Climate & Climate Change

I have previously blogged about the UK High Court finding 9 errors in Gore’s movie AIT, which resulted in the High Court ruling that: Schools Must Warn of AIT Film Bias.

Now we have an admission over at Climate Audit:

Sticking Thermometers In Places They Don’t Belong

In earlier posts, we observed that Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth claimed that “Dr Thompson’s thermometer” confirmed Michael Mann’s hockey stick, but, when analysed, what Gore described as “Dr Thompson’s thermometer” merely proved to be Michael Mann’s hockey stick mis-identified. No wonder it resembled Mann’s hockey stick – or, to use the phrase more common in climate science, no wonder there was a “remarkable” resemblance.

Hu McCulloch of Ohio State University now writes about a recent encounter with Lonnie Thompson, the serial ice core non-archiver and male nurse for the thermometer:

“On January 11, Lonnie Thompson gave a talk on Climate change at Ohio State. After his talk, I asked him if the graph identified by Al Gore as “Dr. Thompson’s Thermometer” in his book and film was really based on his ice core research.

Thompson admitted that an error had been made, and even had a slide ready that showed the data of the Mann Hockey Stick plus Jones instrumental data that Gore’s figure was based on, alongside an average of dO18 z-scores from 6 of his Andean and Himalayan ice cores, similar to the 7-series graph that appeared in his 2006 PNAS article. He stated that he recognized the error right away, and even sent Gore (and Mann, as I recall) an e-mail pointing out the mistake.

When I pressed him if it wouldn’t be appropriate to make a more public announcement, given the high-profile nature of the error, Ellen Mosley-Thompson, his wife and co-author, stood up and offered that it was Gore’s error, not theirs, so that they had no responsibility for it, and that in any event there was no forum in which to make a correction.

I suggested that since OSU’s Byrd Polar Research Center has a website with a News page, it would be trivial and virtually costless to post a press release clarifying the matter for the millions of readers and viewers of Gore’s book and film who are not on Thompson’s e-mail list. ”

“No forum”. “No responsibility.” No shame.

The UK Government’s former chief scientific adviser has accused green activists of putting the fight against climate change at risk by wanting to take society back to the 17th century.

He said: “There is a suspicion, and I have that suspicion myself, that a large number of people who label themselves ‘green’ are actually keen to take us back to the 18th or even the 17th century.

Sir David’s comments were made in an interview in The Guardian.

The most pessimistic predictions of sea level rises as ice sheets are melted by global warming may have to be scaled back as a result of an extraordinary discovery that ice persisted when the Earth was much hotter than today.

Scientists have discovered that glaciers survived for hundreds of thousands of years during an extraordinary era when crocodiles roamed the Arctic and the tropical Atlantic Ocean was as warm as human blood.

They had thought that Earth was ice free during the so called Turonian period, a “super greenhouse world” between 93.5 million and 89.3 million years ago. But now evidence has been found of hothouse glaciers that persisted by studies of tiny plankton and other marine organisms.

Read the rest of the Telegraph article here.

I was hoping to link to a BBC website article, but they don’t seem to find it newsworthy.

Read the article in Science magazine, if you have a subscription, or the abstract if you don’t:

Isotopic Evidence for Glaciation During the Cretaceous Supergreenhouse

André Bornemann,1,2* Richard D. Norris,1 Oliver Friedrich,1,3 Britta Beckmann,4 Stefan Schouten,5 Jaap S. Sinninghe Damsté,5 Jennifer Vogel,1 Peter Hofmann,4 Thomas Wagner6

The Turonian (93.5 to 89.3 million years ago) was one of the warmest periods of the Phanerozoic eon, with tropical sea surface temperatures over 35°C. High-amplitude sea-level changes and positive 18O excursions in marine limestones suggest that glaciation events may have punctuated this episode of extreme warmth. New 18O data from the tropical Atlantic show synchronous shifts 91.2 million years ago for both the surface and deep ocean that are consistent with an approximately 200,000-year period of glaciation, with ice sheets of about half the size of the modern Antarctic ice cap. Even the prevailing supergreenhouse climate was not a barrier to the formation of large ice sheets, calling into question the common assumption that the poles were always ice-free during past periods of intense global warming.

1 Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, Geosciences Research Division, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093–0244, USA.
2 Institut für Geophysik und Geologie, Universität Leipzig, Talstraße 35, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany.
3 School of Ocean and Earth Science, National Oceanography Centre, European Way, Southampton SO14 3ZH, UK.
4 Institut für Geologie und Mineralogie, Universität Köln, Zülpicher Straße 49a, D-50674 Köln, Germany.
5 Department of Marine Biogeochemistry and Toxicology, Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, Post Office Box 59, 1790 AB Den Burg, Texel, Netherlands.
6 School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, UK.

Hi Jennifer,

Below are the latest six scientists to be added to the over 400 scientists who dispute man-made global warming claims:

Meteorologist Brad Sussman, a member of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and Seal holder and past officer of the National Weather Association (NWA), is currently with WJW-TV in Cleveland, Ohio. Sussman, a meteorologist for over 21 years, proudly calls himself a “denouncer of the very-flawed man-made global warming theory.” Sussman wrote to EPW on December 29, 2007 and explained that he “debunks [global warming] theory by using logic and humor.” According to Sussman, “global warming has been happening on and off for millions of years. Millions of years when mankind wasn’t driving around in SUVs and using coal for electric power!”

Hydrologist and geologist Mike McConnell of the U.S. Forest Service is a professional Earth scientist who has studied atmospheric pollution, post-wildfire mitigation planning, and groundwater surface water modeling. In 2007, McConnell dissented from the view that mankind has created a climate crisis. “Climate change is a climate system that we have no real control over,” McConnell wrote on December 27, 2007. “Our understanding on the complexities of our climate system, the Earth itself and even the sun are still quite limited. Scaring people into submission is not the answer to get people to change their environmental ways,” McConnell explained. He also dismissed claims that the human race was “the cause of our global warming.” McConnell wrote, “There is no real basis for this. There is a growing body of scientific literatures outlining that this not to be the case.” He concluded, “Now, if Earth was suffering under an accelerated greenhouse effect caused by human produced addition of CO2, the troposphere should heat up faster than the surface of the planet, but data collected from satellites and weather balloons do not support this fundamental presumption even though we are seeing higher CO2. We ought to see near lockstep temperature increments along with higher CO2 concentration over time, especially over the last several years. But we’re not.”

Physicist F. James Cripwell, a former scientist with UK’s Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge who worked under the leading expert in infra red spectroscopy — Sir Gordon Sutherland – and worked with the Operations Research for the Canadian Defense Research Board, recently dissented from man-made climate change fears. “It seems fair to believe that this new model (from the UK’s Climate Research Unit) assumes that if CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere increase, temperatures will go up. Since some of us know this is wrong, it seems quite likely that the 2008 forecast will be as badly wrong as the 2007 one was. What will the media do then? Maybe if the Northwest Passage does not open up this summer, as seems quite likely, people may start to realize that AGW (Anthropogenic Global warming) is a myth,” Cripwell wrote to CCNET on January 8, 2008. In a note to CCNET on April 7, 2006, Cripwell explained, “I am reminded of a quite well-known commercial in North America from Wendy’s, ‘Where’s the beef?’ When it comes to the [UN] IPCC claim that the increased level of CO2 in the atmosphere is the cause of global warming, where’s the science?” Cripwell continued, “Throughout the discussion of doubling the concentration of CO2, there is absolutely no reference to the concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere over which the increased amount of radiative forcing is supposed to increase linearly when the concentration of CO2 doubles. Presumably if you halved the concentration of CO2, you would decrease the radiative forcing by some linear amount. If you go on halving the CO2 concentration, then as the concentration of CO2 approached zero, it would appear that the CO2 was rapidly cooling the earth!! Clearly any claim that the doubling of the CO2 concentration results in a linear increase in the level of radiative forcing can have no credibility unless the range of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, over which the relationship is claimed to exist, is clearly established from sound scientific principles.” Cripwell concluded, “If there is no scientific basis for the claim that doubling the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increases the radiative forcing linearly, then any claim to put a numerical value on this increase has no basis in science. Such a number, e.g. 4 Wm-2, is irrelevant and meaningless. I am reminded of a discussion I had many years ago on the differences between astronomy and astrology. Both use the same data of the relative positions and motions of the earth, sun, moon, planets and stars; both have long complex calculations; both result in numerical answers. In the case of astronomy, the numbers have a scientific meaning; in the case of astrology, they do not. It seems to me that this claim of doubling the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere resulting in a linear addition to the radiative forcing is more akin to astrology than it is to astronomy.” (LINK) In another interview in 2005, Cripwell said, “Whatever is causing warming, it is not an increase in levels of carbon dioxide. A more plausible theory is that it is water put into high altitudes by aircraft; this would have roughly the same time line,” Cripwell said.

Chemist and Biochemist Dr. Michael F. Farona, an emeritus professor of chemistry at the University of Akron and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, critiqued the news media for inadequate reporting about global warming and expressed climate skepticism. “Data, numbers, graphs, trends, etc., are generally missing in supposedly scientific reports on global warming. These articles are usually long on opinions and short on hard data. Phrases such as ‘scientists agree that …’ scientists doubt that …’ do not belong in a scientific article. There are more data in Michael Crichton’s novel ‘State of Fear’ than in all the global warming articles combined that I have read,” Farona wrote on January 3, 2008. “There have been at least four interglacial periods, where the glaciers have advanced and retreated. The last ice age ended about 10,000 years ago and, in the case of North America, left the Great Lakes in the glacier’s retreat. The glaciers are still retreating, so there should not be any great surprise that the sea level is rising. The industrial revolution is about 150 years old, compared to 10,000 years of warming. Can human activities have really made a significant contribution to rising temperatures in that amount of time?” Farona asked. “We know that the east coast of the U.S. was flooded during the previous interglacial period, so sea level rising and coastal flooding are not unique to this interglacial period. Why now the draconian predictions of coastal flooding as if this has not happened before?” he continued. “What is the relationship between an increased level of carbon dioxide and temperature? Can it be predicted that an increase of so many parts per billion of carbon dioxide will cause an increase of so many degrees? I have not seen any answers to the questions posed above, leading me to adopt a somewhat skeptical view of blaming global warming on human activities. What puzzles me is the reluctance of climatologists to provide scientific data supporting their dire predictions of the near future if we don’t change our ways,” Farona concluded.

Award winning meteorologist Brian Sussman, a member of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), former member of the AMS Education Advisory Committee, and formerly of KPIX-TV CBS in San Francisco, is the author of the forthcoming book “Global Whining: A Denier’s Handbook.” “Mankind’s burning of fossil fuels is allegedly warming the planet. This hypothesis couldn’t stand the test of an eighth grade science fair. And if you dare poke holes in the hypothesis you’re branded a ‘denier,’” Sussman told EPW on January 3, 2008. “Well fine. I’d rather be called a ‘denier’ than try to push a scheme that would make Karl Marx green with envy,” Sussman added.

Climate statistician Dr. William M. Briggs, who specializes in the statistics of forecast evaluation, serves on the American Meteorological Society’s Probability and Statistics Committee and is an Associate Editor of Monthly Weather Review. Briggs, a visiting mathematics professor at Central Michigan University and a Biostatistician at New York Methodist Hospital, has a new paper coming out in the peer-reviewed Journal of Climate which finds that hurricanes have not increased number or intensity in the North Atlantic. Briggs, who has authored numerous articles in meteorological and climatological journals, has also authored another study looking on tropical cyclones around the globe, and finds that they have not increased in number or intensity either. Briggs expressed skepticism about man-made global warming fears in 2007. “There is a lot of uncertainly among scientists about what’s going on with the climate,” Briggs wrote to EPW on December 28, 2007. “Most scientists just don’t want the publicity one way or another. Generally, publicity is not good for one’s academic career. Only, after reading [UN IPCC chairman] Pachauri’s asinine comment [comparing scientists skeptical of man-made climate fears to] Flat Earthers, it’s hard to remain quiet,” Briggs explained. “It is well known that weather forecasts, out to, say, four to five days, have skill; that is, they can beat just guessing the average. Forecasts with lead times greater than this have decreasing to no skill,” Briggs wrote. “The skill of climate forecasts—global climate models—upon which the vast majority of global warming science is based are not well investigated, but what is known is that these models do not do a good job at reproducing past, known climates, nor at predicting future climates. The error associated with climate predictions is also much larger than that usually ascribed to them; meaning, of course, that people are far too sure of themselves and their models,” he concluded.

Marc Morano

———————————-
Part 1
Part 2

Over at Prometheus, it has been noted that observed global average surface temperatures for 2000 to 2007 are failing to follow the projected IPCC A1F1 scenario despite the fact that CO2 emissions are rising in line with the high end prediction. Of course, we don’t know how long this will continue, or when and if the record temperature for 1998 wil be broken.

Meanwhile, Roger Pielke Sr has looked at 3 other global warming or cooling metrics, namely lower tropospheric warming, atmospheric water vapor content, and oceanic heat content. Pielke Sr concludes that:

“An examination of even the most fundamental of climate metrics show that recent trends are inconsistent with the 2007 IPCC claims regarding global warming. This includes a lack of warming in the global average lower tropospheric temperature and upper ocean, the muted at best moistening of the troposphere, and evidence of a negative radiative feedback. These lack of agreement with these climate metrics indicate that the IPCC report should be interpreted as a collection of papers on a hypothesis rather than a summary of established scientific understanding of how humans are altering the climate system.”

With the above in mind, global average temperature is losing it potency as an observational scare, and the scene is set for climate alarmists to shift the focus onto ‘ocean acidification.’ A email from Bob Carter dropped into my mailbox on 18th December suggesting that the IPCC have been preparing for such a debate shift for some time.

Lo and behold, on 6th January, a weblog called Never Ending Math Equation came up with this blog post:

“Ocean Acidification” or “Why You Should Be Scared About Rising CO2 Emissions Even If You Are A Climate Change Skeptic”

“Given that this debate is often as fruitful as debating a creationist on evolution, I propose a different tact in winning support for timely action on this issue: explain the looming problem of ocean acidification.” Read the entire post here.

Of course, the oceans are alkaline and dissolved CO2 makes them less alkaline although acidification is the accepted terminology. Bob Carter provided a link to an excellent New Zealand account of the background to the acidification of the ocean scare. The text, though scientific, is written without detailed technicalities to a degree that renders most of it appreciable by non-scientists. The 3 part Seafriends article, ‘Ocean acidification – Are oceans becoming more acidic and is this a threat to marine life?’ can be found here.

So, if you feel inclined, follow all the links above and prepare for a possible climate debate shift.

Roy Spencer has published a new book that will be released on 27th March entitled, ‘Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Leads to Bad Science, Pandering politicians and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poor.’

In the chapter on politics, Roy Spencer describes the political pressure he was under during the Clinton/Gore
administration to not voice any of his personal views on global warming during congressional testimony…which is more restriction than Jim Hansen ever had.

There are also revised editions of the best sellers TAKEN BY STORM: The Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming by Christopher Essex and Ross McKitrick.

and

Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years,Updated and Expanded Edition by S Fred Singer and Dennis T Avery.

Keep an eye on the Science and Public Policy Institute website for the imminent release of Christopher Monckton’s 90-minute climate movie Apocalypse? NO! DVD.

Plus, there is always the expanded and improved version of the DVD The Great Global Warming Swindle by Wag TV.

Enjoy!