Those arguing for action against the perceived threat they call variously Catastrophic Anthropgenic Global Warming, Climate Change, Climate Disruption or whatever new name they can come up with to try to keep it alive have long relied on the argument that there is overwhelming scientific consensus about it and the “the science is settled”.

In another blog I have argued that consensus has no bearing on scientific accuracy, and that no science is ever settled.  AGW believers say that is nonsense.

Well, it now seems there is scientific consensus that AGW is incorrect, unscientific, fraudulent, and on the data available so far, most probably plain wrong:

http://www.climatedepot.com/a/9035/SPECIAL-REPORT-More-Than-1000-International-Scientists-Dissent-Over-ManMade-Global-Warming-Claims–Challenge-UN-IPCC–Gore (Hat tip to Joe Bastardi through one of his tweets).

In the face of this, look out for AGW supporters declaiming that consensus has no bearing on accuracy…

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

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

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.

In the southern spring of 2009, hundreds of icebergs drifted from the Antarctic toward New Zealand.  This had occurred only twice before – in 1931 and 2006.  The event prompted a sombre warning from an Australian glaciologist on 23 November 2009.

Scientist Neal Young said more than 100 icebergs — some measuring more than 200 metres (650 feet) across — were seen in just one cluster, indicating there could be hundreds more. He said they were the remains of a massive ice floe which split from the Antarctic as sea and air temperatures rise due to global warming.  He also said that he expected to see more icebergs in the area if the Earth’s temperature continues to increase. “If the current trends in global warming were to continue I would anticipate seeing more icebergs and the large ice shelves breaking up,” he said.

That’s rather breathless hype for a scientist, if that’s what a glaciologist is.  Global warming?  In 1931 as well, eh?  Looks like a candidate for a very high Penn & Teller rating!

As a southern hemisphere glaciologist, Neal Young should be well aware that Antarctic sea ice has grown since the 1970s at a rate of 100,000 square kilometres a decade.  (Some scientists who believe in Anthropogenic Global Warming put that down to the hole in the ozone, which supposedly limits the greenhouse effect caused by man-made CO2).

Young should also be well aware of the nature of Antarctic sea ice.  In the Arctic, some sea ice persists for years, but almost all Antarctic sea ice melts away and reforms annually.  That means that the massive ice floes break up every year.  Because every year (at least since mankind became aware of Antarctica), the waters around it have been warm enough in summer to melt almost all of the Antarctic sea ice.  And because it happens every year, the breakup of Antarctic ice floes therefore clearly has sod-all to do with Global Warming!  Every year, there is a greater area of ice shelf waiting to break up into ice floes.   The destination of the remnants (icebergs to you) is up to the winds and currents at the time, and how long they last depends on the temperature of the waters in which they float.  At best, claiming that icebergs getting close to New Zealand is because of Global Warming is nothing but chicken-licken-style poppycock.  And poppycock of that nature can only cause alarm – or is that the real point of it?

It leaves me with two questions:

• What sort of agencies fund Australian glaciology
• Have some or all of the funding agencies any connections with the IPCC?

P.S.  Like Neal Young, I also expect to see more icebergs and more large ice shelves breaking up.  But not because of Global Warming.  In fact, quite the opposite – local Antarctic cooling!  Each decade, there are 100,000 square kilometers more winter sea ice in Antarctica – that’s nearly half the area of New Zealand.  100,000 square kilometres more to break up in the summer.  That’s a hell of a lot of icebergs.

Wake up, environmentalists!  Your movement is on the road to extinction, and you are your own worst enemies.  Your movement is committing suicide, by hitching its wagon to possibly the greatest scientific scam since Piltdown Man.  Seriously.  You have leapt unthinkingly on the bandwagon of preventing Anthropogenic Global Warming.  That bandwagon is headed for a crash, and environmentalism will be its most serious casualty.  In her Globe and Mail column on Saturday, Margaret Wente had this to say.  It’s worth reading.

The scam has been sold to the world by the IPCC and Al Gore, and environmentalists have swallowed the whole thing, hook, line and sinker.  So have the media.  The ” war”  against Global Warming has become a cause celebre, and those who promote global action to reduce CO2 have become media darlings.  But the world is beginning to wake up to the scam, and when the IPCC, Al Gore and AGW itself are finally discredited, the media will disown them.   Environmentalism will be tarred with the same brush.

Why tilt at the windmill of man-made CO2 and methane emissions when there are real enemies to fight?  Unlike man-made CO2 and methane from farm animals, deforestation and wetland destruction really do have a significant climate impact.  Strip-mining, oil spills, over-fishing, bottom trawling, whaling, industrial, agricultural and urban pollution, land-fill waste disposal, intensive forced farming and the destruction of natural wildlife habitats all diminish the sustainability of life itself.

Stick to your knitting, environmentalists – get back out and concentrate on the real environmental issues.  We need you to do that.  And to do it, you need credibility and respect.  It will be very hard to maintain your credibility when you smell of Anthropogenic Global Warming bullshit.

In 2007, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore, “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”.

Eh?  The promoters of the greatest scientific scam since Piltdown Man are awarded a Nobel Peace Prize?  Anthropogenic climate change is at best a speculative theory, and Al Gore and the IPCC have cynically disseminated it as knowledge.  The truth is, scientists have not been able to validate the theory.  They have not demonstrated a causal connection between CO2 produced by mankind and global warming.  Moreover, the IPCC have cherry-picked and manipulated proxy and temperature records to provide a picture consistent with the theory,  failed to provide open access to the raw data they have used to record global temperatures, and relied on computer models for their “evidence” of man-made climate change.  In effect, they have perpetrated a sales job.  And Al Gore has taken a travelling slide show presentation as sales collateral on his mission to convince world leaders.  A presentation that promoted IPCC-manipulated data and conclusions as hard fact, glossed over the real temporal relationship between historical warm periods and atmospheric CO2, blasted scientific skepticism as bias, appealed to scientific “consensus” and “authority”, cast aspersions on all who would disagree with its message, and warned of catastrophe if we don’t accept this tenuous idea as the truth and take immediate disruptive action to cut CO2.

For that, he and the IPCC were awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.  It’s time to rename that prize.  This occurrence of it is nothing but a sales award.

P.S.  I have formally nominated Al Gore for the forthcoming Ig Nobel awards.  Two, in fact:

Nomination for the Ig Nobel Prize for History:

Citation – by using his presentation to show conclusively that there was no Middle-Age Warm Period, Al Gore has set the historic record straight again, exposing Chaucer and the Doomsday Book as frauds for incorrectly recording the presence of orange groves and black grape vineyards in England in the Middle Ages.

Nomination for the Ig Nobel Prize for Scientific Methodology:

Citation – By citing glacial records of rises in atmospheric CO2 that follow each rise in the temperature of the earth as proof that CO2 concentrations caused the rises, Al Gore redefines causality and demonstrates that our intuitive sense that causes precede their effects is fundamentally wrong.

For his chicken-licken successes, Al Gore may well become the first man in history to be awarded both a Nobel and an Ig Nobel award for the same piece of work.

The IPCC uses proxy temperature calculations based on studies of tree rings, to provide a long-term record of global temperature changes.  And the resulting graph showed global temperatures declining since 1998.   This was the subject of the now-infamous email about “Hiding the decline” in the proxy picture of temperature global temperature changes.   They substituted selected thermometer-measured temperatures for the proxy-calculated ones from 1980 onward.   After the emails from the East Anglia University’s Climate research Unit were leaked by the hackers, their justification was that the proxy data are invalid after 1980, because of a localised drought that caused a lessening of tree growth, resulting in an artificial decline in the temperature estimates.  And of course, the substituted temperature data showed the temperatures continuing to rise.  What would Penn & Teller make of that explanation?

There’s a big, big problem with it.  Tree growth rates are influenced by temperature, availability of water and the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, among other things.  If comparisons of tree-ring proxy-calculated temperatures and measured temperatures show the former to be unreliable since 1980, does that not throw all tree-ring proxy-calculated temperatures into doubt?  Including the ones that “prove” conclusively that there was no middle-ages warm period?  How do we know how many localised droughts have occurred in the past, let alone when they occurred?  There are historical records of a sharp decline on temperature in medieval times in Europe.  There is also anthropological evidence of a marked shift in the majority of the New Zealand Maori population from the fertile South Island to the North Island, closer to the tropics, at the same time as the recorded drop in temperature in Europe.  Given that the Maori at the time wore grass skirts and did not have shoes or tailored clothing like shirts, jackets and trousers, such a move could well be explained by a drop in temperature.  Is it not possible that tree-ring proxies are inherently unreliable as a temperature record?  A record that the IPCC and all of the noisy chicken-lickens want us to believe shows conclusively that we are causing the Earth’s temperature to rise?

Bloody hell!  We all know, without needing to reference proxy records, that temperatures rose in the twentieth century, that ice-caps declined and glaciers retreated during that time.  That’s bleeding obvious!  It has happened many times before – there have been many warm periods in the history of the earth, always followed by cool periods.  We have not found any evidence that the rise in the twentieth century was caused by man, or by CO2 or methane from our livestock.  There is also no evidence that this is a disaster and that we are headed for a runaway greenhouse effect of Venusian proportions.  At various times in the glacial records, we have found evidence of much higher temperatures than we have today,  and much higher levels of CO2 than at present.  Has anybody actually noticed that the earlier occurrences did not cause runaway greenhouse effects?  Nope- what they did was fuel the carbon cycle until the next downward temperature trend.  (Venus has a runaway greenhouse effect because its solar proximity and period of rotation make it impossible for it to support a carbon cycle.  Click here for more information about Venus.)

Interestingly, glacial records show that the rises in CO2 have always followed global temperature rises, not preceded them.  They certainly do not support the hypothesis that rising CO2 levels cause temperature rise.  But they sure could support the opposite!

Why do people who want us to believe that we cause global warming and can avert the end of the world only by drastically cutting CO2 emissions insist on appealing to Carl Sagan and to “scientific consensus” as supporting evidence for their beliefs?  Why the hell don’t they read Sagan’s Baloney Detection kit before talking about his theories?

The astrophysicist Carl Sagan was also a prominent scientific educator, whose TV series and books informed us not only about the cosmos but about the nature of science itself – how it works and why it is so effective.  He was a strong and consistent advocate of scientific skepticism, and an opponent of pseudo-science.  His book “The Demon-Haunted World” is but one example of his determination to promote scientific reasoning over superstition and credulity.  The book provides a “Baloney Detection Kit” to be used when assessing arguments.  You can read it here.

Carl Sagan is also widely credited as one of the originators of the theory that man causes global warming by CO2 emissions.  His authority is used as evidence supporting that theory, and those who are skeptical about it are cast as opposing Carl Sagan.  Oh come on – he would be appalled by that reasoning!  “Appealing to Authority” is the number two fallacy on Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit list.  (The number one fallacy in that list is ad hominem.)

Understandably we are in awe of Carl Sagan.  Men of his intellect, eloquence and commitment to the truth are rare.  Yet in his own writings, he warns us against awe-inspired credulity.  He clearly demonstrates that all theories and postulates, including his own, should be viewed with scientific skepticism.

This is what he said in his book “The Demon-haunted World”:

It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion….  Superstition and pseudoscience keep getting in the way, providing easy answers, dodging skeptical scrutiny, casually pressing our awe buttons and cheapening the experience, making us routine and comfortable practitioners as well as victims of credulity. The tenants of skepticism do not require an advanced degree to master, as most successful used car buyers demonstrate.

For crying out loud, Chicken-Licken was no scientist.  But some scientists have become Chicken-Lickens.  They seem to have forgotten the fundamentals of science.  More and more of them use the “We must act now before it’s too late” line.  You know – the time for skepticism has passed.  Don’t oppose us, else we delay and fail to prevent catastrophe!  That is not only alarmist, it is also a logical fallacy.  Sagan calls it “Argument from adverse consequences (putting pressure on the decision maker by pointing out dire consequences of an “unfavourable” decision)”.  It is listed as number three fallacy in his Baloney Detection Kit.