Global warming?

[Happy Monkey]

The truth about "climategate" appears to have its pants and boots on, finally. It's not going to catch up, but at least it's out there.

[xoxoxoBruce]

But not only did British investigators clear the East Anglia scientist at the center of it all, Phil Jones, of scientific impropriety and dishonesty in April, an investigation at Penn State cleared PSU climatologist Michael Mann of “falsifying or suppressing data, intending to delete or conceal e-mails and information, and misusing privileged or confidential information” in February.

Yeah, cleared by their peers... their colleagues... their associates...

[tw]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

Yeah, cleared by their peers... their colleagues... their associates...

Otherwise UG would have to do it. After all, he rewrote science papers some years back.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

Yeah, cleared by their peers... their colleagues... their associates...

And...?

[Undertoad]

If you put noise into Mann's algorithm it still produces a hockey stick graph. This is Academia saying he didn't do it on purpose and there were no emails found that can prove he did. He's allowed to be wrong, just not on purpose.

[classicman]

As the once almighty Pie put it ...

http://www.newsweek.com/blogs

there's your problem.

[Happy Monkey]

It might be on Newsweek, but it is about the Times' retraction.

[classicman]

I was being snarky - but I also agree with bruce in post #647.

They were basically cleared by their own. Color me unimpressed.

[classicman]

Climate change: a collective flight from reality

Climate change isn't a threat. CO2 isn't a significant factor. But the action we're proposing to take on climate mitigation will devastate our Western economies and impoverish a whole generation.

Over the last hundred years, mean global temperatures have increased by 0.7 of a degree Centigrade. That's all. The whole climate scare is all about a fraction of a degree. According to Professor Phil Jones of the infamous Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, there has been no significant warming for the last 15 years.

And the slight warming we have seen is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term natural climate cycles. We had the Roman Optimum (warm); the Dark Ages (cool); the Medieval Warm Period; and the Little Ice Age (when they had ice-fairs on the River Thames in London). Over the last couple of centuries, we've been moving into what seems to be a new 21st Century Optimum. It's rightly called an "Optimum." Generally speaking, human societies do better in warmer weather.

When I raised this with the European Commission, they told me that recent changes were so sharp and rapid that they must be man-made. But 12,000 years ago in the Younger Dryas cold climate period, at the beginning of the current Interglacial, we saw temperature change at 10 times that rate. And there wasn't an SUV to be seen.

When I was at Cambridge in the 1960s, everyone knew that climate was cyclical and was driven largely by astronomical cycles. And there is good evidence that recent decades have also seen warming on Mars and elsewhere in the solar system - pointing to a solar cause.

But the Warmists have the bizarre idea that only CO2 matters. Certainly CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but it's not even the most important one. That's water vapor, and there's nothing we can do about it (as long as the wind blows over the ocean).

I'm horrified that the Environmental Protection Agency has declared CO2 a pollutant. They might as well declare oxygen a pollutant. We are a carbon-based life form, and CO2 is vital to the whole biosphere. Higher levels of atmospheric CO2 drive increased bio-mass formation and improved crop yields.

Al Gore is excited by a correlation between mean temperatures and CO2 levels over the past 600,000 years. He's right about the correlation, but he doesn't mention that the temperature graph leads the CO2 graph by several hundred years. The inescapable conclusion is that temperature drives CO2 - not vice versa.

Over the longer term, the correlation breaks down entirely. Current atmospheric CO2 levels are quite low in geo-historical terms. They have been 10 times as high in the past - and that was during an ice age. There is no tipping point. There is no runaway global warming.

more

I don't know the man, but he seems to make some very good points.

[xoxoxoBruce]

They're good points if they're true and support how you feel on the issue.

The earth and the things living on it change, always have, always will. The whole global warming thing and what's causing it has become so political, I don't believe anybody anymore.

But one thing I do believe, we're polluting this planet at a prodigious rate, and even if science, and it's mother necessity, allow us to survive, it won't be a nice place to live. I live in a rather unique spot in the burbs, that while close to the sprawl, seems almost country. But when I travel a couple miles into Chester or Philly, the blight and trash make me sure I wouldn't enjoy living that way. I find it easy to imagine that blight and trash spreading like a fungus over the entire country.

Yeah I've driven cross country many times, and in the heartland where when your dog runs away you can still see him two days later, it's hard to imagine my fears becoming reality. Remember we thought the oceans were impregnable 60 years ago, too... and we were wrong.

[Happy Monkey]

But the Warmists have the bizarre idea that only CO2 matters.

He seems to have a bizarre idea about what the "Warmists" believe.

[classicman]

Perhaps...
Then again there is this.

[classicman]

Readers of both earlier reports need to know that both institutions receive tens of millions in federal global warming research funding (which can be confirmed by perusing the grant histories of Messrs. Jones or Mann, compiled from public sources, that are available online at freerepublic.com). Any admission of substantial scientific misbehavior would likely result in a significant loss of funding.

It's impossible to find anything wrong if you really aren't looking. In a famous email of May 29, 2008, Phil Jones, director of East Anglia's CRU, wrote to Mr. Mann, under the subject line "IPCC & FOI," "Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith [Briffa] re AR4 [the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report]? Keith will do likewise . . . can you also email Gene [Wahl, an employee of the U.S. Department of Commerce] to do the same . . . We will be getting Caspar [Amman, of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research] to do likewise."

Mr. Jones emailed later that he had "deleted loads of emails" so that anyone who might bring a Freedom of Information Act request would get very little. According to New Scientist writer Fred Pearce, "Russell and his team never asked Jones or his colleagues whether they had actually done this."

The Russell report states that "On the allegation of withholding temperature data, we find that the CRU was not in a position to withhold access to such data." Really? Here's what CRU director Jones wrote to Australian scientist Warrick Hughes in February 2005: "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it[?]"

[classicman]

more food for fodder here ...

A high-level inquiry into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found there was “little evidence” for its claims about global warming.

It also said the panel had emphasised the negative impacts of climate change and made “substantive findings” based on little proof.

The review by the InterAcademy Council (IAC) was launched after the IPCC’s hugely embarrassing 2007 benchmark climate change report, which contained exaggerated and false claims that Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035.

The panel was forced to admit its key claim in support of global warming was lifted from a 1999 magazine article. The report was based on an interview with a little-known Indian scientist who has since said his views were “speculation” and not backed by research.

Independent climate scientist Peter Taylor said last night: “The IPCC’s credibility has been deeply dented and something has to be done. It can’t just be a matter of adjusting the practices. They have got to look at what are the consequences of having got it wrong in terms of what the public think is going on. Admitting that it needs to reform means something has gone wrong and they really do need to look at the science.”

Climate change sceptic David Holland, who challenged leading climate change scientists at the University of East Anglia to disclose their research, said: “The panel is definitely not fit for purpose. What the IAC has said is substantial changes need to be made.”

[spudcon]

I think it's really terrific that in spite of efforts by corporate academia to cover up opposing data, that the truth is finally finding its way into the public eye. If it hadn't been for the internet, the ruling elite in the media would have quashed every attempt at truth.
Oh, and good job Classicman.