Image via WikipediaThe Telegraph
The climate bugaboo is the strangest intellectual aberration of our age
The climate bugaboo, the strangest intellectual aberration of our age, rampages because in the me and now we have cast aside three once-universal forms of learning that gave us perspective: a Classical education, to remind us that in reason and logic there is a difference between true and false; a scientific education, to show us which is which; and a religious education, to teach us why the distinction matters.
With perspective, no one would waste a single second of his own time or a red cent of other people’s money trying, Canute-like, to make “global warming” go away.
11,400 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age, temperatures in Antarctica rose by 5C in just three years. That’s global warming. Thermometers in central England showed warming of 2.2C during just 40 years from 1695-1735 – eight times faster than 20th-century warming.
Yes, there is a greenhouse effect. Yes, CO2 contributes to it. Yes, it causes warming. Yes, we emit CO2. Yes, warming will result. But not a lot.
Even if CO2 were as bad as some think, pietistic extravagances like Boris’ Bikes in London would solve nothing. The cost of this lunatic scheme – I kid you not – is £16,400 per bike.
11,400 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age, temperatures in Antarctica rose by 5C in just three years. That’s global warming. Thermometers in central England showed warming of 2.2C during just 40 years from 1695-1735 – eight times faster than 20th-century warming.
Yes, there is a greenhouse effect. Yes, CO2 contributes to it. Yes, it causes warming. Yes, we emit CO2. Yes, warming will result. But not a lot.
Even if CO2 were as bad as some think, pietistic extravagances like Boris’ Bikes in London would solve nothing. The cost of this lunatic scheme – I kid you not – is £16,400 per bike.
I wasn’t “forced to leave a high-level business summit” in Cancun, either. The organisers, Climate Change Ltd, said they would take my $1000 entrance fee provided that, unlike other paying delegates, I raised no points from the floor: they said only believers in man-made apocalypse could speak up. Another failure of perspective. One of the two ancient principles of natural justice long recognised in British law is audiatur et altera pars. Hear the other side too. It’s certainly cheaper, and it’s probably right.
Temperature records to be made public
Climate scientists are to publish the largest ever collection of temperature records, dating back more than a hundred years, in an attempt to provide a more accurate picture of climate change.
The Met Office, which is hosting an international workshop with members of the World Meteorological Organisation to start work on the project, is now planning to publish hourly temperature records from land-based weather stations around the world.
Until now, most climate change research has had to rely upon average daily and even monthly temperature records which has made it impossible to assess extreme changes in weather that occur at local levels.Dr Peter Thorne, a former Met Office climate scientist who is chairing the International Organising Committee for the project, said the current data sets were "patchy" and that if all the available data was added to them, they could double in size.
He added: "We don't necessarily have the tools available to provide local data which can allow us to tell the effects of heat on human health, or which crops farmers should plant or what temperature tolerance buildings should have."
Members of the public will also be recruited to help compile the new set of data by converting hundreds of thousands of handwritten records dating back to the early 1900s into a searchable database that will be available on the internet.
Image via WikipediaPrince Charles backs 'Climategate' scientists
The Prince of Wales has given his support to the scientists involved in the "Climategate" saga, describing their treatment as "appalling".
Prince Charles's comments came as he opened the Science Museum's new £4.5 million Atmosphere gallery which explores the science behind global warming.
The Prince is a well-known environmental campaigner who has been trying to publicise the threat the planet faces from climate change for many decades.
During his speech to the Science Museum's senior staff and sponsors of the new exhibition space, the heir to the throne said ''climate science has taken a battering of late''.
For that reason in January he visited the University of East Anglia's School of Environmental Sciences which has the prince as its patron and is home to the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) - the department at the centre of the Climategate row.
They reminded me the University of East Anglia is not a campaigning NGO, nor an industry lobby group.
''It is an academic institution working to understand precisely and dispassionately what is happening to our world; to separate the facts from the fiction and build the sum of human knowledge on the one issue that could very well balloon into the cause of our downfall.''
They reminded me the University of East Anglia is not a campaigning NGO, nor an industry lobby group.
''It is an academic institution working to understand precisely and dispassionately what is happening to our world; to separate the facts from the fiction and build the sum of human knowledge on the one issue that could very well balloon into the cause of our downfall.''
Prince Charles turns Highgrove into a green haven 
Image by Mrs Logic via Flickr
The heir to the throne has installed cutting-edge equipment to heat rooms, and provide hot water, at his Gloucestershire estate.
The ground and air source heat pumps will significantly reduce carbon emissions and cut electricity bills. The company that supplied the equipment, Ecovision Systems, will be installed as the tenant of new offices on the estate.
Prince Charles's latest moves to protect the environment are revealed in his sixth annual report, which will be published this week.
The revelation comes three months after the Prince warned that nations have less than 100 months to save the planet from irreversible damage due to climate change.
Climate research probe: science robust, communication lacking
The reputation of both the CRU and the University of East Anglia (UEA) have taken a battering as the ugliness of character was there for all to see.
The latest inquiry was led by Sir Muir Russell, who had complete freedom to both set the terms of reference and recruit people to the inquiry. The members of the inquiry consisted of five people from both public and private sectors, all distinguished in their fields. The inquiry proceeded mostly by following document trails. In the initial stages, the inquiry determined that it would be as open as possible, but, in order to not cover the ground of the previous inquiries, would focus on the behavior of CRU and UAE staff. Here's how the inquiry was laid out.
Image via WikipediaGiven the nature of our remit, our concern is not with science, whether data has been validated or whether the hypotheses have survived testing, but with behaviour; whether attempts have been made to misrepresent, or "cherry pick" data with the intention of supporting a particular hypothesis, or to withhold data so that it cannot be independently validated, or to suppress other hypotheses to prevent them being put to the test.The inquiry focused on whether researchers manipulated data or avoided Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) requests. To help focus the inquiry, they asked for—and received—written submissions, which, depending on the legality and confidentiality of the submission, were made available on the website. These submissions were then boiled down to a series of questions.
CRU has been a victim of changing circumstances. When the CRU began, climate science was a backwater as far as the public was concerned, and the CRU beavered away without anyone noticing. However, growing concerns, due to the findings of various researchers, pushed climate science onto center stage. When it turned out that the CRU was in the forefront of supplying data for the more public figures, it became a focus of attention.
The Freedom of Information Act caught everyone unawares, suddenly making many a scientist's records subject to potential scrutiny.
The CRU simply didn't want to engage with either the public or their "critics." In some respects, I understand why the scientists would get sick and tired of dealing with the incompetent bumblings of the likes of Christopher Monckton. But Phil Jones in particular didn't like blogs, or responding to blogs. And frankly, I am appalled by that attitude. I spend a good portion of my free time attempting to communicate science, and here we have a major contributor—who also happens to be pretty damn clever and in a great position to put forth his work—refusing to participate. The world has moved on, and if your science is front and center, you have take the microphone and sing.
"In order to test the principal allegations of withholding data and making inappropriate adjustments, the Review undertook its own trial analysis of land station temperature data. The goal was to determine whether it is possible for an independent researcher to (a) obtain primary data and (b) to analyse it in order to produce independent temperature trend results. This study was intended only to test the feasibility of conducting such a process, and not to generate scientific conclusions." In other words, if we can do it, anyone can. They found that the data was readily available at at least three different websites. They downloaded the data, selected every station that had an adequate amount of data and performed some smoothing and spatial averaging operations on them. In effect, they replicated the CRU's main research results, producing nearly identical instrumental temperature records, in very little time.
So, in the very broadest terms, the CRU did not, and, in fact, could not prevent other researchers from accessing the instrumental data record. Further, the CRU has not manipulated the data to obtain a preordained result. And, at the most basic level, the code is simply not required. However, this is not replicating in every detail the CRU's work, so the question of code and data sharing was examined in more detail.
It would benefit the global climate research community if a standardised way of defining station metadata and station data could be agreed, preferably through a standards body, or perhaps the WMO. As example an XML-based format which would make the interpretation, use, comparison, and exchange of data much more straightforward.The inquiry reviewed claims that the CRU had published results based on fraudulent data from China. Here, I would say that the CRU got lucky. It turns out that the data was not what it purported to be, but, when that came to light, the CRU reinvestigated their findings using a different data set and found that it didn't change the conclusions of their original paper. http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=9097666276440622860
Without such standardisation there will remain residual problems in issuing unambiguous lists, and assembling primary data from them. We feel it would be in the public interest if CRU and other such groups developed a process to capture and publish a snapshot of the data used for each important publication.
Suppose I managed to publish a paper that the majority of my profession regarded as complete nonsense. What do you think the reaction of my peers would be? Outrage, directed at me, the editor that approved my paper, and the journal in general. That is science: people often manage to publish garbage, and smarter people take them to task for it. After a while, the bruises heal and everyone moves on with their life. (One other option might be to curl up in the fetal position and cry foul.) This is exactly what occurred when researchers from the CRU and others (including editors at the journal) responded to an article that they regarded as poor science, published in the journal Climate Research.
To show that the inquiry's overall conclusions—that the CRU did not have any undue influence on peer review—was correct, the inquiry got an editor of a medical journal to discuss the goings-on in peer review. Their conclusion? "The evidence from an editor of a journal in an often strongly contested area such as medicine (Appendix 5) suggests that such instances are common and that they do not in general threaten the integrity of peer review or publication."
The inquiry then turned its attention to the CRU's role in writing and reviewing IPCC reports. Here, McKitrick and McIntyre had alleged that Jones and Briffa had conspired and broken rules to keep papers with contrary results out of the report. Except that they are in the report, and, in the case of one paper on the heat-island effect, the IPCC report goes on to tell the reader exactly what was not included in the paper, and how these need to be included to make the result reliable. Furthermore, in the inquiry's interview with Jones, it was clear that, if the McKitrick and McIntye land temperature reconstruction were to be taken seriously, then we have to throw out instrumental records from satellites and oceans because they wouldn't match up.Jones certainly did delete a lot of e-mails. Luckily for him, these were only local copies and backups remained. He seems to have been unaware that should someone request that information, he would actually still have to provide it. Indeed, if he had deleted the backups, he would have been in serious breach of the FoIA legislation.
The point is that the entire university staff seems to have built up an obstructionist culture around FoIA requests, and that is not a good thing:
Summing it all up
The CIA as Executive Agent on Climate ChangeThe point is that the entire university staff seems to have built up an obstructionist culture around FoIA requests, and that is not a good thing:
Summing it all up
Image via Wikipedia
The good
- The science was and still is robust.
The bad
- The CRU appears to be full of scientists who want no part in communicating with the public.
The ugly
- No one said, "Just comply with the FoIA requests already."
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Prince Charles pushes the Climate Change myths
Unless those of us with more than half a brain cell unite and act soon, the earth is going to fall prey to the most destructive, expensive, suicidally pointless taxation and regulation and protectionism in global economic history. We simply cannot afford any longer to allow the likes of the Prince Of Wales, Al Gore, NASA activist James Hansen, Lord Stern and their amen corner in the mainstream media to go on pushing their ludicrous scare story unchallenged.Right now, out there in the real world, are numerous genuine ecological challenges that urgently need addressing: the decline of fish (thanks European Union fisheries policy!); pollution; diminishing water tables; deforestation; overpopulation; and the great eco-disaster that are bio-fuels. The Quixotic quest to arrest “climate change” – something that has been happening for 4,567 million years regardless of man’s input – is a silly and expensive distraction.
What’s particularly galling about the most outspoken supporters of climate change taxation and regulation is that many of them either are rich enough not to be affected by it or – worse – stand to make vast fortunes as a result of it.
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