The Death of the Global Warming Myth

[samizdat]

Here's a cute headline. Sounds like someone's trying to proove that humans are warming the planet- bad news- time to reduce the surplus population, eh?

U.N. climate report to 'shock' world
Chairman claims most credible evidence yet of human link to warming
--Reuters

[American Patriot]

Last Warning: 10 years to Save World
Times On Line ^ | 1/28/2007 | Jonathan Leake

Scientists (WHAT SCIENTISTS) say rising greenhouses gases will make climate change unstoppable in a decade THE world has just 10 years to reverse surging greenhouse gas emissions or risk runaway climate change that could make many parts of the planet uninhabitable.

The stark warning comes from scientists who are working on the final draft of a new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (United Nations people).

The report, due to be published this week, will draw together the work of thousands of scientists from around the world who have been studying changes in the world’s climate and predicting how they might accelerate.

They (who are THEY?) conclude that unless mankind rapidly stabilises greenhouse gas emissions and starts reducing them, it will have little chance of keeping global warming within manageable limits.

The results could include the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef, the forced migration of hundreds of millions of people from equatorial regions, and the loss of vast tracts of land under rising seas as the ice caps melt.

In Europe the summers could become unbearably hot, especially in southern countries such as Greece, Spain and Italy, while Britain and northern Europe would face summer droughts and wet, stormy winters.

“The next 10 years are crucial,” said Richard Betts, leader of a research team at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for climate prediction. “In that decade we have to achieve serious reductions in carbon emissions. After that time the task becomes very much harder.”

Among the scientists’ (which scientists? What are their NAMES) biggest fears is that rising temperatures and levels of greenhouse gases could soon overwhelm the natural systems that normally keep their levels in check.

About half the 24 billion tons of carbon dioxide generated by human activities each year are absorbed by forests and oceans — a process without which the world might already be several degrees warmer.

But as CO2 levels rise and soils dry, microbes can start breaking down accumulated organic matter, so forests become net producers of greenhouse gases. The sea’s power to absorb CO2 also falls sharply as it warms.

The latest research (What research?) suggests the threshold for such disastrous changes will come when CO2 levels reach 550 parts per million (ppm), roughly double their natural levels. This is predicted to happen around 2040-50.

“At the moment the real impact of our emissions is buffered because CO2 is absorbed by natural systems. However, if we reach this threshold they could be magnified instead,” said Betts. “It means we must start the action needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the next few years.”

His warnings were backed up by Dr Malte Meinshausen, a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. He has used computer modelling to work out what might happen if greenhouse gas emissions were cut immediately, in 10 years’ time or later.

His results showed that immediate action might allow mankind to hold CO2 levels at 450ppm — well below the 550ppm danger level. However, Meinshausen and his colleagues recognise that this is unrealistic because the world’s governments are in such disarray over global warming. The best hope, they say, is that a global plan will emerge in the next few years, most likely from the renegotiations of the Kyoto treaty on reducing emissions.

“We have to make sure carbon emissions peak no later than 2015 and then fall at around 3% a year. If we let them keep rising after that date it becomes much harder to bring them under control,” said Meinshausen.



His views were echoed by Dr Carol Turley of Plymouth Marine Laboratories who has been studying how rising CO2 levels are acidifying the ocean. When the gas dissolves in water it creates carbonic acid. “Rising acidity makes it much harder for marine organisms to build shells,” she said.

Turley, like the other scientists, has contributed to the IPCC report but all commented this weekend on the basis of already-published research. “If we do not take action in the next decade, by 2100 swathes of the ocean could have been stripped of creatures from plankton to coral reefs,” she said. “Such changes would devastate ecosystems and fisheries.”

Commissioner Barroso leads the battle from his gas-guzzling 4x4

THE president of the European commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, has been accused of hypocrisy for driving a fuel-guzzling off-road vehicle while insisting that cars must become more frugal to combat climate change, write Daniel Foggo and Nicola Smith.

Barroso last week backed proposals to force manufacturers to slash carbon dioxide emissions from new cars by more than 25% within six years.

His car is a Volkswagen Touareg, a hulking 4x4 with high fuel consumption and a carbon dioxide output of 275 g/km compared with an average of 163 g/km.

Barroso said the Touareg was chosen by his wife Margarida and that he rarely travelled in it. His other mode of transport is understood to be a commission Mercedes.

His spokesman said it was “against the concept of a free society to micro-manage people’s choices”.

Jan Kowalzig, climate campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe, said: “Barroso claims to be committed to fighting climate change whilst driving a big gas-guzzling

car in the narrow roads of Brussels. As a high-profile politician he should lead by example, making significant changes to his own lifestyle.”

In contrast, Stavros Dimas, the European environment commissioner, drives a small, green-pleasing Honda Jazz.

[samizdat]

I consider global warming propaganda as child porn.
Here comes the new indoctrination.

a short story for kids- yeah- the UN gets a lot of money and blames it on the cows. It's all bs.

Last year, the United Nations Environment Program published "Tore and the Town on Thin Ice," a children's book about a young boy in an Arctic village who loses a dog sled race because he crashes through thinning ice supposedly caused by manmade "greenhouse gas" emissions.

Inhofe said he also found it interesting that Scholastic made the announcement regarding David's book just before the United Nations is set to release a major study on climate change.

"It appears that Laurie David is joining the United Nations in aiming its global warming propaganda at children," the senator said.
"Having failed for nearly three decades to convince the American people and their leaders to jump on the global warming alarmism bandwagon, David and the U.N. are trying to fill the minds of children with 'sky-is-falling' global warming hysteria," Inhofe said.
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2...146.shtml?s=lh

[Malsua]

Having flown into Anchorage 3 times in Jan and Feb, I think I am qualified to comment on Anchorage. here it is "HOLY #$%ING @#$T WE'RE GOING DOWN, WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!!!!!"

As that relates to the myth of Global warming, the link is tenuous. It does however relate to how planes go over the mountains and drop into the valley of Anchorage. It REALLY sucks.

[Brian Baldwin]

I read a comic on FR today where an old woman and her husband are looking at a newspaper display with a headline stating something about global warming. She says to her husband... "They can't tell us if it's going to rain today, so can they expect us to believe they can accurately predict the weather 50 years from now?"

Funny as that is, it's a good question.

[Ryan Ruck]

Brian,
As Homer Simpson would say, "It's funny 'cause it's true..."

The Sun May Have A Dimmer Switch

There's a dimmer switch inside the sun that causes its brightness to rise and fall on timescales of around 100,000 years – exactly the same period as between ice ages on Earth. So says a physicist who has created a computer model of our star's core.

Robert Ehrlich of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, modelled the effect of temperature fluctuations in the sun's interior. According to the standard view, the temperature of the sun's core is held constant by the opposing pressures of gravity and nuclear fusion. However, Ehrlich believed that slight variations should be possible.

He took as his starting point the work of Attila Grandpierre of the Konkoly Observatory of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 2005, Grandpierre and a collaborator, Gábor Ágoston, calculated that magnetic fields in the sun's core could produce small instabilities in the solar plasma. These instabilities would induce localised oscillations in temperature.

Ehrlich's model shows that whilst most of these oscillations cancel each other out, some reinforce one another and become long-lived temperature variations. The favoured frequencies allow the sun's core temperature to oscillate around its average temperature of 13.6 million kelvin in cycles lasting either 100,000 or 41,000 years. Ehrlich says that random interactions within the sun's magnetic field could flip the fluctuations from one cycle length to the other.

These two timescales are instantly recognisable to anyone familiar with Earth's ice ages: for the past million years, ice ages have occurred roughly every 100,000 years. Before that, they occurred roughly every 41,000 years.

Most scientists believe that the ice ages are the result of subtle changes in Earth's orbit, known as the Milankovitch cycles. One such cycle describes the way Earth's orbit gradually changes shape from a circle to a slight ellipse and back again roughly every 100,000 years. The theory says this alters the amount of solar radiation that Earth receives, triggering the ice ages. However, a persistent problem with this theory has been its inability to explain why the ice ages changed frequency a million years ago.

[Neue Regel]

Having flown into Anchorage 3 times in Jan and Feb, I think I am qualified to comment on Anchorage. here it is "HOLY #$%ING @#$T WE'RE GOING DOWN, WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!!!!!"

As that relates to the myth of Global warming, the link is tenuous. It does however relate to how planes go over the mountains and drop into the valley of Anchorage. It REALLY sucks.

Man, I hate landings in Anchorage. It is by far the worse consistantly white knuckle landing in any American city I can think of. The turbulance is unreal.

[Aplomb]

This global warming nearly stranded me today. It's the first time in 13 1/2 years since I've lived in Colorado that I had a vehicle that didn't want to start due to temperature. http://www.coloradoan.com/apps/pbcs....EWS01/70202012

The temperature hit minus-18 at Denver International Airport shortly before 5 a.m., a record for the date, the National Weather Service said. The old mark was minus-16 set in 1996.

Oh, and I did need gloves today.

[Aplomb]

http://epw.senate.gov/fact.cfm?party=rep&id=259323

Majority Fact of the Day

Failed Defense Defense of Science Magazine Global Warming Study Fails to Address Critiques

---

Fact of the Day: Monday, July 24, 2006 Failed Defense



Defense of Science Magazine Global Warming Study Fails to Address Critiques


Naomi Oreskes, History of Science professor at the University of California at San Diego, in a Los Angeles Times op-ed, “Global Warming -- Signed, Sealed and Delivered,” set out to defend the validity of her study titled “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change (Science Magazine, December 3, 2004). The study purportedly shows a 100% consensus on human caused global warming. In today’s op-ed, however, Oreskes failed to acknowledge several key criticisms to her analysis of peer reviewed literature allegedly showing there is 100% scientific consensus that human activity is primarily responsible for warming the planet in the last 50 years.

FACT: Oreskes’s study contained major flaws. Oreskes did not inform readers in today’s commentary that she admitted to making a search term error that excluded about 11,000 papers –more than 90% of the papers– dealing with climate change. Oreskes also failed to inform readers that, according to one critique of her study, less than 2% of the abstracts she analyzed endorsed what she terms the “consensus view” on human activity and climate change and that some of the studies actually doubted that human activity has caused warming in the last 50 years.



Oreskes originally claimed she analyzed the peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003 under the keywords “climate change” and found just 928 articles. It turns out she was not accurate, according to British social scientist Benny Peiser a professor at Liverpool John Moores University.



A search using the terms “climate change” actually turned up almost 12,000 papers that were published during the time frame Oreskes claimed to have researched. In other words, her supposedly comprehensive research excluded about 11,000 papers. Only after Peiser’s analysis pointed out this error in her study did Oreskes reportedly admit that her study was not based on the keywords “climate change,” but on the far more restrictive phrase “global climate change.”



Peiser noted:

“These objections were put to Oreskes by science writer David Appell. On 15 December 2004, she admitted that there was indeed a serious mistake in her Science essay. According to Oreskes, her study was not based on the keywords “climate change,” but on “global climate change.”



Oreskes’s 100% “consensus” would potentially be accurate only by excluding well over 90% of the available papers in the time frame she was researching, according to Peiser. Eliminating about 11,000 papers (even if a small portion would not be considered ‘peer reviewed’) in favor of just 928, hardly proves a “consensus.”



In addition, Peiser found that less than 2% of the studies Oreskes examined supported her “consensus view” and some of the studies actually disagreed with that humans were the chief cause of the past 50 years of climate change.



Peisner also found,

“…While the ISI database includes a total of 929 documents for the period in question, it lists only 905 abstracts. It is thus impossible that Oreskes analyzed 928 abstracts.”

(http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpei...-abstracts.htm)



“Oreskes entire argument is flawed as the whole ISI data set includes just 13 abstracts (less than 2%) that explicitly endorse what she has called the 'consensus view.’”



“In fact, the vast majority of abstracts do not mention anthropogenic climate change. Moreover - and despite attempts to deny this fact - a few abstracts actually doubt the view that human activities are the main driving force of “the observed warming over the last 50 years.” (http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpei...-abstracts.htm)




No “Scientific Consensus”

Furthermore, sixty scientists recently wrote an open letter to Canadian Prime Minister Harper calling for a complete review of the science behind climate alarmism. Additionally, recent scientific analyzes dispute the claims of those promoting human-caused catastrophic global warming. The United Nations media hyped “Hockey Stick” was broken in June by a National Academy of Sciences report reaffirming the existence of the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age. Finally, just last week, three researchers -- Edward J. Wegman of George Mason University, David W. Scott of Rice University and Yasmin H. Said of Johns Hopkins University, further debunked the “Hockey Stick.”



# # #

[Aplomb]

http://www.investors.com/editorial/e...51682888980468

Heated Rhetoric

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 12/22/2006
Environment: There it is in the headlines — not just in one but in many news outlets: "2006 to be the sixth-warmest year on record." Sounds quite scary. But it's as misleading a statement as it is accurate.
Yes, it appears that 2006 will be the sixth-warmest year recorded. But let's remember two significant facts before we fall into the depths of global warming depression.
First, accurate temperature records based on modern instruments don't go back much further than 100 years. Given that Earth has been around quite a bit longer than a century, such a small sample of data is virtually meaningless.
Second, 2006 will actually be cooler than the previous four years and cooler, as well, than 1998, which was the peak year of global warming — if there is such a thing.
So why didn't the headlines trumpet this obvious trend toward cooler temperatures rather than shriek about the "sixth-warmest year"?
Are journalists in the business of alarming the public or informing it?
Just like our fathers would have said about the shrinking differences in the appearances of young men and women in the late 1960s: It's getting hard to tell these days.
We won't blame the media too much, though. They were simply following the lead of the United Nations' World Meteorological Organization. Its news release opens thusly: "The year 2006 is currently estimated to be the sixth-warmest year on record."
Why bother with the tedious exercise of critical thinking — such as rooting out the cooling trend and pointing it out to the public — when the narrative is already written by the WMO?
Why bother with reality when fiction fits the campaign to convert everyone into the global warming faith so much better?
There's no better example of this than the myth pushed by Al Gore and others that there's a "consensus" among scientists that humans are causing global warming. The media have accepted and repeated that as inarguable truth.
Now the media, willingly led by the U.N. and its anti-American, anti-Western agenda, are trying to influence world opinion with accurate but misleading headlines. The ultimate goal is to get the U.S. to go along with the Kyoto Accord's economy-killing restrictions, which would doom the U.S. to perpetual stagnation while leaving fast-growing China, India and others to pollute at will.
This has nothing to do with global warming, and everything to do with radically changing how Americans live. Don't be fooled.

[Aplomb]

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/ar...TICLE_ID=54074

The other 'green' in global warming

Posted: February 3, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern


The up-tick in global warming propaganda in recent days is to set the stage for the release of the Fourth Assessment Report from the International Panel on Climate Change. Surprise, surprise, the report will say the sky is falling – faster and faster.

For people who have watched this process since the beginning, this report, at least the executive summary of the report, is mostly hogwash, wordsmithed by policy wonks and media specialists to scare the gas out of the economy.


The First Assessment Report was developed by a fairly balanced group of scientists from around the world and released in 1990. The report was quite extensive and dealt primarily with capturing and storing carbon dioxide.




The Second Assessment Report was adopted by a fairly balanced group of participating scientists in December 1995. Then, the lead author of the report, B. D. Santor, acting with the consent of the co-chairman of the Working Group, John Houghton, and with the consent of the executive secretary of the Framework Convention on Climate Change, Michael Cutajar, changed the report significantly, without the approval of the scientists.


Dr. Freidrich Seitz, president emeritus of Rockefeller University and former president of the National Academy of Sciences, said:
"I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report. Nearly all the changes worked to remove hints of the skepticism with which many scientists regard global warming claims."


A hundred distinguished scientists, meeting in Leipzig, Germany, released a joint statement July 10, 1996, which said:
"There is still no scientific consensus on the subject of climate change. On the contrary, most scientists now accept the fact that actual observations from earth satellites show no climate warming whatsoever."


From that point forward, any scientist who dared to offer research results that did not affirm the conclusions of the IPCC has been denied invitations to participate in the IPCC studies, denied funding and/or denigrated publicly by politically motivated scientists and/or the media. Any scientist who dares express skepticism is at once denounced as a pawn for the oil and coal industry.


Actually, the opposite is true: Advocates of global warming are pawns of the global warming industry. And, indeed, global warming is an industry. In 1996, at the same U.N. meeting at which the Second Assessment Report was released, Mohamed T. El-Ashry, chief executive officer and chairman of the Global Environment Facility, released its quarterly report. He told the delegates that his agency had leveraged $462.3 million into $3.2 billion in climate change projects. And that was just the beginning.


In the last decade, billions and billions of dollars have been spent by governments and foundations on research and mitigation programs related to global warming. To the endless bureaucracies, recipients of grant awards and non-government organizations, it is imperative that the global warming hysteria continue – to produce the funding that provides their livelihood.



Their incessant hype has convinced many people, including legislators, that ridiculous policies should be enacted to prevent carbon dioxide from reaching the atmosphere.


Sen. James Inhofe is one of the few in Congress who really knows that the science of climate change is in its infancy, and no one really knows whether human activity has any impact on the climate at all. After all, the earth was warmer during the "Global Medieval Optimum" (1100-1250), when gas-guzzlers didn't exist. The same global warming zealots who manipulated the science to distort the Second (and subsequent) Assessment Reports reinterpreted the science that has stood for more than a century to now deny that there was a Global Medieval Optimum.


This study, produced by Michael E. Mann and Raymond S. Bradley in 1999, was shown to be flawed in a subsequent study by Drs. Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas. Global warming advocates extol the Mann study and decry the Soon/Baliunas study. Real science welcomes conflict as a challenge and evidence that further study is required.


Global warming hypocrites, such as The Weather Channel's Heidi Cullen, who wants the American Meteorological Society to decertify any weatherman who doesn't toe the global warming line, continues to disparage scientists and others who dare to disagree with her conclusions.


The Second Assessment Report was released in 1996 to instill fear and stir up support for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. This current round of global warming hype, including the Fourth Assessment Report, is designed to instill fear and stir up support for forcing the U.S. to join the Kyoto crowd in adopting energy restrictions that will have no effect on the climate, but will severely impact the economy.


U.S. policymakers and the public would do well to reject the propaganda from the global warming hypocrites.





Henry Lamb is the executive vice president of the Environmental Conservation Organization and chairman of Sovereignty International.

[Aplomb]

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?id=50

More Than 15,000 Scientists Protest Kyoto Accord; Speak Out Against Global Warming Myth

by Douglas Houts (May 12, 1998)


More than 15,000 scientists, two-thirds with advanced academic degrees, have now signed a Petition against the climate accord concluded in Kyoto (Japan) in December 1997. The Petition (see text below) urges the US government to reject the Accord, which would force drastic cuts in energy use on the United States. This is in line with the Senate Resolution, approved by a 95-to-0 vote last July, which turns down any international agreement that damages the economy of the United States while exempting most of the world's nations, including such major emerging economic powers as China, India, and Brazil.


In signing the Petition within a period of less than six weeks, the 15,000 basic and applied scientists -- an unprecedented number for this kind of document -- also expressed their profound skepticism about the science underlying the Kyoto Accord. The atmospheric data simply do not support the elaborate computer-driven climate models that are being cited by the United Nations and other promoters of the Accord as "proof" of a major future warming. The covering letter enclosed with the Petition, signed by Dr. Frederick Seitz, president emeritus of Rockefeller University and a past president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, states it well:
"The treaty is, in our opinion, based upon flawed ideas. Research data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful. To the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful."


This freely expressed vote against the warming scare propaganda should be contrasted with the claimed "consensus of 2500 climate scientists" about global warming. This facile and oft-quoted assertion by the White House is a complete fabrication. The contributors and reviewers of the 1996 report by the
UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) actually number less than 2000, and only a small fraction -- who were never polled -- can claim to be climate scientists. Many of those are known to be critical of the IPCC report and have now become signers of the Petition.


"The 'silent majority' of the scientific community has at last spoken out against the hype emanating from politicians and much of the media about a 'warming catastrophe.' The Petition reflects the frustration and disgust felt by working scientists, few of whom have been previously involved in the ongoing climate debate, about the misuse of science to promote a political agenda," said Dr. Seitz.


Dr. S. Fred Singer, president of The Science & Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) and author of Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming's Unfinished Debate, explained:

"Scientists are understandably upset when they see $2 billion per year devoted to research on climate change, much it irrelevant and concerned only with imaginary consequences of a hypothetical warming -- while other fields of science are starved. They are also appalled and angry that an increasing fraction of this research money is diverted into "community workshops," thinly disguised brainwashing exercises to create public fears about climate catastrophes."

The Petition drive was organized by Dr. Arthur Robinson, director of the Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine (Cave Junction, OR) and a vocal critic of the shaky science used to support the Kyoto Accord. It was staffed by volunteers and supported entirely by private donations, with no contributions from industry. The Petition mailing included a scientific summary, an editorial essay by Arthur and Zachary Robinson published in the Wall Street Journal (Dec. 4, 1997), and the covering letter by Dr. Seitz, holder of the National Medal of Science and board chairman of the George C. Marshall Institute (Washington, DC) and also of the Science & Environmental Policy Project (Fairfax, VA).


It was Dr. Seitz' essay in the Wall Street Journal (A Major Deception on "Global Warming", June 12, 1996), which first drew public attention to the textual "cleansing" of the UN scientific report that forms the basis for the Kyoto Accord. For details on the unannounced text changes and how they affected the sense of the IPCC report, click here.
The full text of the Petition follows.

"We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.
There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."

The current list of signers, which is still growing rapidly, is available on http://oism.org/pproject/.

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[Aplomb]

http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/res...te.fall04.html

M&M Project Update, September 2004:
Our Dealings with Nature


In response to our first Environment and Energy paper in October 2003 Mann et al., issued a response on the internet, to which we planned a 3-part reply.

• The first part concerned the provenance of the data used for our analysis and was released in November 2003.
• The second part itemized many additional lacunae and inaccuracies in MBH98 descriptions of data and methodology identified through examination of Professor Mann's FTP site.
• The third part showed that two undisclosed and questionable methodological decisions in MBH98 accounted for virtually all of the difference between our results and MBH98.

We can now update this process, starting with the latter item first. This document is also available as a PDF File.
<<==Return to Main M&M Project Page

Two Undisclosed And Questionable Methodological Decisions (Part 3)

In January 2004, we submitted a short article to Nature, arguing that the shape of the MBH98 hockey-stick depended on: (1) transforming each tree ring proxy prior to calculating principal components (PCs) by subtracting its 1902-1980 mean rather than subtracting the mean of the length of the PC itself (e,g, 1400-1980 for AD1400 calculation step), as would be done in usual software and (2) the duplicate use of the same Gaspé tree ring series in two locations in the MBH98 data base, and, in one of its duplicate uses, an extrapolation at the beginning to make the series available in AD1400 step calculations, while incorrectly listing the first available date as AD1400, thereby concealing the extrapolation. Although MBH98 claimed great "robustness" for its reconstructions, even claiming robustness to the exclusion of all tree ring data, we showed that its results were not robust to seemingly slight changes in these aspects of the methodology. We also showed that, once these issues were remedied, our results held up even when we included the NOAMER PCs back to AD1400, which had been a specific methodological difference earlier.
Our cover letter outlined the purpose of our submission, recognizing that it did not fit neatly into Nature’s submission categories, which classify submissions as "Letters", "Articles" and "Communications Arising". "Letters" and "Articles" are reports on "original" work and have longer word limits than "Communications Arising", which may be criticisms. We thought that the submission could be construed as a "letter", although of an unusual type. Our submission was a comment on a publication, but represented a great deal of original work, which obviously no one else had done. Although the content was critical in nature, the topic was of extreme international importance and we stated explicitly that we were open to guidance on editorial format and asked that the submission be valued on its merits.
In early March, we received a favorable revise and resubmit, at which time we were asked to add additional material in order to respond to referee comments (our paper then standing at 1910 words). Referee #1, an expert in principal components, had stated that he:

[found] merit in the arguments of both protagonists, though Mann et al. (MBH) is much more difficult to read than McIntyre & McKitrick (MM). Their explanations are (at least superficially) less clear and they cram too many things onto the same diagram, so I find it harder to judge whether I agree with them". ...[I am] uneasy about applying a standardisation based on a small segment of the series to the whole series, if that is what is being done. [MM note: we confirmed to him that that is exactly what is done in MBH98].

Referee #2 stated:

The technical criticisms raised by McIntyre and McKritrik (MM) concerning the temperature reconstructions by Mann et al (MBH98), and the reply to this criticism by Mann et al is quite difficult to evaluate in a short period of time, since they are aimed at particular technical points of the statistical methods used by Mann et al, or at the use of particular time series of proxy data. A proper evaluation would require to redo most of the calculations presented in both manuscripts, something which is obviously out of reach in two weeks time. Furthermore, both manuscripts seem to contradict each other in some basic facts. Therefore, my comments are based on my impression of the consistency of the results presented, but there is a wide margin of uncertainty that could be resolved only by by looking in detail into the whole data set and the whole software used by the authors. In general terms I found the criticisms raised by McIntyre and McKritik worth of being taken seriously. They have made an in depth analysis of the MBH reconstructions and they have found several technical errors that are only partially addressed in the reply by Mann et al.

We had pointed to the overwhelming weighting given to one hockey stick-shaped North American tree ring series (Sheep Mountain CA) as a result of the subtraction of the 1902-1980 mean. A comment by Mann et al. which we found interesting was that their PC1 did not just depend on Sheep Mountain, but 14 other sites had at least 25% of the contribution of Sheep Mountain.
We re-submitted in late March, adding a new paragraph showing that these 14 highly weighted sites in the PC1 were all from a group of specialized and controversial high-altitude bristlecone pine series, studied by Graybill and Idso (1993), exhibiting an anomalous 20th century growth spurt, which yields hockey-stick shaped growth series. Graybill and Idso stated that explicitly that the 20th century growth could not be explained by local or regional temperature; co-author Hughes in Hughes and Funkhouser (2003) said that the anomalous growth was a "mystery". We also pointed out that Mann et al. had carried out a sensitivity analysis for the effect of the high-altitude bristlecone sites, by calculating a NOAMER PC1 excluding 20 such sites, a calculation evidenced in the NOAMER/BACKTO_1400-CENSORED subdirectory at Professor Mann’s FTP site. The PC1 in this subdirectory proved to be virtually identical to the one we calculated using standard PC methods on the entire North American network. Carrying these PCs forward into an NH temperature index led to a reconstruction almost the same as ours!
Nature then asked us to reduce the paper down to 800 words. This was not easy, but our final version was within the 800-word limit and was submitted on April 9. We did not hear the results of the re-submission for four months. When we inquired about delays, Nature said that they had not heard back from reviewers. It turns out that Nature had added a third reviewer, which may have contributed to the delays.
On August 4, Nature advised us that our submission would not be published. The main reason was that the issues raised are too technical to resolve in the now 500 word space available:

In the light of this detailed advice, we have regretfully decided that publication of this debate in our Brief Communications Arising section is not justified. This is principally because the discussion cannot be condensed into our 500-word/1 figure format (as you probably realise, supplementary information is only for review purposes because Brief Communications Arising are published online) and relies on technicalities that do not bring a clear resolution of the underlying issues.

This decision primarily reflected the views of the new reviewer, who stated:

Generally, I believe that the technical issues addressed in the comment and the reply are quite difficult to understand and not necessarily of interest to the wide readership of the Brief Communications section of Nature. I do not see a way to make this communication much clearer, particularly with the space requirements, as this comment is largely related to technical details.

This reviewer did not object to any of our findings per se. Readers may share our surprise that the matters raised are "too technical" for consideration in a science journal; additionally, whether or not the matters were of interest to a "wide readership" (and we believe that they are), potential defects in MBH98 affect Nature’s publication record and require disclosure.
Our old referees again commented on the difficulty of resolving who was right and who was wrong. Referee #2 (Referee #1 of the first round) remained sympathetic, and stated:

The amount of material, often contradictory, is simply too complex and lengthy to resolve all the rights and wrongs in a realistic length of time" Only a reader with several days to spare (longer if they are unfamiliar with the area), to chase references and probably the authors, could hope to come close to a full understanding of the arguments.

I started my original review by saying that I found merit in the arguments of both MBH & MM. To rewrite this, I believe that some of the criticisms raised by each group of the other's work are valid, but not all. I am particularly unimpressed by the MBH style of 'shouting louder and longer so they must be right'.

However, Referee #3 (Referee #2 of the first round) was impressed by some of the new arguments of Mann et al. (to which we had not had an opportunity to respond). In his new comments, he expressed concern about whether the points could be made within the space limitations and stated:

I see some merit in MM04 and I would encourage them to pursue their testing of MBH98, and by the way other reconstructions. As I wrote in my first evaluation, this should be a normal and sound scientific process that should not hampered. For instance, questions that seem to be quite critical, such as the sensitivity of the MBH98 reconstructions in more remote periods to changes or omissions in the proxy network or the dependency of the final results to the rescaling of the reconstructed PCs, have become clearer to me now. At the moment, my opinion is that the present MM04 manuscript could be of interest just for the bunch of specialist working exactly in the area of statistical methods for climate reconstructions, and this only after several hours of considerable work to understand all technical details properly. Perhaps this is caused by the tight constrained imposed to the Communications Arising category.

Thus, the matter was effectively disposed of on the Procrustean bed of space limitations, rather than the merit or lack of merit of our arguments.
In their 2nd response, Mann et al. argued that they could still get MBH98-like results by increasing the number of retained PCs in the AD1400 step of the North American network from 2 to 5, and they argued that they were justified in doing so under the PC retention policies of MBH98. In this reconstruction, the bristlecone pine hockey-stick shows up as the PC4 (accounting for less than 8 percent of the North American network explained variance rather than 38 percent in the incorrect MBH98 calculation) and still imparts a hockey-stick shape to the whole NH temperature reconstruction. Without the NOAMER PC#4 their NH temperature index reverts to our shape.
They also re-iterated what seems to have been their primary argument: that they get highly significant Reduction of Error (RE) statistics from their reconstruction, while reconstructions using conventional PC standardization ("our" reconstruction) do not. RE statistics do not have a theoretical distribution and MBH98 benchmarked significance by Monte Carlo methods. We have done new simulations, applying the MBH98 PC methodology to trendless red noise modeled to exhibit the persistence of the North American tree ring network. Despite having no trend in the underlying proxies the MBH98 method regularly produces hockey stick-shaped PC1’s which then fit neatly against the temperature data, despite having, in principle, zero explanatory power. The benchmark for RE significance is therefore much higher than reported in MBH98 and their reported RE statistic can be shown to lack significance under a more realistic test.
In our 2nd submission, we had pointed out that we obtained very low R-squared statistics in our emulations of MBH98 and had been unable to replicate their claimed RE statistics. Again, the response of Mann et al. was highly instructive. They wrote an extraordinary diatribe against our supposed advocacy of the "discredited" and "flawed" R-squared statistic, citing Wilks (1995) as supposed authority for this diatribe. Most readers will be surprised to learn that this workhorse statistic has been "discredited". Wilks (1995) discusses cases where the RE statistic is lower than the R-squared statistic, but does not stand as authority for cases (such as MBH98) where there is a high RE statistic and negligible R-squared statistic. (Our new simulations will neatly illustrate what is going here.)
Our discussion of the statistics in MBH98 was considerably hampered by their refusal to disclose supporting calculations for their AD1400 reconstruction step, which takes us back to the progress of Part 2 (see below).
We are obviously disappointed in Nature’s decision on our submission. We have seen nothing in the referee comments or the response materials from Mann et al. to indicate that our arguments lack merit. However, the process has been helpful in several ways. The two stages of the correspondence have enabled a much more precise dissection of MBH98. We plan to submit a revised article elsewhere.

Lacunae and additional inaccuracies in MBH98 descriptions of data and methodology (Part 2)

In their response to MM03, Mann et al. criticized us for not using 159 series, a figure nowhere used in MBH98, and argued that the RE statistics of their reconstructions were higher than the RE statistics in our calculations. We emailed Professor Mann and asked him to identify the 159 series and to provide the individual results of his 11 calculation steps (described as "experiments") on which his claimed RE statistics rested, which had never been previously archived.
After Professor Mann refused, we submitted a Materials Complaint to Nature in November 2003, referring to Nature’s policies requiring authors to make their data and methods available. We stated:

The policies of Nature rightly place a burden on authors to disclose data and methods to any interested readers. We have been systematically and deliberately stymied by Professor Mann on the most elementary requests: a proper listing of his data series and the exact computational procedures used. In the process of trying to obtain this information we have concluded that the disclosure at the Nature SI site is not merely inadequate, but in some cases it contradicts what is now revealed at the University of Virginia FTP site.
Under the circumstances, we believe that the full data set and accompanying programs for MBH98 should now be included in the Nature Supplementary Information, along with an accounting of any discrepancies between what has been listed at Nature.com to date and what was actually used in MBH98.

Nature replied in early December that:

...we have already been in touch with Professor Mann's group, who have indicated their willingness to supply us with the various materials pertaining to your complaint. Once we have these in hand, we intend to seek external independent advice on the issues that you raise; and on the basis of such advice, we will decide on any actions that need to be taken.

On December 17, we re-iterated and particularized our requests, asking additionally for the disclosure of all residual series, together with programs used in the derivation of residuals and confidence intervals in MBH98. These residual series were used in the calculation of RE and R-squared statistics. We provided Nature with a re-stated list of 10 specific problems which we had identified with the disclosure of data and methods in MBH98, some of which we had already discussed in MM03 and others which we had determined through our examination of Mann’s FTP site. Nature replied that:

We are putting the points that you raise here to Professor Mann (as we did with those from your original communication) and will await his response. I hope that you will understand that, given both the seriousness of your concerns and the time of the year (our office being closed for several days over the coming fortnight), it may take us longer than normal to bring this matter to a conclusion. But we are nevertheless anxious to do so, and I hope that you will bear with us.

Based on Nature'’s statement that Professor Mann had undertaken to provide Nature with the materials relating to our complaint, we made the decision to forego publication of a detailed analysis of these errors in favor of working through Nature to obtain an accurate listing of data and methods. The ensuing investigation by Nature led to the Corrigendum of July 1, 2004. Under Nature’s policies, a Corrigendum is defined as "notification of an important error made by the authors [Nature’s bold] that affects the publication record or the scientific integrity of the paper, or the reputation of the authors or the journal. "
On March 16, we were shown a draft copy of the proposed Corrigendum. We immediately noticed that the Corrigendum was very incomplete and, despite its brevity, contained a number of errors, some of which were readily avoidable, and many inaccuracies. We requested the opportunity to see the new SI, but were not permitted to see it. Nature advised us that they did not edit supplementary information and that it was the sole responsibility of the contributing author, a point which may not be generally known, especially since in their policies they claim that SI is peer-reviewed.
Our biggest concern was the incompleteness of the Corrigendum. It failed to mention an extremely important inaccuracy in MBH98 description of methods (the significance of which we had discussed at length in our submission): their failure to describe the subtraction of the 1902-1980 mean prior to tree ring principal components calculation. In fact, the Corrigendum did not even mention the use of "stepwise" principal components calculation of tree ring network principal components, a matter which was not mentioned in MBH98 and which later formed much of the content of the new SI. The Corrigendum acknowledged the inaccurate citation of instrumental series in MBH98, but the new citation merely to "NOAA" was totally unhelpful as NOAA contains thousands of series. The Corrigendum also did not acknowledge the geographical errors in the precipitation series.
The Corrigendum did comprehensively acknowledge the discrepancies between the listings of series in the original SI and the series actually used. However, the Corrigendum purported to excuse or explain the discrepancies by stating that the differences resulted from the application of additional objective quality control to series already shortlisted according to quality control tests described in Mann et al. (2000).
We had previously examined these quality control tests and found that many of the shortlisted series failed one or more of the supposed quality control tests. One series, in fact, failed the tests so spectacularly that we contacted the originating author, who discovered that the wrong tree ring chronology had been archived all this time and promptly requested that it be removed from the World Data Center for Paleoclimatology. The well-known Polar Urals series, used in nearly all multi-proxy studies, including MBH98 and MBH99, fails the median test for segment length. We provided Nature with a detailed synopsis of the incompleteness and errors in the draft Corrigendum on March 17 . With a little further work, we were subsequently able to identify many other inconsistencies in the supposed explanation. For example, the supposed explanation does not explain why two density series originating from Schweingruber (ak006x, cana096x) are excluded, while other series with seemingly identical methods from the identical publication are included. Similar inconsistencies abound with other authors.
Nature responded to our concerns about the defects in the draft Corrigendum in a very unsatisfactory way.
First, they stated that our comments about the inaccuracy of the purported explanation for the difference between the listing of series in the original SI and the series as actually used "are not directly relevant to the materials complaint. Instead you question the consistency of the methods used, which is not the subject of a Corrigendum." With respect, it seems obvious to us that publishing an incorrect explanation of the discrepancy can hardly be excused merely on the grounds that we had not anticipated it and objected to it in our original Materials Complaint. And regardless, we had actually raised the matter of the reasons for the discrepancy in our Materials Complaint, even drawing Nature’s attention to a different the explanation for dropping ARGE030, one of the excluded series, contained in a note archived in Mann’s FTP site, which said that the deletion would be "better for our purposes" and made no mention of the quality control rules.
Secondly, Nature stated that Corrigenda had to be as "concise" as possible and that "space limitations" prevented a listing of all the matters raised in our comments. They argued that the version they would publish, "together with the Supplementary Information explicitly listing the data sets and methods used" would "clearly establish which data were used in the paper." Interestingly, the reply regarding "space limitations" on the Corrigendum came on exactly the same day that we had been asked to shorten our submission to 800 words and around the same time that the third reviewer was added for our submission.
By the criterion of "space limitations", some of the editorial choices in the Corrigendum are bewildering, with scarce space used for bizarre trivialities, while critical items are referred to deep in the fine print of the Supplementary Information or not at all. For example, scarce space is used to supposedly correct an inaccurate citation of the source for the Briffa et al. Western U.S. temperature reconstruction; amusingly, the correction is itself incorrect, citing a publication about Scandinavian temperature reconstruction. But space is wasted on this triviality, while the critical point about the incorrect calculation of tree ring principal components is not mentioned.
In addition, we had previously expressed concern to them that Mann et al. would use the occasion of the Corrigendum to comment on outstanding issues between us and requested the opportunity to comment on the Corrigendum. In response, Nature had assured us:

...the Correction will contain no mention of the controversy between yourselves and Mann et al; it will be a plain correction stating the errors in the original Supplementary Information, and their correction.

Nature asked us to maintain confidentiality about the Corrigendum, which we did. The Corrigendum came out while the Communication was under 2nd review and contained the statement that:

None of these errors affect our previously published results.

This was not in the draft we had been shown, and was obviously a highly controversial statement (in breach of Nature’s undertaking). It was completely inconsistent with the contents of our submission, then under 2nd review at Nature, on the effect of the erroneous PC calculations (which, in addition to being erroneous, had been inaccurately disclosed) and on the effect of the unique extrapolation of the duplicate version of the Gaspé series (which had also been inaccurately disclosed). We objected in writing to its publication. Nature’s response was as follows:

Regarding your disagreement with the last sentence of the Corrigendum by Mann et al., I have consulted with my colleagues, who have now given the matter careful consideration. However, the errors Mann et al. refer to in the last sentence of their Corrigendum are errors in the listing of the proxy data sets in the original Supplementary Information, rather than errors in either the data sets used or the computational procedures. Errors in the listing of data sets obviously do not affect the calculations or results, and we therefore feel that the sentence is appropriate and justified.

We are astounded at this hair-splitting. In March (and previously), we had pointed out important omissions in the Corrigendum some of which are admitted (without acknowledgement) in the new SI. The failure to include these inaccuracies in the printed Corrigendum, while coopering up the record in the new on-line SI, leaves a misleading impression that crucial calculation errors were really just trivial labeling problems.
Even within the artifice of the Corrigendum, the claim is refutable on the Gaspé series, which we discussed in detail in our submission. The Corrigendum (#6) described the extrapolation of the Gaspé series but did not explicitly acknowledge that the start year had been stated in MBH98 as AD1400 rather than AD1404, or that this was a duplicate use of this series. As we noted above, this extrapolation was unique within the MBH98 corpus. The misrepresentation of the start date (regardless of whether this was intentional or not) resulted in avoiding the disclosure of this unique extrapolation. The extrapolation (not to mention the duplicate usage) permitted a series with questionable 15th century quality to be added to the AD1400 roster, where it has a major effect on MBH98 results in the early 15th century. It does very little good to disclose the unique extrapolation 6 years after the fact, when so many positions are cast in stone. Had the extrapolation and duplication been properly disclosed at the time, an alert reviewer or reader might have inquired about the reason for this unique treatment, which would have necessarily led to discovering the lack of robustness in MBH98. Likewise with the inaccurate description of the PC methodology where disclosure of the subtraction of the 1902-1980 mean would surely have caught someone’s attention before we identified the problem.
Despite Nature’s promises that the new SI would be complete, it failed to contain the results of the 11 calibration "experiments" (which are necessary for assessing the goodness-of-fit claims) and it failed to list the 159 series, although it contained listings of series actually used, which sum to 139. Instead of simply providing actual source code, which would have permitted all the outstanding deficiencies in disclosure to be remedied, it provided a verbal description, which is imprecise and in places inaccurate. Given the incompleteness and inaccuracy of the original SI, in our view, confidence in the results can only be assured by the availability of the actual computational code.
We wrote to Nature in early August and asked for these items to be added to the SI. In late August, Nature replied that they had already done as much as could be expected of them and that there was enough information already available.
As to the matter of the 159 series so loudly brought into controversy last fall, Nature stated:

we feel [this] is an issue quite separate from the material that we have published and over which we are in a position to demand a response. Professor Mann has given us the clear understanding that the corrected Supplementary Information now lists *all* of the series used in the paper, and this list is consistent with statements in the original publication (MBH98). The fact that he has separately emphasised to you the need for a number of series greater than those listed in the Supplementary Information is, we feel, something that you should continue to pursue directly with him (along with your other requests for clarification).

In other words, we take it that the number of 159 series is simply fictitious.
As to source code, their position was:

we do not take the view that these are something that in general should automatically be provided on request - the decision of whether or not to do so normally rests with the authors of such codes. What we do consider to be a reasonable requirement is that the authors provide a detailed description of the procedures used, and this is indeed what Professor Mann has supplied in the corrected Supplementary Information (at our instigation, following your original communication with us).

Given that Nature did not review the Supplementary Information, they obviously are in no position to know whether the corrected Supplementary Information is actually an accurate description of MBH98 methods. Since the previous SI was found to be so inaccurate, producing the source code would be appropriate in this case to verify the proffered correction.
As to the results of the "experiments", they stated:

And with regard to the additional experimental results that you request, our view is that this too goes beyond an obligation on the part of the authors, given that the full listing of the source data and documentation of the procedures used to generate the final findings are provided in the corrected Supplementary Information. (This is the most that we would normally require of any author.)

Reluctance on the part of Mann et al. and Nature to produce the results for their "experiments, " and in particular for the AD1400 step, would be one thing if the source code that generated them were available; but the refusal to provide either one is completely unjustifiable, especially since Nature based its decision against our paper, in part, on claims about the RE statistics that can only be verified by looking at the "experiment" results. We surmise, based on our implementation of the methodology, that the R-squared and Coefficient of Efficiency (as this is defined in paleoclimate studies) statistics fail to reach statistical significance for the AD1400 step. It may also show that there are other problems in MBH98 besides the ones that we have described already. We already know that the adverse results from the bristlecone pine sensitivity study were not disclosed.
In sum, we see no reason why there should be any academic or (especially) policy reliance on this article while requests for supporting calculations and source code are obdurately refused.

Future Plans

While we are frustrated that the time invested in the Nature process did not result in their willingness to correct the publication record therein, it did at least allow us to clarify several methodological issues, especially the crucial role of the controversial bristlecone pine series. We will submit a revised article to a peer reviewed publication. We have also submitted an abstract for a planned presentation at the forthcoming AGU meeting in December. We plan to follow the advice of referee #3 and continue our testing of MBH98 and related papers. We plan to continue attempting to obtain the results of the "experiments" in MBH98 and would welcome any help in this (or in obtaining source code) from readers, who might independently contact Nature, the U.S. National Science Foundation or Professor Mann and his co-authors for this information.

[Aplomb]

http://www.john-daly.com/hockey/hockey.htm

excerpt:

The `Hockey Stick':
A New Low in Climate Science
by John L. Daly


In 1995, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its 5-yearly report on climate change [10], in a blaze of publicity, which contained the now infamous phrase that there was "a discernible human influence on global climate".
In their previous 1990 report [33], the IPCC illustrated their, then, understanding of how global climate had changed, not just during the previous 95 years, but also the past 1,000 years. In so doing they presented this graph (Fig 1.) of temperature change since 900 AD.

Fig.1 - Global temperature since 900 AD
This graph asserts that temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period were higher than those of today (as suggested by the opening lines to the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer), while it was much cooler during the Little Ice Age (as suggested by John King). Historical records from all over Europe, and Greenland attest to the reality of both events, and their profound impact on human society. For example, the colonisation of Greenland by the Vikings early in the millennium was only possible because of the medieval warmth. During the Little Ice Age, the Viking colonies in Greenland collapsed, while the River Thames in London often froze over, resulting in frequent `frost fairs' being held on the river ice.
The dating of these two climatic events depends to some extent on what one regards as `warm' and `cold' in comparison with present temperatures, but the following dating approximates these events -

• 1) `Medieval Warm Period' (AD 700 - 1300)
  2) `Sporer Minimum' cool period (AD 1300 - 1500)
  3) Brief climatic warming (AD 1500 - 1560)
  4) `Little Ice Age' (`Maunder Minimum') (AD 1560 - 1830)
  5) Brief warmer period (AD 1830 - 1870)
  6) Brief cool period (AD 1870 - 1910)
  7) 20th century warm period (AD 1910 - 2000)

As to what caused these two major climatic events, the most probable candidate is the variable sun, particularly with respect to the Little Ice Age. This is because we have direct observations of sunspot counts going back to 1600 AD, which allows us to compare variations in the sun with variations to global climate. Fig.2 shows how the sun has changed over time, the radiation being greatest during a sunspot maximum and least during a sunspot minimum, both recurring on an 11-year cycle.

Fig.2 - The Solar Cycle since 1600 AD
The most striking feature of the above 400-year record of solar variability is the Maunder Minimum, a 70-year period on the sun in which there were practically no sunspots at all. It's as if the sun had `stopped breathing'. But even before 1640 when the Maunder Minimum started, the cycle was clearly fragmented and irregular in contrast with the solid rhythmic cycles of subsequent years after 1710. When we compare this extraordinary solar event with the climate record from Fig.1, we can see the Maunder Minimum occurred at exactly the same time as the lowest point of the Little Ice Age.
The inference is clear. The variable sun caused the Little Ice Age and in all probability caused the Medieval Warm Period too. Carbon 14 isotopes are used as a proxy for solar activity prior to 1600 AD and this indicates a high level of solar activity during the medieval period, resulting in climatic warmth, and also a reduced level of activity during a cold period called the `Sporer Minimum' centered around 1350 AD.
This account of climatic history contains two serious difficulties for the present global warming theory.

• 1) If the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than today, with no greenhouse gas contribution, what would be so unusual about modern times being warm also?
  2) If the variable sun caused both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, would not the stronger solar activity of the 20th century account for most, if not all, of the claimed 20th century warmth?

Both propositions posed a serious threat to continued public acceptance of the climate modeller's catastrophic view of future climate. This is because new findings in solar science suggested that the sun, not greenhouse gases, were the primary driver of 20th century climate trends.
The power of the sun to modulate our climate has been reinforced by a large body of recent research that shows it is not only the cyclic warming and cooling of the sun (manifested by the 11-year sunspot cycle) causing our climate to change, but also changes in the solar spectrum towards greater ultra-violet radiation compared with visible or infra-red light (see Fig.3) [14] [8].

Fig.3 - The sun since AD 1600
The disproportionate enhancement of the ultra-violet part of the solar spectrum affects the ozone layer and other atmospheric chemistry, which may amplify any warming. In addition, recent changes to magnetic activity on the sun influence cosmic radiation reaching Earth which in turn modulates low level cloudiness and therefore temperature [24].
In other words, solar scientists have now identified three separate mechanisms by which the sun could warm or cool the earth, and it is these that are now believed to have been responsible for the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age, and the 20th century climatic trends.
These new solar findings were either ignored by greenhouse theorists or treated with hostility, since a warming sun in the 20th century would leave little or no room for trace greenhouse gases to be cited as an explanation for the claimed 20th century warmth.
In 1999, a new paper published in `Geophysical Research Letters' [15] altered the whole landscape of how past climate history was to be interpreted by the greenhouse sciences. It stood in stark contrast to the challenge posed by the solar scientists.
The infamous `Hockey Stick' was unveiled for the first time.

[Aplomb]

http://huey.colorado.edu/LTER/news/N...rt_011302.html

Excerpt:

Researchers with the National Science Foundation (NSF) Long-term Ecological Research (LTER) site in Antarctica's Dry Valleys - a perpetually snow-free, mountainous area adjacent to McMurdo Sound - argue in the paper that long-term data from weather stations across the continent, coupled with a separate set of measurements from the Dry Valleys, confirm each other and corroborate the continental cooling trend. "Our 14-year continuous weather station record from the shore of Lake Hoare reveals that seasonally averaged surface air temperature has decreased by 0.7 degrees Celsius per decade," they write. "The temperature decrease is most pronounced in summer and autumn. Continental cooling, especially the seasonality of cooling, poses challenges to models of climate and ecosystem change."


The findings are puzzling because many climate models indicate that the Polar regions should serve as bellwethers for any global warming trend, responding first and most rapidly to an increase in temperatures. An ice sheet many kilometers thick in places perpetually covers almost all of Antarctica.


Temperature anomalies also exist in Greenland, the largest ice sheet in the Northern Hemisphere, with cooling in the interior concurrent with warming at the coast.


Peter Doran, of the University of Illinois at Chicago, the lead author of the paper, and his co-authors, acknowledge that other studies conducted in Antarctica have deduced a warming trend elsewhere in the continent. But they note that the data indicate that the warming occurred between 1958 and 1978. They also note that the previous claims that Antarctic is warming may have been skewed because the measurements were taken largely on the Antarctic Peninsula, which extends northwards toward South America. The Peninsula itself is warming dramatically, the authors note, and there are many more weather stations on the peninsula than elsewhere on the continent.


Averaging the temperature readings from the more numerous stations on the Peninsula has led to the misleading conclusion that there is a net warming continent-wide. "Our approach shows that if you remove the Peninsula from the dataset, and look at the spatial trend. The majority of the continent is cooling," said Doran.


He added that documentation of the continental cooling presents a challenge to climate modelers. "Although some do predict areas of cooling, widespread cooling is a bit of a conundrum that the models need to start to account for," he said."


I am here noting that Peter Doran does NOT want his work to be used against the global warming myth. So having made note of that, read what he said. The conundrum speaks for itself, and if he doesn't want to BELIEVE it, that's not ethical scientific conclusion, it's religion, a belief system.

There is also a list of news reports on Antarctica climate cooling at the link.

[Aplomb]

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/in.../2500-less-1-2

Dear colleagues,


After some prolonged deliberation, I have decided to withdraw from participating in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). I am withdrawing because I have come to view the part of the IPCC to which my expertise is relevant as having become politicized.



In addition, when I have raised my concerns to the IPCC leadership, their response was simply to dismiss my concerns.


With this open letter to the community, I wish to explain the basis for my decision and bring awareness to what I view as a problem in the IPCC process. The IPCC is a group of climate researchers from around the world that every few years summarize how climate is changing and how it may be altered in the future due to manmade global warming. I had served both as an author for the Observations chapter and a Reviewer for the 2nd Assessment Report in 1995 and and the 3rd Assessment Report in 2001, primarily on the topic of tropical cyclones (hurricanes and typhoons). My work on hurricanes, and tropical cyclones more generally, has been widely cited by the IPCC. For the upcoming AR4, I was asked several weeks ago by the Observations chapter Lead Author - Dr. Kevin Trenberth - to provide the writeup for Atlantic hurricanes. As I had in the past, I agreed to assist the IPCC in what I thought was to be an important, and politically-neutral determination of what is happening with our climate.


Shortly after Dr. Trenberth requested that I draft the Atlantic hurricane section for the AR4’s Observations chapter, Dr. Trenberth participated in a press conference organized by scientists at Harvard on the topic “Experts to warn global warming likely to continue spurring more outbreaks of intense hurricane activity” along with other media interviews on the topic. The result of this media interaction was widespread coverage that directly connected the very busy 2004 Atlantic hurricane season as being caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas warming occurring today. Listening to and reading transcripts of this press conference and other media interviews, it is apparent the Dr. Trenberth was being accurately quoted and summarized in such statements and was not being misrepresented in the media. These media sessions have the potential to result in a widespread perception that global warming has made recent hurricane activity much more severe.


I found it a bit perplexing that the participants in the Harvard press conference had come to the conclusion that global warming was impacting hurricane activity today. To my knowledge, none of the participants in that press conference had performed any research on hurricane variability, nor were they reporting on any new work in the field. All previous and current research in the area of hurricane variability has shown no reliable, long-term trend up in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones, either in the Atlantic or any other basin. The IPCC assessments in 1995 and 2001 also concluded that there was no global warming signal found in the hurricane record.


Moreover, the evidence is quite strong and supported by the most recent credible studies that any impact in the future from global warming upon hurricane will likely be quite small. The latest results from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (Knutson and Tuleya, Journal of Climate, 2004) suggest that by around 2080, hurricanes may have winds and rainfall about 5% more intense than today. It has been proposed that even this tiny change may be an exaggeration as to what may happen by the end of the 21st Century (Michaels, Knappenberger, and Landsea, Journal of Climate, 2005, submitted).


It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming. Given Dr. Trenberth’s role as the IPCC’s Lead Author responsible for preparing the text on hurricanes, his public statements so far outside of current scientific understanding led me to concern that it would be very difficult for the IPCC process to proceed objectively with regards to the assessment on hurricane activity. My view is that when people identify themselves as being associated with the IPCC and then make pronouncements far outside current scientific understandings that this will harm the credibility of climate change science and will in the longer term diminish our role in public policy.


My concerns go beyond the actions of Dr. Trenberth and his colleagues to how he and other IPCC officials responded to my concerns. I did caution Dr. Trenberth before the media event and provided him a summary of the current understanding within the hurricane research community. I was disappointed when the IPCC leadership dismissed my concerns when I brought up the misrepresentation of climate science while invoking the authority of the IPCC. Specifically, the IPCC leadership said that Dr. Trenberth was speaking as an individual, even though he was introduced in the press conference as an IPCC lead author; I was told that that the media was exaggerating or misrepresenting his words, even though the audio from the press conference and interview tells a different story (available on the web directly); and that Dr. Trenberth was accurately reflecting conclusions from the TAR, even though it is quite clear that the TAR stated that there was no connection between global warming and hurricane activity at this time. The IPCC leadership saw nothing to be concerned with in Dr. Trenberth’s unfounded pronouncements to the media, despite his supposedly impartial important role that he must undertake as a Lead Author on the upcoming AR4.


It is certainly true that “individual scientists can do what they wish in their own rights”, as one of the folks in the IPCC leadership suggested. Differing conclusions and robust debates are certainly crucial to progress in climate science. However, this case is not an honest scientific discussion conducted at a meeting of climate researchers. Instead, a scientist with an important role in the IPCC represented himself as a Lead Author for the IPCC has and used that position to promulgate to the media and general public his own opinion that the busy 2004 hurricane season was caused by global warming, which is in direct opposition to research written in the field and is counter to conclusions in the TAR. This becomes problematic when I am then asked to provide the draft about observed hurricane activity variations for the AR4 with, ironically, Dr. Trenberth as the Lead Author for this chapter. Because of Dr. Trenberth’s pronouncements, the IPCC process on our assessment of these crucial extreme events in our climate system has been subverted and compromised, its neutrality lost. While no one can “tell” scientists what to say or not say (nor am I suggesting that), the IPCC did select Dr. Trenberth as a Lead Author and entrusted to him to carry out this duty in a non-biased, neutral point of view. When scientists hold press conferences and speak with the media, much care is needed not to reflect poorly upon the IPCC. It is of more than passing interest to note that Dr. Trenberth, while eager to share his views on global warming and hurricanes with the media, declined to do so at the Climate Variability and Change Conference in January where he made several presentations.



Perhaps he was concerned that such speculation - though worthy in his mind of public pronouncements – would not stand up to the scrutiny of fellow climate scientists.


I personally cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound. As the IPCC leadership has seen no wrong in Dr. Trenberth’s actions and have retained him as a Lead Author for the AR4, I have decided to no longer participate in the IPCC AR4.


Sincerely,



Chris Landsea

[Aplomb]

...ah, but that was then, just data collected and studied (and some necessarily scrapped)

...and this is now, the report is in the news (the authoritative place to be) and as we all know that means this is the gospel truth scientific conclusion (and so much more frightening when you add in all of those colorful adjectives)...

http://www.domain-b.com/economy/envi..._benefits.html

UN report on climate change warns of catastrophe
3 February 2007
Mumbai: A scientific report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — the most authoritative climate change study ever produced — has prompted new calls for concerted action to ward off soaring global temperatures and rising sea levels.


The report, which put the blame directly on humans, says without action, global warming will deliver catastrophic change, including droughts, flooding, more tropical storms, heat waves and the disappearance of arctic ice in the sea in the second half of this century.


The IPCC report identified that human behaviour is responsible for more than 90 per cent of environmental instability that causes climate changes over thousands of years.


The global community of eminent scientists who prepared the report said that at a conservative estimate a three-degree rise in global temperatures is on the cards - and possibly 6.4 degrees by the end of the century.


Launching the report in Paris, Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), made it clear that the scientists were simply telling the facts as they are and it was for governments to act.


The document has the effective endorsement of the global community, although the report of doom does not shock governments the least, Pachauri pointed out.
The report comes after last year's Stern Report commissioned by UK prime minister Tony Blair, and last month's European Commission report proposing an EU effort to keep the rise temperatures well below two degrees.


The cost to the planet, in human and financial terms, would be incalculable.
EU experts have now admitted that rising temperatures will kill an extra 11,000 people in Europe a year within 10 years — even if politicians take serious action now.


A temperature rise of only 2.2 degrees would trigger such a mortality increase - and from 2071 the annual extra deaths in southern Europe would rise to 29,000 people.
Residents of Italy and Spain will suffer most from drought, fire, dry soil and other climate-change related factors.


Even in relatively cold northern Europe, 27,000 people would die a year by then from the warmer climate.


However, the hotter weather would save 20,000 people who would otherwise die from the cold.


Those figures are seen as conservative estimates in the light of the present report and it is now believed that there is a 50 per cent chance that global temperatures will rise this century by more than five degrees centigrade.


Sea levels will rise by more than half a metre, destroying one-third of Africa's 'coastal infrastructure'.


Similar devastation would hit Europe's coasts and the UK.


Long-term holiday patterns could change in Europe - with no need for northern

Europeans to head south if the aim is a suntan.


They said the world was in for centuries of climbing temperatures, rising seas and shifting weather patterns — unavoidable results of the buildup of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere


The report said warming and its harmful consequences could be substantially blunted by prompt action.


Although the report provided no new evidence of a climate apocalypse now, and avoided recommending courses of action, UN agency officials that created the panel in 1988 said it spoke of the urgent need to limit looming and momentous risks.


"In our daily lives we all respond urgently to dangers that are much less likely than climate change to affect the future of our children," said Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, which administers the panel along with the World Meteorological Organization


The report is the panel's fourth assessment since 1990 on the causes and consequences of climate change, but it is the first in which the group asserts with near certainty - more than 90 per cent confidence - that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from human activities have been the main causes of warming in the past half century.

Temperatures, sea levels to rise
The new report says the global climate is likely to warm 3.5 to 8 degrees by 2050 Fahrenheit if carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere reach twice the levels of 1750, before the Industrial Revolution.


Many energy and environment experts see such a doubling, or worse, as a foregone conclusion after 2050 unless there is a prompt and sustained shift away from the 20th-century pattern of unfettered burning of coal and oil, the main sources of carbon dioxide, and an aggressive expansion of nonpolluting sources of energy.


And the report says there is a more than a 1-in-10 chance of much greater warming, a risk that many experts say is far too high to ignore.


Even a level of warming that falls in the middle of the group's range of projections would be likely to cause significant stress to ecosystems, according to many climate experts and biologists. And it would alter longstanding climate patterns that shape water supplies and agricultural production.


Moreover, the warming has set in motion a rise in global sea levels, the report says. It forecasts a rise of 7 to 23 inches by 2100 and concludes that seas will continue to rise for at least 1,000 years to come. By comparison, seas rose about 6 to 9 inches in the 20th century.

Policy briefing
The meeting released a 20-page summary for policymakers, which was approved early in the morning by teams of officials from more than 100 countries after three days and nights of wrangling over wording with the lead authors, all of whom are scientists.


Generally, the scientists said, more precipitation will fall at higher latitudes, which are also likely to see lengthened growing seasons. Semi-arid subtropical regions, already chronically plagued by drought, could have a further 20 per cent drop in rainfall under the panel's midrange outlook for increases in the greenhouse gases.


The summary added a new chemical consequence of the buildup of carbon dioxide to the list of mainly climatic and biological effects foreseen in its previous reports: a drop in the pH of seawater as oceans absorb billions of tons of carbon dioxide, which forms carbonic acid when partly dissolved. The ocean would stay alkaline, but marine biologists have said that a change in the direction of acidity could imperil some kinds of corals and plankton.


The report essentially caps a half-century-long effort to discern whether humans, through the buildup of carbon dioxide and other gases released mainly by burning fuels and forests, could influence the earth's climate system in potentially momentous ways.


Government officials are involved in shaping the summary of each report, but the scientist-authors, who are unpaid, have the final say over the thousands of pages in four underlying technical reports that will be completed and published later this year.


Big questions remain about the speed and extent of some impending changes, both because of uncertainty about future population and pollution trends and the complex interrelationships of the greenhouse emissions, clouds, dusty kinds of pollution, the oceans and earth's veneer of life, which both emits and soaks up carbon dioxide and other such gases.

Back to Ice Age?
Should greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere at even a moderate pace, average temperatures by the end of the century could match those last seen 125,000 years ago, in the previous warm spell between ice ages, the report said.


At that time, the panel said, sea levels were 12 to 20 feet higher than they are now. Much of that extra water is now trapped in the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, which are eroding in some places.


The panel said there was no solid scientific understanding of how rapidly the vast stores of ice in polar regions will melt, so their estimates on new sea levels were based mainly on how much the warmed oceans will expand, and not on contributions from the melting


The conclusions came after a three-year review of hundreds of studies of past climate shifts; observations of retreating ice, warming and rising seas, and other changes around the planet; and a greatly expanded suite of supercomputer simulations used to test how the earth will respond to a growing blanket of gases that hold heat in the atmosphere.


The summary also described far-flung ramifications for both humans and nature.


"It is very likely that hot extremes, heat waves and heavy precipitation events will continue to become more frequent," said the summary.


Government officials are involved in shaping the summary of each report, but the scientist-authors, who are unpaid, have the final say over the thousands of pages in four underlying technical reports that will be completed and published later this year.


Big questions remain about the speed and extent of some impending changes, both because of uncertainty about future population and pollution trends and the complex interrelationships of the greenhouse emissions, clouds, dusty kinds of pollution, the oceans and earth's veneer of life, which both emits and soaks up carbon dioxide and other such gases.

But a broad array of scientists, including authors of the report and independent experts, said the latest analysis was the most sobering view yet of a century of transition — after thousands of years of relatively stable climate conditions — to a new norm of continual change.

[Aplomb]

Hahaha, I just learned that the news is still not frightening enough. lol.

What's so hot about fickle science?
(http://www.suntimes.com/news/steyn/2...TEYN04.article)

February 4, 2007

BY MARK STEYN Sun-Times Columnist


From the "Environmental News Network": "Science Is Solid on Climate Change, Congress Told." "The science is solid," says Louise Frechette, deputy secretary-general of the United Nations.


"The science is solid," says Sen. Dianne Feinstein.


"The science is really solid," says TV meteorologist Heidi Cullen. "The science is very solid."


And at that point, on "Larry King Live" last week, Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric science at MIT, remarked: "Heidi says the science is solid and I can't criticize her because she never says what science she's talking about."


Indeed. If the science is so solid, maybe they could drag it out to the Arctic for the poor polar bears to live on now that the ice is melting faster than a coed's heart at an Al Gore lecture.


Alas, the science isn't so solid. In the '70s, it was predicting a new ice age. Then it switched to global warming. Now it prefers "climate change." If it's hot, that's a sign of "climate change." If it's cold, that's a sign of "climate change." If it's 53 with sunny periods and light showers, you need to grab an overnight bag and get outta there right now because "climate change" is accelerating out of control.


The silliest argument is the anecdotal one: "You only have to look outside your window to see that climate change is happening." Outside my window in northern New England last week, it was minus 20 Fahrenheit. Very cold. Must be the old climate change kicking in, right? After all, December was very mild. Which was itself a sign of climate change. A few years ago, the little old lady who served as my town's historian for many decades combed over the farmers' diaries from two centuries ago that various neighbors had donated to her: From the daily records of 15 Januarys, she concluded that three were what we'd now regard as classic New Hampshire winters, ideal for lumbering or winter sports; eight had January thaws, and four had no snow at all. This was in the pre-industrial 18th century.


Today, faced with eight thaws and four entirely snowless Januarys, we'd all be running around shrieking that the great Gaia is displeased. Wake up and smell the CO2, people! We need to toss another virgin into the volcano. A virgin SUV, that is. Brand-new model, straight off the assembly line, cupholders never been used. And as the upholstery howls in agony, we natives will stand around chanting along with High Priestess Natalie Cole's classic recording: ''Unsustainable, that's what you are.''


As we say in the north country, if you don't like the weather, wait five minutes. And if you don't like the global weather, wait three decades. For the last century or so, the planet has gone through very teensy-weensy warming trends followed by very teensy-weensy cooling trends followed by very teensy-weensy warming trends, every 30 years or so. And, even when we're in a pattern of "global warming" or "global cooling," the phenomenon is not universally observed -- i.e., it's not "global," or even very local. In the Antarctic, the small Palmer peninsula has got a little warmer but the main continent is colder. Up north, the western Arctic's a little warmer but the eastern Arctic's colder. So, if you're an eastern polar bear, you're in clover -- metaphorically, I hasten to add. If you're a western polar bear, you'll be in clover literally in a year or two, according to Al Gore.


And, if you really don't like the global weather, wait half-a-millennium. A thousand years ago, the Arctic was warmer than it is now. Circa 982, Erik the Red and a bunch of other Vikings landed in Greenland and thought, "Wow! This land really is green! Who knew?" So they started farming it, and were living it up for a couple of centuries. Then the Little Ice Age showed up, and they all died. A terrible warning to us all about "unsustainable development": If a few hundred Vikings doing a little light hunter-gathering can totally unbalance the environment, imagine the havoc John Edwards' new house must be wreaking.


The question is whether what's happening now is just the natural give and take of the planet, as Erik the Red and my town's early settlers understood it. Or whether it's something so unprecedented that we need to divert vast resources to a transnational elite bureaucracy so that they can do their best to cripple the global economy and deny much of the developing world access to the healthier and longer lives that capitalism brings. To the eco-chondriacs that's a no-brainer. As Mark Fenn of the Worldwide Fund for Nature says in the new documentary ''Mine Your Own Business'':


''In Madagascar, the indicators of quality of life are not housing. They're not nutrition, specifically. They're not health in a lot of cases. It's not education. A lot of children in Fort Dauphin do not go to school because the parents don't consider that to be important. . . . People have no jobs, but if I could put you with a family and you could count how many times in a day that that family smiles. Then I put you with a family well off, in New York or London, and you count how many times people smile. . . . You tell me who is rich and who is poor."


Well, if smiles are the measure of quality of life, I'm Bill Gates; I'm laughing my head off. Male life expectancy in Madagascar is 52.5 years. But Mark Fenn is right: Those l'il malnourished villagers sure look awful cute dancing up and down when the big environmentalist activist flies in to shoot the fund-raising video.


If "global warming" is real and if man is responsible, why then do so many "experts" need to rely on obviously fraudulent data? The famous "hockey stick" graph showed the planet's climate history as basically one long bungalow with the Empire State Building tacked on the end. Completely false. In evaluating industrial impact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change used GDP estimates based on exchange rates rather than purchasing power: As a result, they assume by the year 2100 that not only South Africans but also North Koreans will have a higher per capita income than Americans. That's why the climate-change computer models look scary. That's how "solid" the science is: It's predicated on the North Korean economy overtaking the United States.


Could happen. Who knows?


But that's the point: Who knows? You could take every dime spent by every government and NGO and eco-group to investigate "climate change" and spend it on Internet porn instead, and it wouldn't make the slightest difference to what the climate will be in 2050.


However, it would make a dramatic difference to the lifestyle of the "climate change" jet set. Which is why, even before latest new IPCC doomsday scenario was released, the Associated Press was running stories like: "New Climate Report Too Rosy, Experts Say." The AP's "science writer" warns that even this "dire report" is the "sugarcoated version." It's insufficiently hysterical, in every sense.

© Mark Steyn 2007

Copyright 2006 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material
may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

[Phil Fiord]

How about an experienced and well schooled Climatologist who says Global Warming is a non-issue?

Global Warming is not due to human contribution of Carbon Dioxide

Global Warming: The Cold, Hard Facts?

By Timothy Ball
Monday, February 5, 2007
Global Warming, as we think we know it, doesn't exist. And I am not the only one trying to make people open up their eyes and see the truth. But few listen, despite the fact that I was the first Canadian Ph.D. in Climatology and I have an extensive background in climatology, especially the reconstruction of past climates and the impact of climate change on human history and the human condition.“Few listen, even though I have a Ph.D, (Doctor of Science) from the University of London, England and was a climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg.” . For some reason (actually for many), the World is not listening. Here is why.

What would happen if tomorrow we were told that, after all, the Earth is flat? It would probably be the most important piece of news in the media and would generate a lot of debate. So why is it that when scientists who have studied the Global Warming phenomenon for years say that humans are not the cause nobody listens? Why does no one acknowledge that the Emperor has no clothes on?

Believe it or not, Global Warming is not due to human contribution of Carbon Dioxide (CO2). This in fact is the greatest deception in the history of science. We are wasting time, energy and trillions of dollars while creating unnecessary fear and consternation over an issue with no scientific justification. For example, Environment Canada brags about spending $3.7 billion in the last five years dealing with climate change almost all on propaganda trying to defend an indefensible scientific position while at the same time closing weather stations and failing to meet legislated pollution targets.

No sensible person seeks conflict, especially with governments, but if we don't pursue the truth, we are lost as individuals and as a society. That is why I insist on saying that there is no evidence that we are, or could ever cause global climate change. And, recently, Yuri A. Izrael, Vice President of the United Nations sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirmed this statement. So how has the world come to believe that something is wrong?

Maybe for the same reason we believed, 30 years ago, that global cooling was the biggest threat: a matter of faith. "It is a cold fact: the Global Cooling presents humankind with the most important social, political, and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for ten thousand years. Your stake in the decisions we make concerning it is of ultimate importance; the survival of ourselves, our children, our species," wrote Lowell Ponte in 1976.

I was as opposed to the threats of impending doom global cooling engendered as I am to the threats made about Global Warming. Let me stress I am not denying the phenomenon has occurred. The world has warmed since 1680, the nadir of a cool period called the Little Ice Age (LIA) that has generally continued to the present. These climate changes are well within natural variability and explained quite easily by changes in the sun. But there is nothing unusual going on.

Since I obtained my doctorate in climatology from the University of London, Queen Mary College, England my career has spanned two climate cycles. Temperatures declined from 1940 to 1980 and in the early 1970's global cooling became the consensus. This proves that consensus is not a scientific fact. By the 1990's temperatures appeared to have reversed and Global Warming became the consensus. It appears I'll witness another cycle before retiring, as the major mechanisms and the global temperature trends now indicate a cooling.

No doubt passive acceptance yields less stress, fewer personal attacks and makes career progress easier. What I have experienced in my personal life during the last years makes me understand why most people choose not to speak out; job security and fear of reprisals. Even in University, where free speech and challenge to prevailing wisdoms are supposedly encouraged, academics remain silent.

I once received a three page letter that my lawyer defined as libellous, from an academic colleague, saying I had no right to say what I was saying, especially in public lectures. Sadly, my experience is that universities are the most dogmatic and oppressive places in our society. This becomes progressively worse as they receive more and more funding from governments that demand a particular viewpoint.

In another instance, I was accused by Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki of being paid by oil companies. That is a lie. Apparently he thinks if the fossil fuel companies pay you have an agenda. So if Greenpeace, Sierra Club or governments pay there is no agenda and only truth and enlightenment?

Personal attacks are difficult and shouldn't occur in a debate in a civilized society. I can only consider them from what they imply. They usually indicate a person or group is losing the debate. In this case, they also indicate how political the entire Global Warming debate has become. Both underline the lack of or even contradictory nature of the evidence.

I am not alone in this journey against the prevalent myth. Several well-known names have also raised their voices. Michael Crichton, the scientist, writer and filmmaker is one of them. In his latest book, "State of Fear" he takes time to explain, often in surprising detail, the flawed science behind Global Warming and other imagined environmental crises.

Another cry in the wildenerness is Richard Lindzen's. He is an atmospheric physicist and a professor of meteorology at MIT, renowned for his research in dynamic meteorology - especially atmospheric waves. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has held positions at the University of Chicago, Harvard University and MIT. Linzen frequently speaks out against the notion that significant Global Warming is caused by humans. Yet nobody seems to listen.

I think it may be because most people don't understand the scientific method which Thomas Kuhn so skilfully and briefly set out in his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." A scientist makes certain assumptions and then produces a theory which is only as valid as the assumptions. The theory of Global Warming assumes that CO2 is an atmospheric greenhouse gas and as it increases temperatures rise. It was then theorized that since humans were producing more CO2 than before, the temperature would inevitably rise. The theory was accepted before testing had started, and effectively became a law.

As Lindzen said many years ago: "the consensus was reached before the research had even begun." Now, any scientist who dares to question the prevailing wisdom is marginalized and called a sceptic, when in fact they are simply being good scientists. This has reached frightening levels with these scientists now being called climate change denier with all the holocaust connotations of that word. The normal scientific method is effectively being thwarted.

Meanwhile, politicians are being listened to, even though most of them have no knowledge or understanding of science, especially the science of climate and climate change. Hence, they are in no position to question a policy on climate change when it threatens the entire planet. Moreover, using fear and creating hysteria makes it very difficult to make calm rational decisions about issues needing attention.

Until you have challenged the prevailing wisdom you have no idea how nasty people can be. Until you have re-examined any issue in an attempt to find out all the information, you cannot know how much misinformation exists in the supposed age of information.

I was greatly influenced several years ago by Aaron Wildavsky's book "Yes, but is it true?" The author taught political science at a New York University and realized how science was being influenced by and apparently misused by politics. He gave his graduate students an assignment to pursue the science behind a policy generated by a highly publicised environmental concern. To his and their surprise they found there was little scientific evidence, consensus and justification for the policy. You only realize the extent to which Wildavsky's findings occur when you ask the question he posed. Wildavsky's students did it in the safety of academia and with the excuse that it was an assignment. I have learned it is a difficult question to ask in the real world, however I firmly believe it is the most important question to ask if we are to advance in the right direction.

Dr. Tim Ball, Chairman of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project (www.nrsp.com), is a Victoria-based environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg. He can be reached at letters@canadafreepress.com

This page printed from: http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/...ming020507.htm

[American Patriot]

But, but... but... "many scientists say"...