Climate & Climate Change

Channel 4 misrepresented some of the world’s leading climate scientists in a controversial documentary that claimed global warming was a conspiracy and a fraud, the UK’s media regulator will rule next week.

But it is understood that Channel 4 will still claim victory because the ultimate verdict on a separate complaint about accuracy, which contained 131 specific points and ran to 270 pages, will find that it did not breach the regulator’s broadcasting code and did not materially mislead viewers.

The Guardian: Channel 4 to be censured over controversial climate film. Watchdog finds documentary was unfair to scientists but did not mislead viewers

Ofcom will say: “Channel 4 unfairly attributed to the former chief scientist, David King, comments he had not made and criticized him for them and also failed to provide him an opportunity to reply”.In the program, the concluding voice over from the climate change skeptic Fred Singer claimed “the chief scientist of the UK” was “telling people that by the end of the century, the only habitable place on Earth will be the Antarctic and humanity may survive thanks to some breeding couples who moved to the Antarctic … it would be hilarious if it weren’t so sad”.King has never made such a statement and it is believed Singer confused his views with those of the contrarian scientist James Lovelock.

Related story from The Indpendent on Sunday, 2nd May 2004: Why Antarctica will soon be the only place to live – literally

“Antarctica is likely to be the world’s only habitable continent by the end of this century if global warming remains unchecked, the Government’s chief scientist, Professor Sir David King, said last week.”

“There has not been a public debate about the causes of global warming and most of the public and our decision makers are not aware of the most basic salient facts:

1. The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.

Each possible cause of global warming has a different pattern of where in the planet the warming occurs first and the most. The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics. We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes: weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hot spot. Whatsoever…

2. There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None. There is plenty of evidence that global warming has occurred, and theory suggests that carbon emissions should raise temperatures (though by how much is hotly disputed) but there are no observations by anyone that implicate carbon emissions as a significant cause of the recent global warming.

3. The satellites that measure the world’s temperature all say that the warming trend ended in 2001, and that the temperature has dropped about 0.6C in the past year (to the temperature of 1980). Land-based temperature readings are corrupted by the “urban heat island” effect: urban areas encroaching on thermometer stations warm the micro-climate around the thermometer, due to vegetation changes, concrete, cars, houses. Satellite data is the only temperature data we can trust, but it only goes back to 1979. NASA reports only land-based data, and reports a modest warming trend and recent cooling. The other three global temperature records use a mix of satellite and land measurements, or satellite only, and they all show no warming since 2001 and a recent cooling.

4. The new ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says something important about which was cause and which was effect.

None of these points are controversial. The alarmist scientists agree with them, though they would dispute their relevance.”

Read more from David Evans in the article ‘No Smoking Hot Spot’ first published in The Australian here on July 18.

It is summer in the northern hemisphere and given the Americans and Europeans are pretty obsessed with temperatures records at the moment, and some with a fear that the Arctic might go ice free this northern summer, it was with some anticipation that the June 2008 temperature records were released.

According to the US National Climatic Data Centre (NCDC) the Northern Hemisphere Arctic sea ice extent for June 2008 ranked third lowest for June since records began in 1979 while Southern Hemisphere Antarctic sea ice extent for June 2008 was above the 1979-2000 mean, ranking as the second largest June extent.

So there is still ice in the Arctic and more ice than usual in the Antarctic.

As regards the US, according to the NCDC, June 2008 was the 27th warmest June based on records dating back to 1895. Globally though June 2008 ranked eighth warmest for June since worldwide records began in 1880.

But according to Joe D’Aleo a meteorologist with a blog: Don’t believe a word of it.

Joe prefers the NASA satellite data compiled by Roy Spencer at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and it shows June 2008 was the 22nd warmest in its 30 years of records, Figure 1. According to Joe, this satellite data indicated the globe was a full 1.1F degrees colder than the NCDC guesstimate.

Figure 1. The NASA MSU June Temperatures since 1979 via Joe D’Aleo.

Joe explains that he prefers the satellite data because: the thermometer global data bases suffer from major station dropout after 1990 (number dropped from 6000 to less than 2000) and a ten fold increase in the number of missing months in the stations that report. Furthermore, there are serious problems with algorithms for assessing whether a station is urban or rural and adjusting for local land use changes. And there are major siting issues. You can find more information here: http://icecap.us/images/uploads/DATA_ISSUES.pdf

Interestingly though, even James Hansen’s monthly data for the last ten years to June 2008, shows some recent cooling and it looks like global temperaturs have plateaued, Figure 2.

Figure 2. The NASA GISS Monthly Mean Surface Temperature Analysis since 1998, (see http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.C.lrg.gif ).

The IPCC is a single-interest organisation, whose charter presumes a widespread human influence on climate, rather than consideration of whether such influence may be negligible or missing altogether. Though the IPCC’s principles also state that a wide range of views is to be sought when selecting lead authors and contributing authors, this rule has been honored more in the breach than in the observance.

More than two-thirds of all authors of chapter 9 of the IPCC’s 2007 climate-science assessment are part of a clique whose members have co-authored papers with each other and, we can surmise, very possibly at times acted as peer-reviewers for each other’s work. Of the 44 contributing authors, more than half have co-authored papers with the lead authors or coordinating lead authors of chapter 9.

It is no surprise, therefore, that the majority of scientists who are skeptical of a human influence on climate significant enough to be damaging to the planet were unrepresented in the authorship of chapter 9. Many of the IPCC authors were climate modelers – or associated with laboratories committed to modeling – unwilling to admit that their models are neither accurate nor complete. Still less do they recognize or admit that modeling a chaotic object whose initial state and evolutionary processes are not known to a sufficient precision has a validation skill not significantly different from zero. In short, it cannot be done and has long been proven impossible. The modelers say that the “consensus” among their models is significant: but it is an artifact of ex-post-facto tuning to replicate historical temperatures, of repeated intercomparison studies, and of the authors’ shared belief in the unrealistically high estimate of climate sensitivity upon which all of the models assume.

The hypothesis of damaging, man-made warming is a long way from being proven – and, given the recent trend in the peer-reviewed literature, is well on the way to being disproven. Recent cooling of the planet further suggests that man-made warming is at best too weak to be detected in the “noise” of natural internal variability.

Governments have naively and unwisely accepted the claims of a human influence on global temperatures made by a close-knit clique of a few dozen scientists, many of them climate modellers, as if such claims were representative of the opinion of the wider scientific community. On the evidence presented here, the IPCC’s selection of its chapter authors appears so prejudiced towards a predetermined outcome that it renders its scientific assessment of the climate suspect and its conclusions inappropriate for policy making.

Continue reading: Prejudiced authors, Prejudiced findings – Did the UN bias its attribution of “global warming” to
humankind? by John McLean

KEVIN Rudd is about to bank his leadership on a variation of Pascal’s wager, appropriate during the Pope’s visit but reflecting a new and risky calculus in Australian politics.

His independent expert Ross Garnaut has done the same, as he explained by reference to 17th-century French scientist Blaise Pascal: “If there were no God and one believed,” pondered Pascal, “what is the loss? But if there were a God and he rewards belief or denial in heaven and hell, the absence of belief is catastrophic. It is rational to act as if there were a God.”

Pascal’s argument was that smart non-believers should live their lives as though there were a God because they had little to lose and much to gain. Garnaut’s argument is that it is smart to act on the assumption that climate change is real because betting on its denial involves a high risk of catastrophic consequences.

Paul Kelly Blog – The Australian: Caught in carbon crunch

Thanks to Luke for lighting the blue touch-paper on this one!

Roger Pielke Sr has highlighted three research findings that are in the peer reviewed literature, but have been completely ignored by the IPCC and CCSP climate assessment communities, nor have they been refuted in the literature. These are just three examples of the level to which the scientific method has sunk to in climate science.

Observations of the spatial distribution of aerosols in the atmosphere in the lower latitudes, shows that the aerosol effect on atmospheric circulations, as a result of their alteration in the heating of regions of the atmosphere, is 60 times greater than due to the heating effect of the human addition of well-mixed greenhouse gases [from Matsui and Pielke, 2006];

A conservative estimate of the warm bias in the construction of a global average surface temperature trend resulting from measuring the air temperature near the ground is around 0.21°C per decade (with the nighttime minimum temperature contributing a large part of this bias). Since land covers about 29% of the Earth’s surface, the warm bias due to this influence explains about 30% of the IPCC estimate of global warming. In other words, consideration of the bias in temperature would reduce the IPCC trend to about 0.14°C per decade; still a warming, but not as large as indicated [based on Lin et al 2007];

The radiative temperature of the Earth is used by the IPCC and CCSP to represent the portion of the radiation emitted at the top of the atmosphere which originates at the Earth’s surface. However, the outgoing long wave radiation is proportional to the fourth power of T [T4], from Stefan-Boltzman’s Law, not temperature by itself. A 1C increase in the polar latitudes in the winter, for example, would have much less of an effect on the change of long wave emission than a 1C increase in the tropics. The spatial distribution matters, but this important distinction has been ignored. A more appropriate measure of radiatively significant surface changes would be to evaluate the change of the global average of T4 with time. [Pielke et al 2007].

Until, and unless the climate science community returns to the proper scientific method of examining the climate system, policymakers will continue to be fed erroneous information. Only poor policy decisions can result due to this failure.

Recent Ignored Research Findings In Climate Science – An Illustration Of A Broken Scientific Method