"....A Tale of Due Diligence"

A fascinating piece from Ross McKitrick entitled "The Mann et al. Northern Hemisphere 'Hockey Stick' Climate Index: A Tale of Due Diligence" is now available online here.

This was initially published as Chapter 2 of Patrick Michaels' book "Shattered Consensus: The True State of Global Warming".

I think this piece is the best detailed, warts-and-all account of the demolition of the hockey stick, and I encourage you to read it all.

Some excerpts:

This chapter tells the story of the detective work of Stephen McIntyre (and, to a lesser extent, myself) regarding the famous “hockey-stick" climate history graph of Mann, Bradley, and Hughes (1998), better known as MBH98. After studying in detail how the hockey-stick graph was done, we found mistakes in the data and methods that went unnoticed for years, even as the graph was used by governments worldwide to drive major policy decisions. The story behind the hockey stick provides a cautionary tale about the need to recognize the limited function of journal peer review and the dangers of proceeding with major policy decisions without applying a further level of due diligence equivalent to an audit or an engineering study. It also shows that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change failed to carry out elementary due diligence on its most famous promotional graphic, despite widespread perceptions that it had.
...
The hockey-stick graph has been reprinted countless times and used by governments around the world as the official, canonical climate history of the world.
...
...He had assumed that the IPCC and others had carried out due diligence prior to relying on this graphic and that such due diligence would have necessarily required examination of the data—drawing from his own experience with audits and business due diligence. If the data had not been so organized, was it possible that no one had ever checked the data? It was a bizarre possibility, but the collective failure of due diligence in the Bre-X (and, for that matter, Enron) collapses were just as strange.
...
Thus, what was erroneously argued to be the “dominant” signal in the entire Northern Hemisphere climate turns out to have been a local phenomenon specific to a group of high-altitude bristlecone pines, whose influence was inflated due to a programming error. Mann’s hockey stick hinges (literally) on this. And on that flimsy foundation the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change based the conclusions of its third assessment report.
...
At the IPCC level, the IPCC itself made no attempt to verify any MBH98 findings, relying only on the prior peer review by Nature. There is a common misunderstanding by the general public and the numerous Nobel laureates who endorsed the IPCC report that the IPCC carried out substantial due diligence of its own. That is not the case. Obviously, problems can result if people think that due diligence has taken place when it hasn’t.

The failure of the IPCC to carry out such independent verification or to audit studies may be partly explained by the lack of independence between the chapter authors and the original authors. Michael Mann was lead author of the chapter relying on his own findings, a lack of independence that would never be tolerated in ordinary public offerings of securities.
...
...there is an obvious need for additional due diligence prior to use of academic articles in public policy. In the private sector, no one would build an oil refinery based an academic article. There is a process of engineering due diligence. Some of the most highly paid professionals are principally involved in verification. Yet governments will make far larger, costlier decisions based on the chimerical standard of academic peer review. Merely stating the contrast points to the need to ramp up standards in the public sector, and quickly.

Well, maybe not EXACTLY the same thing

An excerpt from this article:

During Audubon’s time, whoopers migrated from the Gulf Coast to vast marshlands throughout the Midwest and Canada. But as Americans moved west, the swamps were drained and converted to farmland. By 1870 the whooping crane population had dropped to 1,500. “The loss of wet prairie was far and away the biggest reason for the bird’s decline,” said John Fitzpatrick, director of the Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University. “We basically removed its habitat and the bird, which wasn’t very abundant to begin with, simply vanished. It’s the same thing that happened with the ivory-bill and its virgin bottomland forest.”

"Certainty in sight records"

Another great IBWO-related post from David Sibley is here.

More on the infamous "hockey stick"

In a comment here, Ilya Maclean wrote:

...McIntyre and McKitrick criticisms have little relevance with respect to the final shape of the Hockey stick graph...

That's simply not true.

A piece by Michael Crichton is here.

Now the question is, is this twentieth-century temperature rise extraordinary? For that we must turn to the second graph by Michael Mann, which is known as the “hockey stick.”

This graph shows the results of a study of 112 so-called proxy studies: tree rings, isotopes in ice, and other markers of relative temperature. Obviously there were no thermometers back in the year 1000, so proxies are needed to get some idea of past warmth. Mann’s findings were a centerpiece of the last UN study, and they were the basis for the claim that the twentieth century showed the steepest temperature rise of the last thousand years. That was said in 2001. No one would say it now. Mann’s work has come under attack from several laboratories around the world. Two Canadian investigators, McKitrick and McIntyre, re-did the study using Mann’s data and methods, and found dozens of errors, including two data series with exactly the same data for a number of years. Not surprisingly, when they corrected all the errors, they came up with sharply differing results.

But still this increase is steep and unusual, isn’t it? Well, no, because actually you can’t trust it. It turns out that Mann and his associates used a non-standard formula to analyze his data, and this particular formula will turn anything into a hockey stick---including trendless data generated by computer.

Physicist Richard Muller called this result “a shocker…” and he is right. Hans von Storch calls Mann’s study “rubbish.” Both men are staunch advocates of global warming. But Mann’s mistakes are considerable. But he will get tenure soon anyway.

The "hockey stick" debate in this hysteria shares some similarities with the Luneau video debate in the Ivory-bill hysteria. Make no mistake--when you side with Michael Mann (one of the founders of realclimate) on the hockey stick, it's like siding with Lammertink/Fitzpatrick/Pulliam on the Luneau video. Once you learn more about the hockey stick and figure out that it's been shattered, it's like joining the Sibley/Bevier/etc side on the Luneau video debate.

More from Lubos Motl

An excerpt from this post:

...If the CO2 were the cause, if the temperature were its consequence, and if the greenhouse effect were able to transform a 100 ppm increase of CO2 into 8 degrees of warming as suggested by Al Gore, something like that would have happened since 1850, too: since 1850, we have increased CO2 by additional 100 ppm. But the temperatures clearly didn't increase by 8 Celsius degrees since 1850. That's why we see that the prediction for the recent temperature change by the hypothesis that CO2 was a major climate driver during the glaciation periods is brutally falsified. The observed warming is 13 times smaller than the prediction.

IBWO on "Grey's Anatomy"

Excerpts from this link:

Izzie’s heart patient needs a catheter. He launches into a huge schpiel about how all he wants to do is get well so he can go see the Ivory-billed woodpecker...Christina researches and finds a way Hahn can operate on the heart patient without anesthesia—he’d be wide awake though numb from the neck down. For 5-6 hours. Awake. With his chest open. When the patient balks, Izzie reminds him about the Ivory-billed woodpecker.

Excerpts from this link:

...Because Izzie has excellent bedside manner, she finds out that the man is a lifelong birdwatcher, and as soon as he's out of the hospital, he's going to scout the ivory-billed woodpecker, a very rare species...Izzie decides to use her empathy for the patient as a strength. She goes to the trouble of finding a picture of an ivory-billed woodpecker and placing it in the OR where Mr. Arnold could see it.

Ivory-bill publications

Here.

"A Cool and Wet October for California"

Here.

An excerpt:

The month of October has been significantly cooler than normal. This was seen with average daily maximum and average daily mean temperatures that were below normal for all 9 key cities (see tables below). The largest temperature anomalies were in the Sacramento Valley where temperature maxima averaged 5.8 and 4.6 degrees below normal at Redding and Sacramento respectively. Close behind were San Francisco and San Jose with -3.5 and -3.6 degrees below normal. Despite a period of warm dry Santa Ana winds in Southern California that led to fires, both San Diego and Los Angeles had average monthly maximum temperatures of about a half degree below normal.

Note that the Santa Ana winds are seasonally normal; they happen about this time every year, and some years are stronger than others. This talk in news stories of attributing the Southern California fires to global warming is just pure nonsense made up by some news organizations that don’t understand California’s seasonal weather patterns.

"Skeptics Help Us Search for Truth"

Article by Dennis Avery here.

Excerpts:

When global warming alarmists condemn skeptics as deniers, it is an unscientific and socially dangerous characterization. Skeptics are not the enemy. On the contrary, they are crucial to science because they help us search for truth.

Scientific theories exist to be verified or proven false. Thomas Huxley, a famous nineteenth-century English biologist, explained, "Skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin."
...
...Yet there are those inconvenient facts: Chinese researchers recently examined their ancient historic records, which go back farther in China than in any other society. They found evidence of a warm period from the years 1 to about 240 AD (known as the Roman Warming); a cold period (the Dark Ages) from 240 to 800 AD; a warming (the Medieval Optimum) from 800 to 1400; and the Little Ice Age from 1400 to about 1920.
...
From this evidence, the Chinese researchers concluded China's warmest period during the past 2000 years occurred around 100 AD. (See Bao Yang, et al., "General Characteristics of Temperature Variation in China During the Last Two Millennia," Geophysical Research Letters, 10 (2002): 1029/2001GLO014485.) This aligns with Roman records of growing wine grapes in Britain during their occupation of that island in the first century--even though Britain was unable to grow wine grapes from 1300 to 1950 because of too-cold temperatures.

If China was warmer during the first century than today, what's so remarkable about today's warming?
...
Perhaps the most powerful evidence of all is the strong correlation between sunspot records and the Earth's temperatures during the "thermometer years" since 1860. Henrik Svensmark of the Danish Space Research Institute found a 95-percent correlation between the sunspot numbers and the lagged record of the Earth's sea-surface temperatures.
...
The reality is, since 1998 CO2 levels have continued to soar while the Earth's temperatures have held stable.

The climate models are not evidence; they are guesses. The fact that they tend to agree with each other says more about discussions among the modelers than about the accuracy of the models.

Lively debate on solar cycle 24

See the comment section here.

"Science vs. Gore on Methane"

Here.

An excerpt:

...the cessation of the historical increase in the atmosphere's methane concentration - which appears to have actually been accomplished, and without any overt help from mankind - will likely do more to slow the increase in total greenhouse-gas radiative forcing than any program humanity will ever be able to implement. And if the atmosphere's methane concentration actually starts to decline (which looks to be a real possibility in the very near future), the increase in radiative forcing due to continued increases in the air's CO2 content will be significantly countered by the decline in methane-induced radiative forcing, once again accomplishing more than anything man will ever be able to do in this regard.

More on the "hockey stick" scandal

Excerpt from Michael Crichton's Senate testimony in September 2005:

...Because any study where a single team plans the research, carries it out, supervises the analysis, and writes their own final report, carries a very high risk of undetected bias. That risk, for example, would automatically preclude the validity of the results of a similarly structured study that tested the efficacy of a drug.

By the same token, any verification of the study by investigators with whom the researcher had a professional relationship-people with whom, for example, he had published papers in the past, would not be accepted. That's peer review by pals, and it's unavoidably biased. Yet these issues are central to the now-familiar story of the "Hockeystick graph" and the debate surrounding it.

To summarize it briefly: in 1998-99 the American climate researcher Michael Mann and his co-workers published an estimate of global temperatures from the year 1000 to 1980. Mann's results appeared to show a spike in recent temperatures that was unprecedented in the last thousand years. His alarming report formed the centerpiece of the U.N.'s Third Assessment Report, in 2001.

Mann's work was immediately criticized because it didn't show the well-known Medieval Warm Period, when temperatures were warmer than they are today, or the Little Ice Age that began around 1500, when the climate was colder than today. But real fireworks began when two Canadian researchers, McIntyre and McKitrick, attempted to replicate Mann's study. They found grave errors in the work, which they detailed in 2003: calculation errors, data used twice, data filled in, and a computer program that generated a hockeystick out of any data fed to it-even random data. Mann's work has since been dismissed by scientists around the world who subscribe to global warning.

Why did the UN accept Mann's report so uncritically? Why didn't they catch the errors? Because the IPCC doesn't do independent verification. And perhaps because Mann himself was in charge of the section of the report that included his work.

The hockeystick controversy drags on. But I would direct the Committee's attention to three aspects of this story. First, six years passed between Mann's publication and the first detailed accounts of errors in his work. This is simply too long for policymakers to wait for validated results.

Second, the flaws in Mann's work were not caught by climate scientists, but rather by outsiders-in this case, an economist and a mathematician. They had to go to great lengths to obtain data from Mann's team, which obstructed them at every turn. When the Canadians sought help from the NSF, they were told that Mann was under no obligation to provide his data to other researchers for independent verification.

Third, this kind of stonewalling is not unique. The Canadians are now attempting to replicate other climate studies and are getting the same runaround from other researchers. One prominent scientist told them: "Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it."

Even further, some scientists complain the task of archiving is so time-consuming as to prevent them from getting any work done. But this is nonsense.

Note that Michael Mann is one of the key people behind the realclimate web site.

A quote from Mann:

"We hope this site will serve as a resource that can challenge mis-representations or mis-understandings of the science as they occur in real time," said Michael Mann.

Mann's quote reminds me of Geoff Hill's here:

"We avoid anything that smacks of the lunatic fringe," he says. He doesn't want anyone thinking his desire to see the bird might color his science.

Update: Note that Mann's flawed algorithm produces a "hockey stick" even when fed solar data.

"IPCC too blinkered and corrupt to save"

Here.

An excerpt:

Vincent Gray has begun a second career as a climate-change activist. His motivation springs from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body that combats global warming by advocating the reduction of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Dr. Gray has worked relentlessly for the IPCC as an expert reviewer since the early 1990s.

But Dr. Gray isn't an activist in the cause of enforcing the Kyoto Protocol and realizing the other goals of the worldwide IPCC process. To the contrary, Dr. Gray's mission, in his new role as cofounder of The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, is to stop the IPCC from spreading climate-change propaganda that undermines the integrity of science.

"The whole process is a swindle," he states, in large part because the IPCC has a blinkered mandate that excludes natural causes of global warming.

" The Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) 1992 defined 'climate change' as changes in climate caused by human interference with atmospheric composition," he explains. "The task of the IPCC, therefore, has been to accumulate evidence to support this belief that all changes in the climate are caused by human interference with the atmosphere. Studies of natural climate change have largely been used to claim that these are negligible compared with 'climate change.' "

Dr. Gray is one of the 2,000 to 2,500 top scientists from around the world whom the IPCC often cites as forming the basis of its findings. No one has been a more faithful reviewer than Dr. Gray over the years -- he has been an IPCC expert almost from the start, and perhaps its most prolific contributor, logging almost 1,900 comments on the IPCC's final draft of its most recent report alone.

But Dr. Gray, who knows as much about the IPCC's review processes as anyone, has been troubled by what he sees as an appalling absence of scientific rigour in the IPCC's review process.

"Right from the beginning, I have had difficulty with this procedure. Penetrating questions often ended without any answer. Comments on the IPCC drafts were rejected without explanation, and attempts to pursue the matter were frustrated indefinitely.

"Over the years, as I have learned more about the data and procedures of the IPCC, I have found increasing opposition by them to providing explanations, until I have been forced to the conclusion that for significant parts of the work of the IPCC, the data collection and scientific methods employed are unsound. Resistance to all efforts to try and discuss or rectify these problems has convinced me that normal scientific procedures are not only rejected by the IPCC, but that this practice is endemic, and was part of the organization from the very beginning."

If you no longer like the U.S. temperature data, can you just ignore it?

Back in August, after one or more problems with historical U.S. temperature data were revealed, this graph (for U.S. data) was published:



Climate alarmists immediately tried to make the problem go away with arguments like this:

Not an issue...US accounts for 3% of the land mass of the global...Global mean is more significant...

That argument is refuted here:

Now for those whom will likely say that "the USA only has 2% of the worlds area, so it really doesn't matter", I'd point out this graphic from NCDC which shows the distribution of weather stations that have mean temperature records going back to 1900. The USA makes up the lions share of the weather stations in the world with complete data sets spanning 100 years.


The USA data clearly makes up the bulk of the last century's worth of mean temperature data. And there are few candidates that span 100 years in many continents...

"There wasn't enough effort"

1. Check out an excerpt from this Birdforum post:

A situation developed in 2004 that very much warranted all the effort it got. In fact there wasn't enough effort and still isn't.

2. A bit more from Martin Collinson is here.

More great work from Steve McIntyre

Here.

An excerpt:

In this data set that supposedly shows the following:

Contrary to generally accepted wisdom, no statistically significant impact of urbanization could be found in annual temperatures.

actual cities have a very substantial trend of over 2 deg C per century relative to the rural network - and this assumes that there are no problems with rural network - something that is obviously not true since there are undoubtedly microsite and other problems. At the very end of the graphic, the change levels off - I wonder if that might indicate increased settlement effects at rural sites.


(click to enlarge)

Now this doesn’t prove anything one way or the other about other networks - other than there is a need to be wary. However, the notion that Peterson 2003 is a sustainable authority for the IPCC proposition that “rural station trends were almost indistinguishable from series including urban sites” seems increasingly difficult to accept.

"Snows return to Austria's 'doomed' ski resorts"

Here.

Excerpts:

The naked slopes that plagued Europe's alpine resorts last year appeared to sound the death knell for many of them. But, a year on, the picture could not be more different.

Skiers were this weekend gearing up for a bumper season after slopes began to open more than six weeks before the official start to the season.

Pistes in Austria boasted pristine conditions after early falls and low temperatures left resorts blanketed with snow.

The large patches of mud and green that dotted the mountainsides at the start of last winter have been consigned to distant memory.
...
A spokesman for the Met Office said: "The continent is cooling down now and when you get that effect it is not unusual to get snow across the Alps.

"Trenberth’s Twenty-Three Scientific Errors in One Short Article"

Yet another excellent piece by Christopher Monckton (dated 10/24/07) is here. You should read the whole thing.

Excerpts:

Error 20. Trenberth says the IPCC’s reports “are thoroughly reviewed”. They are not.

The crucial chapter in which the IPCC blames climate change on humanity was reviewed by only 40 people chosen by the IPCC itself. The authors of the IPCC’s chapter decided to reject more than half of the reviewers’ comments (and very nearly all of the comments that were critical). This is not peer-review in the accepted sense. Only a tiny handful even of the hand-picked “reviewers” explicitly agreed with the IPCC’s conclusion that humankind is chiefly responsible for recent warming of the climate.

Error 21. Trenberth says, “Most of the so-called ‘deniers participate” in the IPCC process, “and their comments are fully taken into account”. This is known to be untrue.
For instance, Paul Reiter pointed out during discussions on the draft 2001 report that the ban on DDT had done far more to spread malaria than “global warming,” that the malaria mosquito does not need temperatures any higher than 15 degrees C and is not therefore tropical, and that the largest recent outbreak of malaria was in Siberia in the 1920s and 1930s, when 13 million were infected and 600,000 died, 30,000 of them at Archangelsk on the Arctic Circle. All his comments were rejected in favour of a nonsensical statement to the effect that “global warming” would spread malaria. It will not. When Paul Reiter asked for his comments to be taken into account, the IPCC refused. He resigned, and then had to threaten to sue before the IPCC would take his name off the defective chapter on the imagined ill effects of “global warming” on human health.
...
Conclusions
Trenberth’s shallow analysis discredits both him and the IPCC in which he plays “a major part”. The likelihood that Trenberth, in a short article, would have made as many as 23 errors all falling in the direction of undue alarmism and flagrant exaggeration by mere accident is less than 1 in 8 million. Sir John Houghton, the first chairman of the IPCC, in which Trenberth plays “a major part”, wrote in 1994 that “Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen.” If Trenberth and the IPCC, in which he plays “a major part”, go on announcing disasters when none are in truth at all likely, then indeed no one will listen, and no one should. From now on, we want honest, unbiased science. No more lies. Tell us the unvarnished, unexaggerated truth. Then, and only then, we will listen.

Amazon review of "The Chilling Stars"

By Fritz R. Ward here:

For many years it has been known that periods of global cooling are associated with reduced solar activity. In the 1970s, Jack Eddy of the High Altitude Observatory in Colorado named the correlation between the lack of sunspots and the consequent decline in earth's temperature the "Maunder Minimum" and showed that similar sequences of global warming and cooling were also associated with increasing and decreasing solar activity. Until recently, however, no one has been able to provide a mechanism explaining why this correlation exists. Henrik Svensmark, however, has done just that in his published work and with the help of science writer Nigel Calder has provided a very readable explanation of how solar activity affects climate change. This book has profound implications for policy debates in this country and deserves a wide audience.

Svensmark's theory is that cosmic rays which originate from collapsing stars (novas) are the primary cause of cloud formation, in particular the formation of low level clouds, those 3,000 meters above the ground and lower. Muons, basically very dense electrons, which are among the few cosmic particles to survive the solar winds and contact with the earth's atmosphere to sufficiently interact with with atoms near the surface, liberate electrons in the atomosphere which in turn join with molecules that form stable clusters. These clusters attract a small amount of sulpheric acid and then water molecules to ultimately generate water droplets, the basis of cloud cover. But how exactly does cloud cover affect climate? Most climate models simply see clouds as a byproduct of climate changes, but as Svensmark and Calder demonstrate, clouds themselves are the predominant factor in global cooling. Although they trap heat between the clouds and earth's surface, they also reflect radiant energy from the sun back into space. The net effect of low lying clouds is therefore a cooling one. And, as it happens, all periods of global cooling have coincided with increasing cosmic rays and cloud cover.

The implications of this theory are quite startling. For one thing, it almost completely eliminates increases and decreases of carbon dioxide and other so called green house gasses (GHG) from the equation of climate change, a matter of some concern to those who use fears of anthropomorphic global warming to advance their political agendas. Indeed, when Svensmark first proposed his theory in the mid 1990s, it was called "dangerous" because, if correct, it would undermine the vast public funding currently available to the many scientists who feed off of global warming fears. Unfortunately for them, Svensmark's theories have since been experimentally vindicated, something that cannot be said for the "models" that GHG advocates use to prop up their increasingly discredited arguments. Indeed, Svensmark's "chilling stars" are able to explain all the data that other climate change models note. For example, since 1900 the solar magnetic field has almost doubled, resulting in a dramatic decline in the amount of cosmic rays reaching the earth's surface. There has been a consequent temperature increase (.6 degrees celsius) and an 8.6% decrease in cloud cover. This results in "a warming of 1.4 watts per square meter."(p. 80) But this figure is crucially important because it is precisely the same figure that advocates of the man made global warming hypothesis say is the result of increases in greenhouse gases. What this means is that natural variation almost entirely explains all observed temperature increases this century, and this model, unlike the GHG model, is experimentally vindicated.

But what really sets Svensmark and his colleagues apart from the man made global warming advocates is that this model, while also explaining the observed rise in temperature, also explains the data that the other models ignore, and in some cases irresponsibly cover up. For example, it is well known that Antarctica is not experiencing global warming. This is part of a long term climate trend in which Antarctica has for thousands of years experienced cooling while the rest of the world warms, and warming as the rest of the world cools. It is part of the troubling evidence that skeptics of man made global warming routinely bring to the table and which popular films like Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" conveniently ignore. Advocates of GHG as the primary mover of climate change typically try to brush off this anomaly by explaining that they need "more data." But Svensmark explains it easily. The Antarctic ice cap is the one place on earth that is so reflective that it actually loses more radiant energy on cloudless days than on cloudy ones. So, while cloud cover cools the rest of the planet, it warms Antarctica, and as the rest of the planet warms with a decrease in cloud cover, Antarctica cools.

Similarly, Svensmark's work explains the cooling trend the world experienced from the 1940s to the mid 1970s. This period also saw one of the greatest outputs of GHG in history and man made global warming theorists have a great deal of trouble dismissing it. Indeed, for a long time they ignored it but following the publication of Michael Crighton's novel 'State of Fear' this anomaly became common knowledge among the literate public. This period also coincides with a slight reduction in solar activity and a slight increase in cosmic ray induced cooling. In terms of the history of global climate, this cooling was not very dramatic, but it was sufficient by 1975 to lead many popular publications to speculate on the coming of a new ice age. Interestingly enough, the solution to "global cooling" political activists sought in the 1970s also involved a reduction in fossil fuel usage, so one might reasonably be skeptical now of their claims to solve global warming by the same technique.

The value of Svensmark and Calder's book, however, extends far beyond the current debates on global climate change and what, if anything, we as a society should do about it. They note that periods of warming and cooling have had a tremendous impact on human history, including the development of agriculture, and on the whole development of life on earth. Indeed, their research suggests ways to narrow the search for life in other parts of our galaxy. The final chapter of the book describes the myriad of research projects that will open up to investigators once this new (but already well tested) paradigm of climate change is adopted.

But the promise of new research, even the promise of a better model, is hardly sufficient to insure the adoption of Svensmark's "Chilling Stars" as a new paradigm for research in the modern era. Historically, as Thomas Kuhn has demonstrated, "science" advances by using a paradigm, a carefully constructed set of theories. These paradigms guide research until a point at which there are too many unexplainable gaps in the theory for the paradigm to continue to be useful. At this point, a new paradigm replaces it. Usually the process by which one paradigm replaces another is fraught with argument, debate, and in some cases dramatic confrontations among advocates of competing ideas. This is how science operates and it generally works quite well. Svensmark's work has been subjected to just this sort of rigorous testing for the last decade and has shown itself to be remarkably versatile. However, late 20th and 21st century science is altogether different than science in earlier periods of human history. Scientists used to be motivated by religious considerations (a desire to better understand creation) or humanitarian motives (curing diseases like polio) or simply curiosity. Such motivations are still common among many scientists. But increasingly, political advocacy coupled with the public funding of science has led to a new motivation for science: the advancement of a political agenda. In such an environment, it may not matter that the work of Svensmark and his colleagues better explains climate, the development of life on the planet, and even better predicts the future. The political usefulness of their studies does not, at present anyway, coincide with that of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and so it is quite possible that their work simply will not get the attention it deserves. This signals a dramatic, and perhaps fundamental, change in the way science operates. Will the future see a continued commitment to experimental research and the free publication of diverse views, or will the modern scientists win out, stiffling open debate and corrupting data to advance their agendas. The case of Michael Mann and his famous "hockey stick" graph is instructive in this regard. Mann, an advocate of the man made global warming hypothesis, knew that the medieval warming period and the little ice age of the last millenia contradicted the GHG theory. So he simply revised history by creating a chart that that showed a stable climate for a thousand years followed by a dramatic increase in the 20th century. He also hid his raw data and algorithms from public and scientific scrutiny for almost a decade, an act that would have immediately disqualified his work from serious consideration among the previous generation of scientists. But in the "Brave New World" of science, his graph graced numerous IPCC publications. Calder rightly calls Mann's work "Orwellian" and dismisses it in favor of finding a theory that accurately explains, rather than explains away, actual climate changes in earth's history. But one cannot help but wonder if Orwell's vision was correct. Time, and in particular, the reception of this spectacular book, will tell. Be sure to get the book yourself and enjoy the read.

Two more posts from "Watts Up With That?"

1. "Hurricane season 2007 is near the record low of 1977".

2. "Upcoming TV special on the Sun - worth watching"

An excerpt:

Given that the sun is so quiet lately ... and there is talk of an ebb in its next solar cycle 24, it bears looking into the details of our primary climate driver.

The National Geographic Channel has a TV special on the sun, sunspots, climate, etc. They interviewed several people involved in that debate. It includes interviews with Judith Lean, Leif Svalgaard, and others.

It will be shown on the National Geographic Channel. It’s titled: Naked Science ‘Solar Force’.

"150 Years of Global Warming and Cooling at the New York Times"

This piece is extremely helpful in putting the current global warming hysteria into its proper perspective.

An excerpt:

International Team of Specialists Finds No End in Sight to 30-Year Cooling Trend in Northern Hemisphere

January 5, 1978, Thursday

By WALTER SULLIVAN

...

DISPLAYING FIRST PARAGRAPH - An international team of specialists has concluded from eight indexes of climate that there is no end in sight to the cooling trend of the last 30 years, at least in the Northern Hemisphere.

Excellent interview with Fred Singer

Here.

A key excerpt:

Q: When you say global warming is natural, what is your chief culprit?

A: The sun. The sun. Definitely. The evidence we have shows an extremely strong correlation with solar activity. The (Earth's) temperature follows the solar activity and the correlation is very strong. The mechanism itself is still under some dispute, but we think in some way the sun influences cosmic rays, which in turn influences cloudiness.

Q: That doesn't even count the heat output of the sun, which changes over time, doesn't it?

A: Those are very small and are not enough to account for all the climate changes that we see. What is causing it is not just the heat of the sun, but emissions from the sun that we don't see -- except with satellites and spacecraft -- the so-called solar winds and magnetic fields.

Q: What about the things like the wobble of the Earth on its axis and the Earth's eccentric orbit around the Sun?

A: That's also important, but on a different time scale. For each time scale there is a particular cause. The time scale I'm talking about when I talk about direct solar influences are of the order of decades. The time scales that involve wobbles and orbits of the Earth around the sun involve times scales of 10,000 or 100,000 years.

Videos providing counterpoints to "An Inconvenient Truth"

Here.

An excerpt from the post:

Personally, I have no objection to the showing of Al Gore's video to schoolchildren of age 10 and above, as long as equal minutes from videos such as the two I present here, are also shown to the developing young minds. Not that I
expect government school teachers to expose their pre-teen and early teen minds to contradictory ideas. Private school teachers may care enough about the development of young minds to do so, but for parents of government school students--it's up to you. You have to make sure your kids are provided with the "grist" for mind development. If you don't, you're where the buck stops when the consequences start to roll in.

The two linked videos are:

1. "Global Warming Doomsday Called Off", from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 2004

2. "The Great Global Warming Swindle", BBC video (2007)

Another video also available at the above post:

3. "Exposed: The Climate of Fear", Glenn Beck's HeadlinePrime production. This ran on CNN on 5/2/07; a transcript is here.

If you only have time to watch one of the three, I'd suggest "The Great Global Warming Swindle" (75 minutes):