali or a hurricane, as proof positive that climate change is already fully underway.

  • that the development will continue going up along a simple, straight line.

In reality, phases of stagnation or even cooling are completely normal," says Latif.

Part 2: The Difficulties of Predicting the Climate

  • Climatologists use their computer models to draw temperature curves that continue well into the future.

They predict that the average global temperature will increase by about three degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, unless humanity manages to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

  • However, no one really knows what exactly the world climate will look like in the not-so-distant future, that is, in 2015, 2030 or 2050.

This is because it is not just human influence but natural factors that affect the Earth's climate.

Major volcanic eruptions can also curb rising temperatures in the medium term. The eruption of

  • Mount Pinatubo in June 1991, for example, caused world temperatures to drop by an average of 0.5 degrees Celsius, thereby prolonging a cooler climate phase that had begun in the late 1980s.

But the Mount Pinatubo eruption happened too long ago to be related to the current slowdown in global warming. So what is behind this more recent phenomenon?

Weaker Solar Activity

Its radiation activity is currently at a minimum, as evidenced by the small number of sunspots on its surface. According to calculations performed by a group of NASA scientists led by David Rind, which were recently published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters,

  • this reduced solar activity is the most important cause of stagnating global warming.

Latif, on the other hand, attributes the stagnation to so-called Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO). This phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean allows a larger volume of cold deep-sea water to rise to the surface at the equator. According to Latif, this has a significant cooling effect on the Earth's atmosphere.

  • With his team at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, Latif has been one of the first to develop a model to create medium-term prognoses for the next five to 10 years. "We are slowly starting to attempt (such models)," says Marotzke, who is also launching a major project in this area, funded by the Federal Ministry for Research and Technology.

Despite their current findings, scientists agree that temperatures will continue to rise in the long term. The big question is: When will it start getting warmer again?

  • If the deep waters of the Pacific are, in fact, the most important factor holding up global warming, climate change will remain at a standstill until the middle of the next decade, says Latif. But if the cooling trend is the result of reduced solar activity, things could start getting warmer again much sooner. Based on past experience, solar activity will likely increase again in the next few years." (They don't know. They just worry because they'll be embarrassed).

(continuing) "Betting on Warmer Temperatures

  • The Hadley Center group expects warming to resume in the coming years. "That resumption could come as a bit of a jolt," says Hadley climatologist Adam Scaife, explaining that natural cyclical warming would then be augmented by the warming effect caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

While climatologists at conferences engage in passionate debates over when temperatures will start rising again,

  • global warming's next steps have also become the subject of
  • betting activity.

Climatologist Stefan Rahmstorf is so convinced that his predictions will be correct in the end that he is willing to back up his conviction with a €2,500 ($3,700) bet. "I will win," says Rahmstorf.

  • His adversary Latif turned down the bet, saying that the matter was too serious for gambling. "We are scientists, not poker players.""

'Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan' from Spiegel Online, "Stagnating Temperatures: Climatologists baffled by Global Warming Time-out" by Gerald Traufetter, 11/19/09, Der Spiegel