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Title: The Dog Ate Global Warming
Source:
National Review Online
URL Source: http://article.nationalreview.com/? ... EyMmRhZjU3ZmYzODI5MGY4ZWI5OWM=
Published: Sep 23, 2009
Author: Patrick J. Michaels
Post Date: 2009-09-24 16:09:09 by sourcery
Ping List: *Agriculture-Environment* Subscribe to *Agriculture-Environment*
Keywords: None
Views: 131
Comments: 12
Imagine if there were no reliable records of global surface temperature. Raucous policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have no scientific basis, Al Gore would at this point be little more than a historical footnote, and President Obama would not be spending this U.N. session talking up a (likely unattainable) international climate deal in Copenhagen in December. Steel yourself for the new reality, because the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared. Or so it seems. Apparently, they were either lost or purged from some discarded computer. Only a very few people know what really happened, and they aren't talking much. And what little they are saying makes no sense. In the early 1980s, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, scientists at the United Kingdom's University of East Anglia established the Climate Research Unit (CRU) to produce the world's first comprehensive history of surface temperature. It's known in the trade as the "Jones and Wigley" record for its authors, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley, and it served as the primary reference standard for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) until 2007. It was this record that prompted the IPCC to claim a "discernible human influence on global climate." Putting together such a record isn't at all easy. Weather stations weren't really designed to monitor global climate. Long-standing ones were usually established at points of commerce, which tend to grow into cities that induce spurious warming trends in their records. Trees grow up around thermometers and lower the afternoon temperature. Further, as documented by the University of Colorado's Roger Pielke Sr., many of the stations themselves are placed in locations, such as in parking lots or near heat vents, where artificially high temperatures are bound to be recorded. So the weather data that go into the historical climate records that are required to verify models of global warming aren't the original records at all. Jones and Wigley, however, weren't specific about what was done to which station in order to produce their record, which, according to the IPCC, showed a warming of 0.6° +/51; 0.2°C in the 20th century. Now begins the fun. Warwick Hughes, an Australian scientist, wondered where that "+/51;" came from, so he politely wrote Phil Jones in early 2005, asking for the original data. Jones's response to a fellow scientist attempting to replicate his work was, "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?" Reread that statement, for it is breathtaking in its anti-scientific thrust. In fact, the entire purpose of replication is to "try and find something wrong." The ultimate objective of science is to do things so well that, indeed, nothing is wrong. Then the story changed. In June 2009, Georgia Tech's Peter Webster told Canadian researcher Stephen McIntyre that he had requested raw data, and Jones freely gave it to him. So McIntyre promptly filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the same data. Despite having been invited by the National Academy of Sciences to present his analyses of millennial temperatures, McIntyre was told that he couldn't have the data because he wasn't an "academic." So his colleague Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph, asked for the data. He was turned down, too. Faced with a growing number of such requests, Jones refused them all, saying that there were "confidentiality" agreements regarding the data between CRU and nations that supplied the data. McIntyre's blog readers then requested those agreements, country by country, but only a handful turned out to exist, mainly from Third World countries and written in very vague language. It's worth noting that McKitrick and I had published papers demonstrating that the quality of land-based records is so poor that the warming trend estimated since 1979 (the first year for which we could compare those records to independent data from satellites) may have been overestimated by 50 percent. Webster, who received the CRU data, published studies linking changes in hurricane patterns to warming (while others have found otherwise). Enter the dog that ate global warming. Roger Pielke Jr., an esteemed professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, then requested the raw data from Jones. Jones responded: The statement about "data storage" is balderdash. They got the records from somewhere. The files went onto a computer. All of the original data could easily fit on the 9-inch tape drives common in the mid-1980s. I had all of the world's surface barometric pressure data on one such tape in 1979. If we are to believe Jones's note to the younger Pielke, CRU adjusted the original data and then lost or destroyed them over twenty years ago. The letter to Warwick Hughes may have been an outright lie. After all, Peter Webster received some of the data this year. So the question remains: What was destroyed or lost, when was it destroyed or lost, and why? All of this is much more than an academic spat. It now appears likely that the U.S. Senate will drop cap-and-trade climate legislation from its docket this fall--whereupon the Obama Environmental Protection Agency is going to step in and issue regulations on carbon-dioxide emissions. Unlike a law, which can't be challenged on a scientific basis, a regulation can. If there are no data, there's no science. U.S. taxpayers deserve to know the answer to the question posed above.
Since the 1980s, we have merged the data we have received into existing series or begun new ones, so it is impossible to say if all stations within a particular country or if all of an individual record should be freely available. Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e., quality controlled and homogenized) data.
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#1. To: sourcery, *Agriculture-Environment*, former lurker, buckeroo (#0)
The "discernible human influence" on global climate was assumed and built into the IPCC charter. I have the distinct benefit of talking to Warwick Hughes personally. He is one of the many scientists with which I get to correspond. Here is his web site: That, alone, puts the lie to any pretensions to disinterested climate science. Jones will pass away some day, and science will advance.
When a whole society keeps saying "It's not about race," the person who BELIEVES that will be seen as an idiot. Even by children. Even by ILLITERATE children.
There are many recent discovered data points using all new technical approaches that undermine your statement. Cases in point demonstrate the overall change of CO2 concentrations from Arctic and Antarctic ice samples are rising at an unprecedented rate compared to pre-human geological periods. And there are other data collection points located around the world operated by others than whom signed the IPCC charter giving a sense of objective understanding. But these hard and factual scientific data points are only clues about a REAL phenomena occurring around the world irrespective of the cause or major influence. The Greenhouse gas model is real. And CO2 concentrations are increasing.
“Gold is the money of kings; silver is the money of gentlemen; barter is the money of peasants; but debt is the money of slaves.”
Put in a historical context this is not necessarily a bad thing.
Like HELL it is, "not necessarily a bad thing." It is death for all life as we know it.
“Gold is the money of kings; silver is the money of gentlemen; barter is the money of peasants; but debt is the money of slaves.”
Life has managed so far.
Not at the rate of increase of CO2 emissions that are known today. We are operating in unchartered waters.
“Gold is the money of kings; silver is the money of gentlemen; barter is the money of peasants; but debt is the money of slaves.”
There's nothing extraordinary about CO2 level today compared to the peaks experienced in recent times, if by recent times you're talking about hundreds of thousands of years. (The ice core data also suggests that temperature drives CO2 concentrations, and not the other way around.) www.ianschumacher.com/global_warming.html If you go way back, say beyond the Miocene, and get into really geologic frames of reference, you find that CO2 concentrations were much, much higher, and flora and fauna did quite well, as an abundance of fossil evidence reveals.
I hope you don't need to be put on suicide watch.
If we were experiencing goober warming at least the water would be warm ... but it's not and you're sooo fucking goofy !!! Good for a laugh though !!!
The U.S. Govt is a tyrannical butcher; U.S. taxpayers are accomplices to international murder and mayhem. If you satisfy your fears by bowing to this butcher, you forfeit your humanity and possibly your soul.
Chasing a More Accurate Global Century Scale Temperature Trend
It was this record that prompted the IPCC to claim a "discernible human influence on global climate."
"If, from the more wretched parts of the old world, we look at those which are in an advanced stage of improvement, we still find the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry, and grasping the spoil of the multitude. Invention is continually exercised, to furnish new pretenses for revenues and taxation. It watches prosperity as its prey and permits none to escape without tribute." --Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, 1791
#2. To: sourcery (#0)
Jones's response to a fellow scientist attempting to replicate his work was, "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?"
#3. To: farmfriend, sourcery (#1)
The "discernible human influence" on global climate was assumed and built into the IPCC charter.
#4. To: buckeroo (#3)
And CO2 concentrations are increasing.
"If, from the more wretched parts of the old world, we look at those which are in an advanced stage of improvement, we still find the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry, and grasping the spoil of the multitude. Invention is continually exercised, to furnish new pretenses for revenues and taxation. It watches prosperity as its prey and permits none to escape without tribute." --Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, 1791
#5. To: farmfriend (#4)
#6. To: buckeroo (#5)
It is death for all life as we know it.
"If, from the more wretched parts of the old world, we look at those which are in an advanced stage of improvement, we still find the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry, and grasping the spoil of the multitude. Invention is continually exercised, to furnish new pretenses for revenues and taxation. It watches prosperity as its prey and permits none to escape without tribute." --Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, 1791
#7. To: farmfriend (#6)
#8. To: buckeroo (#7)
Not at the rate of increase of CO2 emissions that are known today. We are operating in unchartered waters.
#9. To: buckeroo (#5)
Like HELL it is, "not necessarily a bad thing." It is death for all life as we know it.
#10. To: buckeroo (#7)
Not at the rate of increase of CO2 emissions that are known today. We are operating in unchartered waters.
#11. To: buckeroo, farmfriend (#3)
 | "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." -- C. S. Lewis |
#12. To: sourcery (#11)
Excellent link.
"If, from the more wretched parts of the old world, we look at those which are in an advanced stage of improvement, we still find the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry, and grasping the spoil of the multitude. Invention is continually exercised, to furnish new pretenses for revenues and taxation. It watches prosperity as its prey and permits none to escape without tribute." --Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, 1791
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