Tag Archives: Chicken Licken

Climate Change – Rice Bowl Science

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Posted by JJ on February 21, 2010 – 9:17 am
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Climate Scientists are not all necessarily participating in a global conspiracy.  Climate Science itself is compromised by the funding model.

This sentence is in the charter of the IPCC:

“The role of the IPCC is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation.”

So, the IPCC was set up on the assumption that the risk is considerable, the impacts  huge, and that we  need to have global plans for adaptation and mitigation.  All in one.  It was not set up to assess risk and impact and report back so that decisions could be made about the need for adaptation and mitigation measures.  No, the UN assumed from the outset that those measures would be needed.   They put “options for adaptation and mitigation” right there in the charter.  Such a charter all but guarantees unscientific conclusions – it compromises scientific objectivity,

It is a charter, not for an objective scientific assessment, but for a living organisational entity.  The natural desire of any entity is to survive.  And the IPCC is funded by the UN – a bottomless well.  So, what would you expect the IPCC to find in its assessment of the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change?  The impact assessments would be the conclusions that most influenced future funding of the IPCC.  So, what would you expect to find in their assessment of the impact?  Go on – take a guess.

It is no surprise that of all the IPCC findings, it was the impact assessments that most conspicuously lacked rigour.  Most lacked proper peer-review, some were not peer-reviewed at all.  The IPCC  predictions about the melting of Himalayan glaciers, African rainfall and harvests, tropical storm frequency and strength, the spread of malaria  and projected rises in sea level were based on anecdote, magazine articles, and activist literature.  All were couched in exaggerated, catastrophic terms.  And all have been discredited.

The IPCC preaches global warming to the world, and has a charter for rice-bowl science.  It funds and coordinates funding of climate research, always with the aims of assessing impact on climate change.  The scientists and institutions who win climate change  funding for their research know that their findings must be delivered in terms of the climate impact.  They are not about to disappoint the source of their funding, so they write their findings in the terms of advocacy.

And rice-bowl science is what they deliver.

References:

Principles governing IPCC Work”  http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/ipcc-principles/ipcc-principles.pdf

Oh, that Explains Climate Temperature Adjustments!

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Posted by JJ on January 20, 2010 – 9:57 pm
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Brett Anderson, in his Global Warming blog in Accuweather, reports that the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have explained why they adjust temperatures to “remove bias”.  Wow.  Wherever they look, the nasty recording devices and processes produce a cooling bias that they have to correct for the sake of accuracy.  And even when they use the raw data, they still show warming.  Here are their warming rates:

1.6552 deg C per century (“corrected”), or 1.6539 deg C (uncorrected) based on analysis of temperatures from 1979 – 2009.  Should we be alarmed?

Nope.  The Accuweather hurricane forecaster Joe Bastardi, in his European blog, points out that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation has just switched over from its warming cycle to the start of a thirty-year cooling cycle.  The Northern hemisphere similarly has just switched over – here in the Netherlands, the negative Arctic Oscillation has brought the coldest winter for thirty years, and there are more cold winters to come.  Now even the IPCC admits that we are headed for thirty years of global cooling.  From 1979 – 2009, the Atlantic and the Pacific have been in warming mode.  The warming rate in the last thirty years is completely normal in those circumstances.

In his blog entry for Saturday 16 January 2010, Joe Bastardi rhetorically addresses the NOAA people.  This is how he puts it:

“Its not like the 80s and 90s guys ( and gals) you were running the table with warm warm warm. Kick in the Atlantic switching to its warm cycle and what did you think would happen. Cmon now.. 75% of the worlds surface is water… the ice caps are surrounded by water…. the two biggest oceans in their warm cycle together.. Folks, if you bet warming, you have a free shot on goal, NO GOALIE!”

Right on, Joe!  To publish per century rates based on three decades of natural oceanic warming conditions, without mentioning those warming conditions is mischievously misleading at best, and downright malicious alarmist poppycock if I am to be less polite.  You can bet your shirt that when they publish the cooling trend during the coming years, the NCDC and the IPCC will shout about the negative PDO at the top of their lungs!

The NDCC warming rates based readings from 1880 – 2009 are 0.5911 deg C per century (“corrected”) or 0.5621 deg C per century (uncorrected).  That’s more believable.  One has only to look at environmental changes like the retreating glaciers in a number of locations like New Zealand to find evidence of warming.  Perfectly natural warming – the earth has warmed much more rapidly many times in its long history.  The rate of warming in the last century certainly does not indicate that we are warming the planet by our activities.  Sorry, chicken lickens.  The sky is not falling.  The earth will cool again.

You can read the whole story by following the link to the NCDC/NOAA report in the References section at the end of this grump.  I leave it to others to criticise the way they massage data, and their selection of temperature records.

You can access Brett Anderson’s and Joe Bastardi’s blogs from the links section of this website.

References:

NCDC Article http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cmb-faq/temperature-monitoring.html

A Funny Thing did not happen in the Cambrian and Late Ordovician Periods

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Posted by JJ on January 17, 2010 – 8:47 pm
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Climate Change scientists warn us to act right now to limit our CO2, or our climate will tip over irreversibly, and there will be a disaster for marine life.

The climate tip-over is foretold in a study reported by “Scientific American” on 12 January 2010.  It finds that “even if the world’s governments manage to cut global emissions in half by 2050 and then do everything possible to limit emissions from 2050 on, society has only even odds of limiting global temperature increases to 2º, a goal noted in the recent Copenhagen Accord“.

The article says that “The science is not clear what level poses a threat, but some research suggests concentrations must remain at or below 450 parts-per-million to prevent drastic climate change.”  And it says that “emissions today are on the path to 550 ppm and beyond”.  The last quote in the article is from Gary Yohe, an economist at Wesleyan University (an economist – what’s he doing here in “Scientific American”?)  He says that “Tip an ecosystem or planetary process – such as the atmosphere – too far in one direction, and it may suddenly and irreversibly “flip” into an altered state that precludes any notion of going back to the unaltered version”.

The marine disaster is foretold in a report published by the EU-funded European Project on Ocean Acidification.   The report says that levels of aragonite, the type of calcium carbonate which is essential for marine organisms to make their skeletons and shells, will fall by 60% to 80% by 2095 across the northern hemisphere.  Dr John Baxter, a senior scientist with Scottish Natural Heritage, and the report’s co-author, says “The bottom line is the only way to slow this down or reverse it is aggressive and immediate cuts in CO2.  This is a very dangerous global experiment we’re undertaking here.”

Now, let’s put what they are saying into perspective:

Consider the geological history of Earth from the Cambrian period that began 600 million years ago.  In the latter part of the Cambrian period, about 530 million years ago, the proportion of atmospheric CO2 was nearly 7000 parts per million.  In the Late Ordovician period, about 430 million years ago, CO2 was at 4400 parts per million.

Today we are in the beginning of the Quaternary Period.  In all of the past 600 million years, CO2 levels have been less than 400 parts per million in only the Carboniferous period and the present.  For about 70 percent of the whole 600 million years, the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere has been above 1000 parts per million.  1000 ppm – that’s well above the 550 million ppm they are rabbiting on about, up to peak of nearly 7000 ppm!  For 420 million years out of the last 600 million.

And guess what.  A funny thing didn’t happen in all of those 420 million years.  The sky did not fall.  That is, the ecosystem did not flip over to an irreversible state.  The Greenhouse Effect did not run away.  And, in the waters beneath an atmosphere containing 7000 ppm of CO2, the marine acidity did not kill the marine animals and plants that teemed in the Cambrian oceans.

P.S:

It’s a wonder the two “studies” didn’t say outright “Be afraid…  Be very afraid”.  They don’t use the words “Runaway Greenhouse Effect”, and they avoid any specifically testable conclusions,  but they want us to be afraid, all right.  Penn & Teller would love them.

In accord with good literary manners, I have enclosed the name of the scientific publication in quotes – viz: “Scientific American”.  I have no hesitation in also enclosing my final comment on the reported studies in quotes: “Yeah Right!”

References:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/10/ocean-acidification-epoca

The “Guardian” article “Ocean Acidification Rates pose Disaster”, reported on the Copenhagen Summit.

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html.  They quote:

Temperature after C.R. Scotese http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm
CO2 after R.A. Berner, 2001 (GEOCARB III)

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=climate-policy-analysis-goals-long-mid-term.

The study they quote was published by scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, and the Energy Research Center in the Netherlands, under the auspices of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.