OgBlog.net

WHAT UNDER THE SUN IS “CLIMATEGATE”? UPDATED, UPDATED AGAIN!

I’ve posted several times about Global Warming (click on Environment in the list to the left), and will do so again. But a major development occurred a couple of weeks ago, and the major news outlets in the United States are not doing a very good job of informing the public about it (surprise, suprise!)

Some background: I have long been a skeptic of Al Gore’s campaign to scare us into doing economically damaging things in order to avoid the CLIMATE CATASTROPHE that he INSISTS IS IMMINENT.
.
.

.
.
Part of my skepticism is that the actual source of heat for our earth, the sun, is pretty much being ignored….while great emphasis is placed on a minor fraction of the gases known to be trapping heat, a service that is preventing us from turning into a giant ice-ball. And that fraction is carbon dioxide, a gas essential to plant growth, that just happens(?) to be produced by automobiles, power plants, and other things that Al has been preaching against for decades. The fact that Mr. Gore is getting immensely wealthy off his campaign doesn’t increase my tendency to trust him.

HERE IS THE BEST SUMMARY currently available of what has happened, and what it may mean. Just to whet your appetite, I’ll give you some samples:

...And now the climate campaign is having its Emperor’s New Clothes moment.

In mid-November a large cache of emails and technical documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Britain were made available on a number of Internet file-servers for download by the public—either the work of a hacker or a leak from a whistleblower on the inside. The emails—more than 1,000 of them—reveal a small cabal of scientists who, in the words of MIT’s Michael Schrage, engaged in “malice, mischief and Machiavellian maneuverings.” In an ironic twist, one of the frequent correspondents in this long e‑trail (University of Arizona scientist Jonathan Overpeck) warned several of his colleagues in September, “Please write all emails as though they will be made public.” Small wonder why. It’s being called Climategate, but more than one wit is calling them “the CRUtape Letters.”

The emails do not in and of themselves reveal that catastrophic climate change scenarios are a hoax or without any foundation. What they reveal is something problematic for the scientific community as a whole, namely, the tendency of scientists to cross the line from being disinterested investigators after the truth to advocates for a preconceived conclusion about the issues at hand. In the understatement of the year, CRU’s Phil Jones, one of the principal figures in the controversy, admitted the emails “do not read well.” Jones is the author of the most widely cited leaked e‑missive, telling colleagues in 1999 that he had used “Mike’s Nature [magazine] trick” to “hide the decline” that inconveniently shows up after 1960 in one set of temperature records. But he insists that the full context of CRU’s work shows this to have been just a misleading figure of speech. Reading through the entire archive of emails, however, provides no such reassurance; to the contrary, dozens of other messages, while less blatant than “hide the decline,” expose scandalously unprofessional behavior. There were ongoing efforts to rig and manipulate the peer-review process that is critical to vetting manuscripts submitted for publication in scientific journals. Data that should have been made available for inspection by other scientists and outside critics were released only grudgingly, if at all. Perhaps more significant, the email archive also reveals that even inside this small circle of climate scientists—otherwise allied in an effort to whip up a frenzy of international political action to combat global warming—there was considerable disagreement, confusion, doubt, and at times acrimony over the results of their work. In other words, there is far less unanimity or consensus among climate insiders than we have been led to believe.

Such is the volume of material leaked from the CRU that it may be many months before all of its implications for the underlying climate science are fully digested. But a few preliminary conclusions can be reached. First, we still don’t know whether the medieval warm period was comparable to or even much warmer than current temperatures, and we probably never will know with confidence. So the validating or refining of today’s climate models will have to go forward without this piece of the puzzle being filled in. Second, a close reading of the entire email archive allows some distinctions to be drawn among the CRU circle. Michael Mann, Phil Jones, and Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore seem indisputably to be the bad actors (it was Santer who said he was “very tempted” to “beat the crap out of” skeptic Pat Michaels). Others in their circle, such as Keith Briffa, Tom Wigley, and Mike Hulme, appear much more scrupulous and restrained about handling the data, uncertainties, and conclusions they put into print. Kevin Trenberth, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and key IPCC contributor, comes out somewhere in the middle, writing recently, for example, “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment [since 1998], and it is a travesty that we can’t.” But Jones also suggests in one email that he and Trenberth will help keep contrarian climate research out of the IPCC process “even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

You really do need to READ THE WHOLE THING
.
.
UPDATED:
.
.
Here is a WONDERFUL, STEP-BY-STEP EXPLANATION of Climategate and what it means to us. Plenty of links, in case you get interested in more details.
.
.
Additionally, there’s another piece just out that taught ME a lot - and I’ve been reading about this subject for decades. To get you interested, here is the standard understanding of historic climate -

including a “medieval warm period” (MWP) when temperatures were even higher than today, during which wine grapes were grown in northern England and the Vikings colonized Greenland and raised both crops and livestock successfully. All over Europe during this warm period, prosperity was high, signaled in part by the outburst of cathedral building during that time. The “reconstructed temperatures” used here are derived from interpretations of tree-ring studies, ice cores, etc. because no one was taking measurements with thermometers back then. But the reconstruction is robustly supported by historic records, European place names, etc.

You can see that the MWP was followed by the Little Ice Age (LIA) when temperatures plunged - the Vikings had to leave Greenland and their farms, the Thames River froze over in London, and tremendous hardship was experienced all over Europe. Again, the temperature reconstructions you see are abundantly supported by the historical records, and there was never any controversy over this standard chart…..until recently. The problem is that Al Gore’s Global Warming story attributes the recent warming of our planet - clearly seen in the chart above - in large part to man’s activities, and says that disaster is coming if we don’t stop burning fossil fuels (gas in cars, coal in powerplants, etc.). The standard reconstruction is a problem because it A. shows that the current warming has plenty of precedent, B. the current warming isn’t apparently much of a threat because the polar bears survived the MWP, and C. something OTHER THAN human beings drive temperatures really high and then low, because our ancestors weren’t doing ANY of the things that are alleged to be driving the current warming. So, some of the Climategate scientists came up with the following:

Notice something interesting…..the MWP and the LIA are just plain GONE….leaving the recent (since 1850) rise in temperatures without any historic precedent. How did they get this? And why? To understand, you need to read a BLOCKBUSTER EXPLANATION OF “MICHAEL’S TRICK” TO “HIDE THE DECLINE”, two terms from the Climategate e-mails that have become infamous and the subject of much controversy. From the American Thinker article:
.

As you can see, the post-LIA warming that began around 1850 is neither unprecedented nor spectacular. And certainly not worth rewiring the economic circuitry of the planet over.

And the CRU/IPCC reconstructions have been counterfeited for the express purpose of hiding that very fact.

After all, the stakes are enormous – perhaps trillions of dollars and unquestionably every American’s personal liberties. Tomorrow, over 20,000 delegates from 193 nations will gather in Copenhagen to craft an agreement which would not only force American power consumption to levels equal to those of about 1910, but would also have us pay reparations for an imaginary “climate debt” we’ve accumulated by building the world’s greatest economy of all time. That debt is based on the amount of CO2 our financial growth has purportedly pumped into the atmosphere, which, according to the conclusions of the IPCC, based largely upon reports from the CRU, has selfishly imperiled the planet by inducing climate change.

.
.
Even if you’ve been following this stuff pretty carefully, I’m betting this will be new to you—it was to me, and I’ve been extremely interested and followed it closely. In fact, I’m going back to read it AGAIN. I suggest that YOU DO THE SAME
.
.
UPDATED AGAIN!
.
For just one example of how “the data” may be fooling us, check out THIS YOU-TUBE VIDEO, that is a model of concision and clarity on the effect of urban heat islands…..

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 12/06 at 02:22 AM

About

Categories

Monthly Archives

Search

Join Og's Mailing List

OgBlog.net

OgBlog.net

WHAT UNDER THE SUN IS “CLIMATEGATE”? UPDATED, UPDATED AGAIN!

Reading

Web resources

Friends