Climate links
Climate modeling may be about to change dramatically. The paper.
Paper arguing that cloud cover compensates for the increased power of the Sun.
Retired NASA atmospheric physicist uses matched-station data to identify significant urban heat effect (pdf) in US surface temperature data.
Graphing Greenland ice core data over the last 65 million years. It was much warmer in Greenland during the Minoan, Roman and Medieval warmings than now. About the hockey sticks.
IPCC report fails to follow the peer-reviewed literature and gets Antarctic sea ice seriously wrong.
The UK Met Office is proposing a complete “do over” of world temperature and climate data:
At a meeting Monday of 150 climate scientists, representatives of Britain's weather office proposed that the world's climatologists start all over again and produce a new trove of global temperature data that is open to public scrutiny and "rigorous" peer review.
The 2006 Wegman Report (pdf) which identified strong clique patterns in paleoclimate published scholarship, poor statistical practice and poor data availability.
President of the US National Academy of Science blames IPCC for public distrust, worries that the credibility of science and scientists has been damaged. Worries that the process has got “completely out of hand”.
Tim Ball feeling vindicated on Climategate part one, two. (Linker page here.) The personal vilification as a tactic of exclusion and intimidation is familiar to anyone who has studied how progressivist “policy advocacy” works.
A very thoughtful essay about rebuilding public trust picking up on the rise of the “climate auditing” movement and the confusion of scientific research with policy advocacy:
On the other hand, the climate auditors have no apparent political agenda, are doing this work for free, and have been playing a watchdog role, which has engendered the trust of a large segment of the population. …
No one really believes that the “science is settled” or that “the debate is over.” Scientists and others that say this seem to want to advance a particular agenda. There is nothing more detrimental to public trust than such statements.
The adoption of the notion that moral concern is the possession of one side of the debate leads to accusations (e.g. being “shills for big oil”) that many people know simply do not apply to themselves and others, leading to a spreading sense of distrust and discounting of other claims. A response:
The lack of trust is not a problem of perception or communication. It is a problem of lack of substance. Results are routinely exaggerated. “Scientific papers” are larded with “may” and “might” and “could possibly”. Advocacy is a common thread in climate science papers. Codes are routinely concealed, data is not archived. A concerted effort is made to marginalize and censor opposing views.
A movement brought down by its own arrogance and insularity:
The climate change movement now needs to regroup, and at some point it will have to confront a central, unpalatable fact: the wounds from which it is bleeding so profusely are mostly its own fault. This phase of the climate change movement was immature, unrealistic and naive. It was poorly organized and foolishly led. It adopted an unrealistic and unreachable political goal, and sought to stampede world opinion through misleading and exaggerated statements. It lacked the most elementary level of political realism … Foundation staff, activists and sympathetic journalists cocooned themselves in an echo chamber of comfortable group-think, and as they toasted one another in green Kool-Aid they thought they were making progress when actually they were slowly and painfully digging themselves into an ever-deeper hole.
Comparing the patterns within climate science revealed by Climategate et al with the patterns in Enron.
Making very nicely the obvious point that advocates of AGW have have hugely more money backing them than skeptics. Meanwhile, insurance companies use “climate change” as a way to hike premiums and profits.
Prof. Jones questioned by a British Parliamentary Committee. Statement by Royal Society of Chemistry. An even more brutal statement by the Institute of Physics. More.
A Q&A with Viscount Monckton on how his views had evolved:
The CEO of a boutique finance house in the City of London asked me to have a look at "global warming" because his analysts could not decide whether it was real or not. I first realized something was wrong when I wanted to find out how to convert radiative forcings in Watts per square meter to temperature in Kelvin, but not once in 1,000 pages did the IPCC's 2001 science assessment report reveal the existence of the Stefan-Boltzmann radiative-transfer equation, without which one cannot even begin the calculation. So obscurantist was the IPCC's methodology for determining climate sensitivity that it took me two years to research the underlying equations, some of which I had to derive for myself. A scientific establishment that was confident of its results would have explained the matter clearly and concisely.
Being understandably very angry at a contemptible characterization of climate sceptics. The use of “denialism” was, in fact, a symptom of the crippled epistemology (pdf) involved: a nice juxtaposition.
An amusing graph ”charting” AGW skepticism.
Much of this is about the recurring (and tragic) dangers of a new science.
The times, they are a-changing; the ABC online is actually going to let skeptics have a say (beyond the comments sections). Meanwihile, green advocacy groups meet to coordinate strategy. (This is, of course, not a conspiracy, nor an “alarmism machine”.) Meanwhile, keep up with the complete list of things caused by global warming.
Paper arguing that cloud cover compensates for the increased power of the Sun.
Retired NASA atmospheric physicist uses matched-station data to identify significant urban heat effect (pdf) in US surface temperature data.
Graphing Greenland ice core data over the last 65 million years. It was much warmer in Greenland during the Minoan, Roman and Medieval warmings than now. About the hockey sticks.
IPCC report fails to follow the peer-reviewed literature and gets Antarctic sea ice seriously wrong.
The UK Met Office is proposing a complete “do over” of world temperature and climate data:
At a meeting Monday of 150 climate scientists, representatives of Britain's weather office proposed that the world's climatologists start all over again and produce a new trove of global temperature data that is open to public scrutiny and "rigorous" peer review.
The 2006 Wegman Report (pdf) which identified strong clique patterns in paleoclimate published scholarship, poor statistical practice and poor data availability.
President of the US National Academy of Science blames IPCC for public distrust, worries that the credibility of science and scientists has been damaged. Worries that the process has got “completely out of hand”.
Tim Ball feeling vindicated on Climategate part one, two. (Linker page here.) The personal vilification as a tactic of exclusion and intimidation is familiar to anyone who has studied how progressivist “policy advocacy” works.
A very thoughtful essay about rebuilding public trust picking up on the rise of the “climate auditing” movement and the confusion of scientific research with policy advocacy:
On the other hand, the climate auditors have no apparent political agenda, are doing this work for free, and have been playing a watchdog role, which has engendered the trust of a large segment of the population. …
No one really believes that the “science is settled” or that “the debate is over.” Scientists and others that say this seem to want to advance a particular agenda. There is nothing more detrimental to public trust than such statements.
The adoption of the notion that moral concern is the possession of one side of the debate leads to accusations (e.g. being “shills for big oil”) that many people know simply do not apply to themselves and others, leading to a spreading sense of distrust and discounting of other claims. A response:
The lack of trust is not a problem of perception or communication. It is a problem of lack of substance. Results are routinely exaggerated. “Scientific papers” are larded with “may” and “might” and “could possibly”. Advocacy is a common thread in climate science papers. Codes are routinely concealed, data is not archived. A concerted effort is made to marginalize and censor opposing views.
A movement brought down by its own arrogance and insularity:
The climate change movement now needs to regroup, and at some point it will have to confront a central, unpalatable fact: the wounds from which it is bleeding so profusely are mostly its own fault. This phase of the climate change movement was immature, unrealistic and naive. It was poorly organized and foolishly led. It adopted an unrealistic and unreachable political goal, and sought to stampede world opinion through misleading and exaggerated statements. It lacked the most elementary level of political realism … Foundation staff, activists and sympathetic journalists cocooned themselves in an echo chamber of comfortable group-think, and as they toasted one another in green Kool-Aid they thought they were making progress when actually they were slowly and painfully digging themselves into an ever-deeper hole.
Comparing the patterns within climate science revealed by Climategate et al with the patterns in Enron.
Making very nicely the obvious point that advocates of AGW have have hugely more money backing them than skeptics. Meanwhile, insurance companies use “climate change” as a way to hike premiums and profits.
Prof. Jones questioned by a British Parliamentary Committee. Statement by Royal Society of Chemistry. An even more brutal statement by the Institute of Physics. More.
A Q&A with Viscount Monckton on how his views had evolved:
The CEO of a boutique finance house in the City of London asked me to have a look at "global warming" because his analysts could not decide whether it was real or not. I first realized something was wrong when I wanted to find out how to convert radiative forcings in Watts per square meter to temperature in Kelvin, but not once in 1,000 pages did the IPCC's 2001 science assessment report reveal the existence of the Stefan-Boltzmann radiative-transfer equation, without which one cannot even begin the calculation. So obscurantist was the IPCC's methodology for determining climate sensitivity that it took me two years to research the underlying equations, some of which I had to derive for myself. A scientific establishment that was confident of its results would have explained the matter clearly and concisely.
Being understandably very angry at a contemptible characterization of climate sceptics. The use of “denialism” was, in fact, a symptom of the crippled epistemology (pdf) involved: a nice juxtaposition.
An amusing graph ”charting” AGW skepticism.
Much of this is about the recurring (and tragic) dangers of a new science.
The times, they are a-changing; the ABC online is actually going to let skeptics have a say (beyond the comments sections). Meanwihile, green advocacy groups meet to coordinate strategy. (This is, of course, not a conspiracy, nor an “alarmism machine”.) Meanwhile, keep up with the complete list of things caused by global warming.