Archives for September 18, 2007

It was reported on BBC Radio 2 News today that the UK’s Martin Parry, co-chair of the IPCC’s working group II on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability, has stated that the EU has ‘little chance’ of limiting global temperatures to a rise of 2C, due to the fact that global CO2 emissions are rising as though the Kyoto Protocol ‘never happened.’ He claims this means that millions more people are at risk from flood, drought and famine, although he acknowledges the difficulties with accurate prediction of future climate change.

Full Judge’s opinion here.

A landmark decision concerning car companies and global warming was handed down by a federal judge in California on Monday. Yet, most people are likely not going to hear about it, because the ruling goes counter to the media’s agenda.

As reported by the Associated Press : “District Judge Martin Jenkins in San Francisco handed California Attorney General Jerry Brown’s environmental crusade a stinging rebuke when he ruled that it [sic] impossible to determine to what extent automakers are responsible for global-warming damages in California.”

How delicious. But, there was much more about this decision the press will likely keep from people outside of California:

“The court is left without guidance in determining what is an unreasonable contribution to the sum of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere, or in determining who should bear the costs associated with global climate change that admittedly result from multiple sources around the globe,” Jenkins write.

The judge also ruled that keeping the lawsuit alive would threaten the country’s foreign policy position.

[…]

“President George W. Bush opposes the protocol because it exempts developing nations who are major emitters, fails to address two major pollutants, and would have a negative economic impact on the United States,” Jenkins wrote in his 24-page decision. To rule in favor of California would undermine the administration’s position, Jenkins said.

Jenkins said it’s up to lawmakers, rather than judges, to determine how responsible automakers are for global warming problems.

Jenkins ruled that a court “injecting itself into the global warming thicket at this juncture would require an initial policy determination of the type reserved for the political branches of government.”

Full blog by Noel Sheppard at Newsbusters is here.

Since NASA’s James Hansen finally released computer codes related to how climate data are collected and adjusted, anthropogenic global warming skeptics around the world have been waiting to see what a scientific examination of this information would produce.

On Monday, Canada’s Steve McIntyre, who himself debunked Michael Mann’s ridiculous “Hockey Stick” theory as well as identified Hansen’s Y2K bug, released information identifying that Hansen recently made additional changes to climate data akin to how companies like Enron used creative accounting to exaggerate earnings and defraud investors.

As published at Climate Audit moments ago (emphasis added, h/t Anthony Watts):

Shortly after, NASA published their source code on Sept 7, we started noticing puzzling discrepancies in the new data set. […]

By this time, we’d figured out exactly what Hansen had done: they’d switched from using the SHAP version – which had been what they’d used for the past decade or so – to the FILNET version. The impact at Detroit Lakes was relatively large – which was why we’d noticed it, but in the network as a whole the impact of the change was to increase the trend slightly – enough obviously to make a difference between 1934 and 1998 – even though this supposedly was of no interest to anyone.

In very simplistic terms, SHAP and FILNET are computer programs used by climatologists to assist in the collation and interpretation of climate data. Each program does so differently, and, therefore, yields different final results.

As such, by suddenly switching from SHAP – which NASA had been using for decades – to FILNET, NASA was able to once again claim that 1998 and 1934 are now tied for the warmest years on record in the U.S. This despite Hansen’s claim in August that climate record changes precipitated by McIntyre’s Y2K bug find were irrelevant.

As McIntyre pointed out, what’s now happening at NASA is akin to companies changing from Generally Accepting Accounting Principles (GAAP) to what produced a lot of faulty earnings in the late ’90s and early ’00s, Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization (EBITDA):

Read the rest of the blog post here http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2007/09/17/nasa-s-hansen-playing-enron-accounting-games-climate-data

I considered the relation between carbon dioxide (CO2) and the oceans as a surface or interface phenomena. The oceans are remarkably shallow in relation to the lateral extent. Similarly the atmosphere is remarkably thin.