Global Warming Again.

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As the global warming matter chugs along, more more evidence of the manipulation of data is coming to light.

Although it has been emerging for seven years or more, one of the most extraordinary scandals of our time has never hit the headlines. Yet another little example of it lately caught my eye when, in the wake of those excited claims that 2014 was “the hottest year on record”, I saw the headline on a climate blog: “Massive tampering with temperatures in South America”. The evidence on Notalotofpeopleknowthat, uncovered by Paul Homewood, was indeed striking.
Puzzled by those “2014 hottest ever” claims, which were led by the most quoted of all the five official global temperature records Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) Homewood examined a place in the world where Giss was showing temperatures to have risen faster than almost anywhere else: a large chunk of South America stretching from Brazil to Paraguay.
Noting that weather stations there were thin on the ground, he decided to focus on three rural stations covering a huge area of Paraguay. Giss showed it as having recorded, between 1950 and 2014, a particularly steep temperature rise of more than 1.5C: twice the accepted global increase for the whole of the 20th century.
But when Homewood was then able to check Giss’s figures against the original data from which they were derived, he found that they had been altered.

Some interesting graphics here.

I follow this story on a skeptic blog and Steve McIntyre’s blog.

Both are currently tearing apart an absurd recent paper that has serious statistical errors. Steve is a statistician.

A new paper in Nature by Jochem Marotzke and Piers Forster: ‘Forcing, feedback and internal variability in global temperature trends'[i] investigates the causes of the mismatch between climate models that simulate a strong increase in global temperature since 1998 and observations that show little increase, and the influence of various factors on model-simulated warming over longer historical periods. I was slightly taken aback by the paper, as I would have expected either one of the authors or a peer reviewer to have spotted the major flaws in its methodology. I have a high regard for Piers Forster, who is a very honest and open climate scientist, so I am sorry to see him associated with a paper that I think is very poor, even as co-author (a position that perhaps arose through him supplying model forcing data to Marotzke) and therefore not bearing primary responsibility for the paper’s shortcomings.

This is embarrassing as many are attacking the methods with what sound like valid arguments.

Even Nature has begun to recognize trouble in the alarmist world.

Despite the continued increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, the annual-mean global temperature has not risen in the twenty-first century 1, 2, challenging the prevailing view that anthropogenic forcing causes climate warming. Various mechanisms have been proposed for this hiatus in global warming3, 4, 5, 6, but their relative importance has not been quantified, hampering observational estimates of climate sensitivity. Here we show that accounting for recent cooling in the eastern equatorial Pacific reconciles climate simulations and observations. We present a novel method of uncovering mechanisms for global temperature change by prescribing, in addition to radiative forcing, the observed history of sea surface temperature over the central to eastern tropical Pacific in a climate model.

The story is getting harder to defend but, grant money being what it is, there is still a strong motive to try to keep the ball rolling, even uphill.

The Michael Mann lawsuit against Mark Steyn and National Review is still chugging along as Mann seems to have nine lives in this matter.

Steyn comes to Washington Tuesday for a hearing at the D.C. Court of Appeals. Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State, filed the lawsuit against Steyn, National Review, space policy and tech analyst Rand Simberg and the Libertarian-bent Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) in 2012.

All parties have lawyered up. They all have different legal representation with the exception of Simberg, who is clumped in with CEI.

It is hard for me to take this seriously but there are enough scientifically illiterate judges to keep Mann’s suit alive.

Steyn insists Mann is waiting out the clock so that everyone he’s suing will be good and broke if they ever get remotely near the prospect of a trial. The journalist, however, is plowing ahead, raising money and prepping himself for a trial he’s dying to see happen.

The case is already on its second judge — the first one applied for “senior status” (meaning she’ll work part time and get full pay) and was accepted. The second, says Steyn, seems to be more on top of things, but has been unable to restore a timely process.

Mann appears to be following a “law fare” strategy.

”If this guy Dr. Mann feels he’s being defamed then he should, like Oscar Wilde, get in court and have the manner settled. There is no right to a speedy trial…but you know, defamation is serious and more injurious to one’s reputation than bouncing a check for $30 at the general store. It’s more injurious than a parking ticket, than doing 45 in a 30 mile speed limit. [There’s the right to a speedy trial], but not for defamation. Nuts to that.”

Last summer, a “lukewarmer” scientist named Roger Peilke had the misfortune to encounter the angry left when he accepted a job at the left wing site called five thirty eight.

Roger Pielke Jr. said Monday that he left FiveThirtyEight, ending a short-lived but turbulent stint with the site launched by Nate Silver earlier this year.

Pielke, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, told Discover Magazine that after editors at the site “showed some reluctance” in publishing his work, he told FiveThirtyEight managing editor Mike Wilson that “it was probably best that we part ways.”

Reluctance was not exactly the proper term. Hysteria was more like it.

“Disinformer!” the Daily Kos screamed. “One of the country’s leading tricksters on climate change,” charged the Huffington Post. “Inaccurate and misleading,” was ThinkProgress’s measured verdict. Even that doyen of professionalism and sworn enemy of hyperbole, Michael Mann, weighed in, knocking his foe for his “pattern of sloppiness.” The pile-on was as predictable as it was unjust. At root, Pielke’s biggest crimes are to have walked at slightly different pace than his peers and to have refused to bow to the president. Pielke accepts the IPCC’s view of the climate-change question but suggests in parallel that man’s response is unlikely to have a “perceptible impact on the climate for many decades” and that civilization should thus adapt to, rather than attempt to prevent, change.

Pielke quickly left. He now has begun a new blog called The Climate Fix.

The alarmist hysteria grows more acute as the evidence piles up that they are wrong and, perhaps, even lying.

11 thoughts on “Global Warming Again.”

  1. The clue that ” Global Warming” was sketchy, was the demonization of anyone skeptical of the idea that GW would likely present a serious problem. The e-mails released in ClimateGate gave the game away; the science just was not there. Someone working at HADCRUT had a conscience, and released the e-mails,exposing the scam.

    The really disturbing thing is that this Lysenko like thing was able to get such traction in “Liberal Democracies”. The cost of this fraud? Probably well over a trillion dollars thus far.

  2. An acquaintance told me the other day that the worst problems at the mo’ are Islamophobia and Science Denial. I think she must believe everything she reads in The Guardian.

  3. I support science, that is, the process of careful data collection and experiment followed by a transparent release of data, code, and plain argument. Real science is sceptical. It rejects fuzzy argument and unsupported or unrepeatable claims. History shows that anything less leads to costly error.

    There are a few facts about carbon dioxide and direct warming, and a pile of speculation, models, and government manipulation. Most of climate science is not science. Publishing only a graph is scientifical, not science.

    I trust in results produced by a group of skeptic scientists attempting to disprove/improve on the theories floating around. Government climate scientists embrace one result but not one model, strangely, and they obscure the data leading to their conclusions. That is a cabal, not a scientific community.

    It is ridiculous to trust in the integrity of a “scientific community” or “peer review” where prominent members of academic and government institutions announce they are willing to lie for the supposed good of the peasants.

    The models are complex, Dr. Mann won’t release his data, and manipulations of peer-reviewed, published graphs to “hide the decline” are explained as unfortunate limitations of space. The warmists have no credibiility, meaning that there is no reason to believe anything they say which is not supported in transparent detail. They are revolutionaries or true believers, not scientists.

    One might argue that these liars are only a few. If so, why aren’t the rest denouncing them, proclaiming proudly that the data is enough, proclaiming that exaggeration and lying are not needed? Their silence demeans the global warming community and their science.

    ( http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2012/03/03/unless-we-announce-disasters-no-one-will-listen/ )
    Lying for climate change
    3/3/12 – Ed Driscoll   [edited]
    === ===
    It is a fascinating development when people admit that they are lying for their cause.

    •  Prof. Chris Folland, Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research
    “The data doesn’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models.”

    •  Dr David Frame, Climate modeler, Oxford University
    “The models are convenient fictions that provide something very useful.”

    •  Paul Watson, Co-founder of Greenpeace
    “It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.”

    •  Sir John Houghton, First chairman of the IPCC
    “Unless we announce disasters no one will listen.”

    •  Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment
    “No matter if the science of global warming is all phony ”¦ climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”
    === ===

    The global warming scare is political, not scientific. It represents an old political ploy. When you scare the sheep, they are more willing to be sheared.

    There can be no discussion with liars. It is worse when the liars claim the status of learned, dispationate science, and then tell you that your peasant mind should just believe, because you can never match the facts to their “models”. You are not allowed to question their models because they were never designed to be questioned.

    It does not surprise me that an average person cannot directly evaluate the claims and models. It amazes me that the average person can’t tell when they are being lied to, even when the liars say it right out and have the shears (tax schemes) in their hands.

  4. “This is embarrassing as many are attacking the methods with what sound like valid arguments.”

    “Sound like valid arguments” should be on your masthead.

  5. The models are complex, Dr. Mann won’t release his data, and manipulations of peer-reviewed, published graphs to “hide the decline” are explained as unfortunate limitations of space.

    Not even “the” here is remotely true.

  6. “The alarmist hysteria grows more acute as the evidence piles up that they are wrong and, perhaps, even lying.”

    This is one thing that really bugs me, we KNOW they are lying. The number of data tampering incidences, fraudulent graphs, misrepresented results and so on are trumpeted as the final nail each time they come to light and within a week all the big climate skeptic sites go back to a sort of “maybe they just made a mistake, we’ll help them fix it” attitude.

    Why not just simply write, person x has been caught fabricating data on 6 occasions, this is his latest paper. They are liars with history, yet they are treated as honest, but misguided souls. It is baffling.

  8. Claiming the “world climate” is “warmer” than a century or so before is kind of like saying the “world economy” is “richer” than before. Okay, so what?

    The problem is the models and the experts who then want to use the claim to advance a particular agenda. BECAUSE the world has grown “richer” since the publication of Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital”, THEREFORE the economy has benefitted from his economic models and GOING FORWARD we should abandon other, older models such as Adam Smith’s. Or so many would claim. Why can I not agree with the initial claim and argue the second? Why have claims been conflated? And why is the climate “science” community so entrenched against the idea of “Business as Usual”, if not for Marxist bias built into the weather (or economic) model?

    If a random layperson tends to object to the Marxist model, the experts tend to assault the critic in this fashion: “You are ignorant if you deny that the world is richer. You are out-of-step if you deny that Marx’s models are widely regarded and accepted in the consensus view of economic science. You are reactionary and backwards if you try to argue against Marx’s models, and you are to be dismissed if you haven’t published your own economic theories in peer-reviewed journals. In short, YOU have no standing to object and if you DO object you must be the puppet or shill of evil powers, standing athwart history…” We are lucky in that the “richer -> Marxist” duality may still be laughed at, but the “warmer-> UN-treaty (control of markets)” model is still very solemnly regarded.

    PROBABLY the world IS “warmer” nowadays than at the start of scientific weather record keeping. This is an unexceptional claim, and is no more grounds for policy than the observation that the world is “richer” since the start of national/central banking. It is a stronger claim that the weather records, like the aggregation of various nations’ banking records, taken as some sort of single-number “index” of the world economy, are sufficiently accurate and unbiased to be useful in determining anything about the overall world economy. Some nations only recently had central banks, some such banks didn’t keep good records, some banks and nations have split or merged … There are lots of things affecting the records and the calculated “index”. Attacking the index tends to be pointless, however. If, as we guess, the world is warmer and richer, any half-assed index attempting to quantify the effect will point in the same direction. The index itself, (and there will be several) is still not particularly useful in attributions about the past or predictions about the future. It is only a piece in a theory, whether economic, climatic, or historical.

    The claim the “index” is meaningful is a stronger claim than the claim the world is richer, and agreement with weak claim does NOT require agreement with the stronger claim. The claim that “something must be done” because of the assumed-meaning of the index number is a stronger claim still, and the evidence of that is, I think, even weaker than the claim that the world is warmer and richer. The structure of claims continues into stronger claims and weaker evidence the more we read of climate. It’s claimed that something CAN be done. It’s claimed that something can be done CHEAPLY. It claimed that cheap projects can be supported without displacing OTHER priority projects such as clean water, control of disease, or exploration of space. It’s claimed that free nations can make treaties supporting these ideas and projects that will meet targets without being enforced, and without leading to boycotts, embargoes, sanctions or wars. It is claimed that climate treaties and super-governing bodies can be an example for world-wide problem-solving to apply to OTHER (lesser) priorities like disease control. In short, it is claimed that those –97% of smart people — who “believe in warming” ALSO and INEVITABLY believe in the utopia that will result as a consequence of that belief and nothing else.

    That, I do not believe. This is not a matter of faith. I, and the world, have experience with such questions. Belief distorts results, rather than affording them.

    USING and BELIEVING IN the temperature index number to plan the political future of the world is exactly the sort of mistake Stalin and Mao made in their Five Year Plans to use steel production measurements as an “index” for national economic health. In theory, more steel led to richer nations. In practice, measuring steel production led to fudging the numbers. It led to the sacrifice of other priorities in order to boost steel numbers. It led to lies, slavery, torture, death, and the loss of accumulated capital in the form of infrastructure, social cohesion, and ability to trade. And in climate science, it appears to me, measuring a world-wide “temperature index” and “carbon price” has led to fudging up weather numbers. Lies, so far, and calls for slavery, torture and death of critics. Remember the Ten/Ten advertisements? Happily we are not yet using those bodged numbers in Five Year Plans.

    At least not yet, not all, and not everywhere.

  9. weathermen and weathergirls are chosen for sex appeal, not for scientific dedication. Everything is as phony as their wigs, girdles and forecasts.

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