Posts Made By: Dave Snope

Well, it looks like somebody has found a paper that defines how temperature station data is 'homogenized', and to nobody's surprise the algorithm makes the past cooler, the present warmer, and smooths out unwanted 'anomalies' like the warm period around 1940. However we don't know if this is actually what is programmed in the computers at NCDC GHCN and CRU, even though their names are all over it, so more on that later.

Let us look at another example.
HCC blog kindly made the effort to download the raw GHCN data for all 88 temperature stations in Siberia. The actual temperature don't look very scary:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Lxqre8hMG3M/Sywk8yHIEGI/AAAAAAAAA9Y/R2s5gdDCZKc/s1600-h/weatherSiberia88stationsGSImgtmp4361.png


Now let's see what happens when they apply their adjustments to 'homogenize' the data before passing it on to all of the famous global warming researches and on to the IPCC. Looks like a 5 degree swing. Yikes, it's runaway global warming! Hurry, move your house inland, stop driving your car, vote for cap-and-trade, and for god's sake get these researchers more money fast!


http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Lxqre8hMG3M/SywjXos5s-I/AAAAAAAAA9A/4emRCUo8xM4/s1600-h/weatherSiberiaAnomaly88foranimation.gif

Hansen and Gavin. They must be feeling like Sisyphus, relentlessly pushing their temperatures up the mountain while physics works against them. Except that they cheat. And Hansen predicted this. He's like Nostradamus, I guess.

And they have the GALL to claim that 2009 was the warmest year on record in the southern hemisphere, when Australian and New Zealand temperature records show it COOLING.

And the satellite temperature records have 2009 at the 15th coolest.

If people still believe these frauds at NASA GISS, they are simply Believers, because they are no longer using facts and data. I understand believing them 10 years ago, and even 5 years ago if you weren't watching closely. But now their credibility is at the same level as the negative weights that they put on older temperature data and claim it "sophisticated".

What the heck is Dave talking about now?

A couple of days ago I got an email from Va about the meteor that hit the doctor's house, from someone familiar with the event. So I'm alert to news of that story.

Then today I read this:


Lindley Johnson, NASA's manager of the Near-Earth Objects program, has said that NASA needs up to $1 billion in additional funding over the next 15 years in order to meet its goal of finding all nearby asteroids that could threaten Earth.

On Monday, a small, half-pound meteorite crashed through the roof of a doctor's office in Virginia, punched through a wall and upper floor before slamming into pieces when it hit a concrete floor at a speed that may have hit 200 mph. No injuries were reported, but the doctor's office was populated at the time.

According to the report, current long-term projections estimate that there could be up to 100 fatalities a year caused by space rock impacts, though admittedly the chances of such rare hits are remote.

http://www.space.com/news/space-rock-earth-threat-100122.html

Now to me that sounds exactly like NASA GISS and global warming. They made outrageous and unfounded projections of future calamities, with absolutely no historical basis, and ask for $1 Billion Dollars to study it even though they admit that man cannot do anything to stop it.

Really now, 100 people per year??? That's a helluva hockey stick curve! I'd love to see the filter weights in that simulation. I wonder if it's peer reviewed by his pals? How long before the UN builds a bureaucracy around this one?

Don't get me wrong: I think it's a great idea to study and catalog asteroids and I've worked on a telescope system for that purpose. Knowledge is power in this as it is in climate research. Just don't make sh!t up.

From the Daily Mail

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’

Chilling error: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change wrongly asserted that glaciers in the Himalayas would melt by 2035

Dr Lal’s admission will only add to the mounting furore over the melting glaciers assertion, which the IPCC was last week forced to withdraw because it has no scientific foundation.

According to the IPCC’s statement of principles, its role is ‘to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis, scientific, technical and socio-economic information – IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy’.

The claim that Himalayan glaciers are set to disappear by 2035 rests on two 1999 magazine interviews with glaciologist Syed Hasnain, which were then recycled without any further investigation in a 2005 report by the environmental campaign group WWF.

It was this report that Dr Lal and his team cited as their source.

The WWF article also contained a basic error in its arithmetic. A claim that one glacier was retreating at the alarming rate of 134 metres a year should in fact have said 23 metres – the authors had divided the total loss measured over 121 years by 21, not 121.

Last Friday, the WWF website posted a humiliating statement recognising the claim as ‘unsound’, and saying it ‘regrets any confusion caused’.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/23/breaking-news-scientist-admits-ipcc-used-fake-data-to-pressure-policy-makers/#more-15589

The Nobel prize winning IPCC AR4 is full of garbage. So is the Nobel committee. Not a surprise from a publication who's board member once said that "this is about leveling the playing field". Well, this really isn't worse than legitimate scientists adjusting all the temperature data or basing tree ring temperature proxy data on one cherry-picked tree. After all, the IPCC are politicians, you expect them to lie.

Now people are seriously looking at AR4 with a critical eye and finding things everywhere.

Remember our friends at World Wildlife Fund? Those schlockmeisters that produced the video of planes flying into New York with explicit comparisons to 9/11?

Well it turns out that the WWF is cited all over the IPCC AR4 report, and as you know, WWF does not produce peer reviewed science, they produce opinion papers in line with their vision. Yet IPCC’s rules are such that they are supposed to rely on peer reviewed science only. It appears they’ve violated that rule dozens of times, all under Pachauri’s watch.

A new posting authored by Donna Laframboise, the creator of NOconsensus.org (Toronto, Canada) shows what one can find in just one day of looking.

List follows at:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/24/the-scandal-deepens-ipcc-ar4-riddled-with-non-peer-reviewed-wwf-papers/#more-15636

Aleo and Watts have published a compendium on the state of surface temperature records, including explanations of the homogenization process and how it pollutes good data with bad, and how it biases and exaggerates the perception that the earth is getting warmer. Homogenizing the good data with the bad only serves to ruin the good data. The idea that this just fixes (eg cools) the bad data is scientifically unsound reasoning. The paper also explains why the NOAA's defense of this process does not hold water.

Here is the 111 page paper.
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/surface_temp.pdf

Here is the summary for those short on time, but I urge to read the paper:

1. Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and unidirectionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant “global warming” in the 20th century.
2. All terrestrial surface-temperature databases exhibit very serious problems that render them useless for determining accurate long-term temperature trends.
3. All of the problems have skewed the data so as greatly to overstate observed warming both regionally and globally.
4. Global terrestrial temperature data are gravely compromised because more than three-quarters of the 6,000 stations that once existed are no longer reporting.
5. There has been a severe bias towards removing higher-altitude, higher-latitude, and rural stations, leading to a further serious overstatement of warming.
6. Contamination by urbanization, changes in land use, improper siting, and inadequately-calibrated instrument upgrades further overstates warming.
7. Numerous peer-reviewed papers in recent years have shown the overstatement of observed longer term warming is 30-50% from heat-island contamination alone.
8. Cherry-picking of observing sites combined with interpolation to vacant data grids may make heat-island bias greater than 50% of 20th-century warming.
9. In the oceans, data are missing and uncertainties are substantial. Comprehensive coverage has only been available since 2003, and shows no warming.
10. Satellite temperature monitoring has provided an alternative to terrestrial stations in compiling the global lower-troposphere temperature record. Their findings are increasingly diverging from the station-based constructions in a manner consistent with evidence of a warm bias in the surface temperature record.
11. NOAA and NASA, along with CRU, were the driving forces behind the systematic hyping of 20th-century “global warming”.
12. Changes have been made to alter the historical record to mask cyclical changes that could be readily explained by natural factors like multidecadal ocean and solar changes.
13. Global terrestrial data bases are seriously flawed and can no longer be trusted to assess climate trends or VALIDATE model forecasts.
14. An inclusive external assessment is essential of the surface temperature record of CRU, GISS and NCDC “chaired and paneled by mutually agreed to climate scientists who do not have a vested interest in the outcome of the evaluations.”
15. Reliance on the global data by both the UNIPCC and the US GCRP/CCSP also requires a full investigation and audit.

Oh Brother:

Considered the climate Bible by governments around the world, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is meant to be a scientific analysis of the most authoritative research.

Instead, it references literature generated by Greenpeace – an organization known more for headline-grabbing publicity stunts than sober-minded analysis. (Eight IPCC-cited Greenpeace publications are listed at the bottom of this post.)

In one section of this Nobel-winning report, climate change is linked to coral reef degradation. The sole source for this claim? A Greenpeace report titled “Pacific in Peril” (see Hoegh-Guldberg below). Here the report relies on a Greenpeace document to establish the lower-end of an estimate involving solar power plants (Aringhoff).

When discussing solar energy elsewhere, the report references two Greenpeace documents in one sentence. Here it uses a Greenpeace paper as its sole means of documenting where the "main wind-energy investments" are located globally (Wind).

On this page, the report notes that while some research suggests wind power will generate between three and five percent of global electricity by 2030, a more optimistic forecast places this number at 29%. The six times more favorable estimate comes from GWEC, 2006 - a 60-page, photo-rich report co-authored by Greenpeace and the Global Wind Energy Council. (The latter describes itself as "the global wind industry trade association.") In fairness to the IPCC, even it rejected Greenpeace's numbers, choosing instead to use 7% in its analysis.

But the fact that this report relies on Greenpeace-generated copy isn't the only reason for concern. Here is an IPCC graphic:


The idea that 2,500 "scientific expert reviewers" provided feedback about the report during its pre-publication phase sounds awesome. But many of those people aren't scientists at all. They're professional activists in the employ of environmental organizations.

The expert reviewers who had input into just one portion (Working Group III) of the IPCC report are listed in this 8-page PDF. They include three Greenpeace employees, two Friends of the Earth representatives, two Climate Action Network reps, and a person each from activist organizations WWF International, Environmental Defense, and the David Suzuki Foundation.

http://nofrakkingconsensus.blogspot.com/2010/01/greenpeace-and-nobel-winning-climate_28.html

H/T WUWT

This is climate-related, but probably deserves to fall under the humor category. This is what you can learn on national television in Venezuela:

Jan. 31 - Venezuela's new Environment Minister made his public debut on Sunday, during Chávez's weekly TV program "Aló Presidente," and he immediately showed why he was chosen for the post: He is not only ignorant but also stupid.

The new minister, Alejandro Hitcher, told Chávez that the weather pattern known as El Niño has to have a different name, because "El Niño" was "chosen by the imperialists" to hide its real causes.

According to Hitcher, El Niño should be called "El Cope" for "Calentamiento del Oceano Pacífico Ecuatorial" (Warming of the Equatorial Pacific Ocean).

What this vegetable, who is now Venezuela's Environment Minister, doesn't know is that the name "El Niño" was not an imperialist invention.

The name was chosen by the fishermen of Puerto Paita in Peru, because this weather phenomenon is usually noticed around Christmas with a warming of the Pacific Ocean, near South America.

As a result, the Peruvian fishermen named it "El Niño" for Baby Jesus. (Niño means boy in Spanish)

Also, this weather pattern is not new, it has been occurring for close to 11,000 years, long before the "yankee imperialists" became an excuse for inept dictators and stupid environment ministers.

if someone tells Hitcher where the name came from, I would not be surprised if he says that George W. Bush's great-great-grandfather was a Peruvian fisherman.

No wonder these people destroy everything that they touch.

http://www.therealcuba.com/

Just once, I'd like to see an IPCC error that doesn't err on the side of exaggerating fears of global warming. They're not in a rush to fix it, though. But they move like greased lighting when they rush to include poorly sourced data which increases fear in ordinary people.

The Netherlands has asked the UN climate change panel to explain an inaccurate claim in a landmark 2007 report that more than half the country was below sea level, the Dutch government said Friday.

According to the Dutch authorities, only 26 percent of the country is below sea level, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will be asked to account for its figures, environment ministry spokesman Trimo Vallaart told AFP.

The incident could cause further embarrassment for the IPCC, which recently admitted a claim in the same report that global warming could melt Himalayan glaciers by 2035 was wrong.

IPCC experts calculated that 55 percent of the Netherlands was below sea level by adding the area below sea level -- 26 percent -- to the area threatened by river flooding -- 29 percent -- Vallaart said.

"They should have been clearer," Vallaart said, adding that the Dutch office for environmental planning, an IPCC partner, had exact figures.

Correcting the error had been "on the agenda several times" but had never actually happened, Vallaart said.

While perusing some of the review comments to the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report, I came across the contributions of Andrew Lacis, a colleague of James Hansen's at GISS. Lacis's is not a name I've come across before but some of what he has to say about Chapter 9 of the IPCC's report is simply breathtaking.

Chapter 9 is possibly the most important one in the whole IPCC report - it's the one where they decide that global warming is manmade. This is the one where the headlines are made.

Remember, this guy is mainstream, not a sceptic, and you may need to remind yourself of that fact several times as you read through his comment on the executive summary of the chapter:

There is no scientific merit to be found in the Executive Summary. The presentation sounds like something put together by Greenpeace activists and their legal department. The points being made are made arbitrarily with legal sounding caveats without having established any foundation or basis in fact. The Executive Summary seems to be a political statement that is only designed to annoy greenhouse skeptics. Wasn't the IPCC Assessment Report intended to be a scientific document that would merit solid backing from the climate science community - instead of forcing many climate scientists into having to agree with greenhouse skeptic criticisms that this is indeed a report with a clear and obvious political agenda. Attribution can not happen until understanding has been clearly demonstrated. Once the facts of climate change have been established and understood, attribution will become self-evident to all. The Executive Summary as it stands is beyond redemption and should simply be deleted.

I'm speechless. The chapter authors, however weren't. This was their reply (all of it):

Rejected. [Executive Summary] summarizes Ch 9, which is based on the peer reviewed literature.

Simply astonishing. This is a consensus?

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2010/2/9/hansens-colleague-eviscerates-ar4-chapter-9.html