Cohenite

ONE week ago the Sydney Morning Herald published an opinion piece by Michael Raupach from CSIRO and fourteen other Australian scientists making four key claims to support the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).  A regular reader and commentator at this weblog, Cohenite, explains that the claims are not supported by the available evidence: 

1. The world is warming

The first conclusion is that the world has been warming since 1850. This is generally correct but what Professor Raupach et al. don’t mention is the warming follows a particularly cold period called the Little Ice Age [LIA] which ended in 1850. The correlation of a decline in solar activity with the LIA is well established with various measures of solar activity showing an increase at the same time as the world warmed after 1850.

Professor Raupach et al. say that most of the warming since 1850 has happened since 1950. This is incorrect. The temperature data from both the official English agency, HADCRUT, and the land-based American temperature agency, NASAGISS, show an increase in temperature from 1910 to 1944 which is equivalent to the temperature increase from 1976 to 1998. [Read more…] about Climate Change Not Poised to Feed on Itself

SINCE Copenhagen the intensity of doom and gloom [D&G] has been ratcheted up with such anthropogenic global warming luminaries as Will Steffan and David Karoly declaring their previous predictions not dire enough and so have been superseded by much worse predictions.

Jay Leno has a good response to this;
“According to a new U.N. report, the global warming outlook is much worse than originally predicted. Which is pretty bad when they originally predicted it would destroy the planet.”

The question is, is there any evidence to support the worsening D&G?

Professor Chris Field was recently reported on the ABC doing D&G about an increase in fossil fuel emissions, but this quickly died when the penny dropped that the main increase in emissions was coming from China and India, not to mention the fact that temperature was declining concurrently.

With increased emissions insufficient to sustain the D&G could the peer-reviewed literature provide justification? Peer-review is the life-blood of AGW and lo-and-behold it was apparent that the D&G was backed up by several new and recycled papers. 10 of these papers which offer ‘evidence’ for the D&G are discussed. All of them exhibit the usual defects of pro-AGW papers; reliance on modeling regardless of contradictory or non-existent ‘real-world’ data.

[Read more…] about More Worst AGW Papers: A Note from Cohenite

We’ve had the ten worst climate research papers, the ten worst blog posts, and now Cohenite has decided on ten of the worst man-made disasters.  I can’t say I agree with all his choices for the list, but we are all entitled to our own opinions.  So, here goes from Cohenite, with a preamble about global warming and western society:

The anthropogenic global warming (AGW) paradigm is that interference with nature will inevitably produce disastrous results.

Danish Statistician Bjorn Lomborg is castigated for even suggesting there has been progress in humanity’s living conditions and the destruction of nature to achieve this, on balance has been worthwhile.

[Read more…] about Ten Worst Man-Made Disasters