$250 for the "best seats" at Harrison's next IBWO gala

Here.

20th century U.S. temperature trends

Check out this post by Steve McIntyre.

According to this raw data, large swaths of the country apparently failed to warm at all in the 20th century (click to enlarge).



Hey IBWO_Agnostic--I know that you (and, according to my sitemeter, plenty of lurkers) are reading this.

You seem to have drunk deeply of the Global Warming Catastrophe Kool-Aid, and I suspect that in truth, you don't actually know *why* you believe.

When you look at this raw, unfudged data for yourself, do you immediately grow weak-kneed with the clear realization that we're facing a planetary meltdown?

I don't.

Hey, Ilya Maclean

Hi Ilya,

Ok, I'm going to take the time to tell you very specifically why I didn't accept your comment regarding this post.

Here's the reason: While the post's author very clearly points out (multiple times) that he's talking specifically about the 21st century, you went off on a near-insane rant that the post was a "complete lie" since the data didn't apply to the 20th century.

Just to make this more clear for you, I should probably point out that the 20th century and the 21st century are two different centuries.

The post in question is short and clearly written, and your complete failure to comprehend his meaning is puzzling to say the least.

We all make mistakes, but I'm sorry to say that this is not an isolated incident for you. You've consistently shown similar comprehension problems in our public and private conversations regarding global warming.

I don't know what your problem is and I don't really care, but I strongly suspect that on this particular subject, you are blinded by ideology.

Anyway, it's clear to me that further global warming discussions with you are simply not a good use of my time.

Regards,
Tom

Update: Ok, as expected, Ilya has responded with yet another ad hominem attack. This is what people tend to do when they're completely unable to argue their points using facts and logic.

His one attempt at using a "fact" is rather amusing--he said something like "the last time I checked, the 21st century began in the year 2000". I'd like to point out two things:

1. This is essentially irrelevant to Ilya's original rant, which was about years well before 2000.

2. The 21st century did not, in fact, begin in the year 2000.

An excerpt from this link:

The 21st century is the present century of the Anno Domini (common) era, in accordance with the Gregorian calendar. It began on January 1, 2001 and will end December 31, 2100. A common misconception is that it started in 2000 and will end in 2099.

Two papers by David Archibald

Here and here.

As noted here:

[Archibald] says we are coming into a weaker solar cycle and that a cooler climate is likely in decades ahead. David also explains that the Greenhouse effect due to carbon dioxide is miniscule...

In the first paper linked above, Archibald provides this figure (click to enlarge):



If Archibald's calculations are anywhere near correct, I think a lot of people living later in this century would actually *welcome* a bit of man-made warming.

Good discussion about the Al Gore Hockey Stick

Check out the comment section over at Climate Audit here.

This comment summarizes some of the issues.

"THE FRAUD ALLEGATION AGAINST SOME CLIMATIC RESEARCH OF WEI-CHYUNG WANG"

Paper by Douglas J. Keenan here.

Excerpts:

ABSTRACT

Wei-Chyung Wang has been a respected researcher in global warming studies for decades. I have formally alleged that he committed fraud in some of his research, including research cited by the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC (2007) on "urban heat islands" (a critical issue). Herein, the allegation is reviewed, and some of its implications are explicated.

1. INTRODUCTION

The work of Jones et al. (1990) is a significant paper in global warming studies (see below for details). In February 2007, Stephen McIntyre blogged about evidence he had found showing that it was "impossible" for Jones et al. to have carried out their work as they had claimed. An anonymous comment on the blog then indicated potential issues with the closely-related work of Wang et al. (1990). Further study by myself found additional evidence of problems. The evidence particularly implicates Wei-Chyung Wang-the lead author of Wang et al. and a co-author of Jones et al.

Wang is a professor at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He has been doing research on climate for over 30 years, and he has authored or coauthored more than 100 peer-reviewed scientific papers. He has also received an Appreciation Plaque from the Office of Science in the U.S.A., commending him, "For your insightful counsel and excellent science. .". The plaque resulted in particular from his research on global warming.

I have written a Report that details evidence that Wang committed scientific fraud. The Report was submitted to the University at Albany in August 2007, and a formal inquiry into research misconduct is now underway. A copy of the Report is in the Appendix.

"the most spectacular demonstration of warming hypocrisy yet seen"

Check out this article from Andrew Bolt.

Excerpts:

I ask because what Flannery is doing on his luxurious lonesome, entire jet-loads of global warming activists are about to do in a gluttonous mass-orgy - the most spectacular demonstration of warming hypocrisy yet seen.

The gold medal performance.

I'm talking about the United Nations' Climate Change Conference 2007, to be held next month at Bali's luxury tourism precinct of Nusa Dua.
...
Now guess how many people are jetting to this Balinese paradise to demand we cut our emissions?

Let me quote a newspaper report in which Indonesian Environment Minister Rachmat Witoelar gives the startling numbers: "He said 189 countries to be represented by some 10,000 delegates and 2500 foreign journalists had officially registered to take part."

That's right, 12,500.

To fly to a conference that will cost more than $70 million to stage.

I can hear the oinking from here.
...
You'd think these warming alarmists would set an example by staying at home and, say, video-conferencing instead.

If they really believed our gases were killing the planet, that is.

Paper by Hans Labohm

Here.

Excerpts:

Some main points of criticism of the IPCC include:
- The hypothesis that an increased CO2 concentration in the atmosphere will lead to a rise in temperature has not been proven and is even at odds with the observations.
- Satellite-based temperature measurements show that the earth has warmed a few tenths of a degree Celsius between 1979 and 1998. It is not likely that this is caused by mankind.
- There is still a lack of scientific understanding, required to model all assumed radiative forcings. The most important one, for which there are not sufficient quantitative data to date, is the variable impact of clouds.
- Climate models, which are being used to achieve a better understanding of the climate system, are not suited to serve as basis for predictions. This is, inter alia, related to the stochastic nature of climate.
- The global climate is very much determined by extra-terrestrial phenomena, of which the fluctuation of sun activity is the most important.
- Should there still be global warming in the future, for which there are only model-based indications, then mankind will not be able to do something about it. Moreover, also according the IPCC, a modest additional warming (e.g., of 2 degrees Celsius) will on balance be beneficial for mankind.
- The IPCC has ignored the climate projections of astrophysicists, which suggest global cooling.
...
The IPCC was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Its mission is: ‘to assess the scientific, technical, and socio-economic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change.’

Various authors have pointed out that the mandate of the IPCC is too narrow and not purely scientific, since its wording presupposes that there is such a thing as man-made global warm ing (often referred to as AGW: Anthropogenic Global Warming), which excludes other explanations for the (modest) warming which has taken place over the last century.
...
Ironically, just as global warming scare-mongering reaches new heights, the global cooling hypothesis is making a comeback.
...
Some time ago the astronomer Khabibullo Abdusamatov of the Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in St. Petersburg declared that the Earth will experience a ‘mini Ice Age’ in the middle of this century, caused by low solar activity. Temperatures will begin falling five or six years from now, when global warming caused by increased solar activity in the 20th century reaches its peak. The coldest period will occur 15 to 20 years after a major solar output decline, between 2035 and 2045, Abdusamatov said. This view is shared by the Belgian astronomer, Dirk Callebaut, who expects a ‘grand minimum’ in the middle of this century, just like the Maunder Minimum (1650-1700 – even colder than the Dalton Minimum), a period during which the Thames, the Seine and the Dutch canals were frozen in winter. A similar message came from solar physicist David Hathaway, who pointed out that the Sun’s Great Conveyor Belt has slowed to a record low crawl. This has important repercussions for future solar activity. The Great Conveyor Belt is a massive circulating current of fire (hot plasma) within the Sun. Researchers believe the turning of the belt controls the sunspot cycle. According to theory and observation, the speed of the belt foretells the intensity of sunspot activity 20 years in the future. A slow belt means lower solar activity; a fast belt means stronger activity. Hathaway believes that Solar Cycle 25, peaking around the year 2022, could be one of the weakest in centuries. Finally, the climatologist Olech Sorochtin, member of the Russian Academy of Physical Science, has recently published an article in which he also supports the idea of an imminent little ice age.

“Bias And Concealment In The IPCC Process: The “Hockey-Stick” Affair And Its Implications”

A new article by David Holland is here.

Excerpts:

In medicine, despite centuries of study, there are few things absolutely safe or efficacious but we assume that most medical professionals would not propose medicines or procedures that they knew were poor in either respect. However, we have learnt through experience that it is unwise to allow pharmaceutical manufacturers, or others with a conflict of interest, to be the judges of these qualities. Carefully controlled studies are mandated specifically to avoid bias in the judgements as to which medicines and procedures are appropriate. High standards of record keeping and disclosure are enforced. It is inconceivable today that the developer of any medicine or procedure would be allowed to conceal test data or take a leading role in a review process that approved it. In comparison, climate research is in its infancy and almost entirely unregulated.
...
The IPCC WGI is effectively run by small groups of inbred scientists from UCAR, CRU and the Hadley Centre, who have a strong and disproportionate influence on its processes and agenda. Rather than the consensus of thousands of scientists, the IPCC conclusions represent the passionate belief of a small number of scientists whose funding and research careers depend heavily upon continuing alarm.

"Global warming? Bring it on"

Here.

Excerpts:

Why do we believe the Earth's climate was at its optimum at the start of the 20th century?
...
If my ambivalence to what apparently everyone in the world believes with religious fervor is a crisis is grating on your nerves, the truth is that we've been here before -- and nobody dies. The Earth's climate history did not start with the dawn of the 20th century. It was warmer, much warmer than it is getting now, and not for a decade or a century but for 400 years.

The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research explains on its Web site that the Medieval Warm Period "was a time of unusually warm climate in Europe from about 850 until 1250 A.D. ... The warmer climate caused historic events such as the spread of Viking settlements in Northern Europe. They traveled by boats to Greenland, among other places, through seas that, with cooler climates, are typically full of dangerous sea ice. During this time, grape vineyards, which require moderate temperatures and a long growing season, were as far north as England. Today, in comparison, grape vineyards are only typically as far north as France in Europe."
...
A reminder: This warming occurred long before the Industrial Revolution and the invention of the internal combustion engine, and before General Motors, Ford and Chrysler were turning out those huge, gas-guzzling SUVs.

Global warming fraud compared to cold fusion and Piltdown Man

1. An excerpt from this link:

When did the global warming hoax die? Historians are likely to pinpoint 2007.

It will take another decade to ensure it cannot be revived, but the avalanche of scientific studies and the cumulative impact of scientists who have publicly joined those who debunked the lies on which it has been based will be noted as the tipping point.
...
It took some 40 years to unmask the Piltdown Man hoax that began in 1912, alleging the skull of an ancient ancestor of man had been found in England. Any number of British anthropologists unwittingly contributed to the hoax by confirming the authenticity of the skull--until it was found that the jaw of an orangutan had been cunningly attached.

The unmasking of global warming has taken less than half that time.

2. An excerpt from this link:

... The science establishment will have a big black eye from this outrageous fraud for years to come. Global Warming will go down in history along with "cold fusion" and other science fables that fooled some of the people some of the time. Except that in this case, the scientific establishment allowed itself to be taken for a long and very expensive ride.

"It is the greatest scam in history"

John Coleman, meteorologist and the founder of The Weather Channel, minces no words on global warming here.

Excerpts:

It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it...
...
This is my field of life-long expertise. And I am telling you Global Warming is a non-event, a manufactured crisis and a total scam. I say this knowing you probably won’t believe a me, a mere TV weatherman, challenging a Nobel Prize, Academy Award and Emmy Award winning former Vice President of United States. So be it.

I have read dozens of scientific papers. I have talked with numerous scientists. I have studied. I have thought about it. I know I am correct. There is no run away climate change. The impact of humans on climate is not catastrophic. Our planet is not in peril. I am incensed by the incredible media glamour, the politically correct silliness and rude dismissal of counter arguments by the high priest of Global Warming.

In time, a decade or two, the outrageous scam will be obvious. As the temperature rises, polar ice cap melting, coastal flooding and super storm pattern all fail to occur as predicted everyone will come to realize we have been duped. The sky is not falling. And, natural cycles and drifts in climate are as much if not more responsible for any climate changes underway. I strongly believe that the next twenty years are equally as likely to see a cooling trend as they are to see a warming trend.

"Grey's Anatomy" recapper reveals Ivory-bill skepticism

An excerpt from this page:

Weird guy is some sort of bird-watching expert who lives to spot the ivory-billed woodpecker — it’s, like, his rosebud … or his Dulcinea. Or whatever. He says the bird lives in Arkansas, but I listen to NPR — its existence is dubious at best (recordings of the bird are allegedly fake). Whatever — turns out, Weird Guy is allergic to anesthetic so, because he really wants to see the bird of dubious existence, he decides to have heart surgery without anesthesia.

Jetting to Bali to discuss global warming

Here.

Excerpts:

The would-be regulators of the world’s climate (and your wallet) will be jetting to Bali this December for Ban Ki-Moon’s next UN weather fest: “UN Climate Change Conference 2007.” UN policy allows even the lowlier UN staffers to travel business class on long-haul flights (your tax dollars at work), the better to arrive wined, dined and ready to hit the ground …and the beaches … and the golf courses … and the tennis courts — running. Apparently there is so much to discuss that the conference will run for a full fortnight, from Dec. 3-14, at Bali’s seaside luxury resort of Nusa Dua.
...
One might just wonder — would “climate change,” be such an urgent UN issue were UN bureaucrats required to hold their meetings without availing themselves quite so amply of other people’s money to enjoy their own convenient change of climate.

Blog post by former California State Climatologist Jim Goodridge

Here.

An excerpt:

The sunspot record needs to be examined in its entirety rather than as individual sunspot cycles. The method to do this is by calculating the accumulated departure from the average of all the sunspot numbers of the entire 500-year index. This reveals the cooling during the Maunder Minimum and the current “global warming”. The current warming of 15 watts per square meter began in 1935, based on the sunspot record.

Note this graph:

"Proliferation of Climate Scepticism in Europe"

An article by IPCC expert reviewer Hans H.J. Labohm is here.

Excerpts:

...in my capacity as expert reviewer of the IPCC, I have also received (a tiny) part of the Nobel price, which has been awarded to Al Gore and the IPCC (yes, thanks for your congratulations). Should I be grateful? I don't think so. Both 'An Inconvenient Truth' and the latest IPCC report labour under cherry-picking, spindoctoring and scare-mongering (Al Gore's movie more than the IPCC reports). Awarding the Nobel price for such flawed science is a disgrace.
...
Russian scientists are criticising very openly the AGW hypothesis. They do it with a frankness which - in this particular field - is still rare in the 'free world'. Usually scientists shroud their statements in clouds of caveats. Even the IPCC follows this tradition to a certain extent. But Russian climatologists do not. They simply state that a new little ice age is imminent. Not so long ago it was astronomer Khabibullo Abdusamatov of the Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in St. Petersburg, who declared that the Earth will experience a 'mini Ice Age' in the middle of this century, caused by low solar activity. Now it is the climatologist Olech Sorochtin, member of the Russian Academy of Physical Science, who joins him.

Related links are here and here.

Bob Carter lecture on YouTube

An excellent lecture by Australian research professor Bob Carter is now available online:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

A paragraph about Carter's talk is here:

... it should be required viewing for any member of the press who wants to report about climate change, for it more thoroughly and concisely explains the science refuting the current alarmism than anything to date.” During the roughly 37-minute lecture given at the Annual Conference of the Australian Environmental Foundation on September 8th in Melbourne, Carter debunked the hysterical claims regularly espoused by warm-mongers. In fact, and not to give too much away, one of Carter’s rather startling observations is that a greater threat to mankind moving forward is the cooling trend that has likely already started, and that all this hysteria over a nominal warming period is distracting us from preparing for the colder temperatures destined to come.

You should also check out Dr. Carter’s May 2007 paper “The Myth of Dangerous Human-Caused Climate Change" here. Don't miss the accompanying graphs.

Still more "failure to warm"

Here.

Excerpts:

According to the latest RSS MSU satellite data for the lower troposphere, October 2007 was globally the 2nd or 3rd coldest month among the 82 months since January 2001.
...
May 2007 and October 2007 share the silver and bronze medals with the anomaly of 0.091 Celsius degrees which is 0.81 Celsius degrees cooler than the warmest RSS month, April 1998.
...
Unless the average temperature anomaly in November and December jumps well above 0.4 Celsius degrees which seems rather unlikely, 2007 will become the coldest recorded year in the 21st century according to the RSS MSU data.

"Carl Wunsch on Self-Deception"

Another thought-provoking post on Climate Audit is here (check out the comment section too).

From the abstract of the linked paper:

The human eye and brain are powerful pattern detection instruments. Coupled with the clear human need to perceive the world as deterministic and understandable, and the often counter-intuitive results of probability theory, it is easy to go astray in making inferences. In particular, many examples exist where attention was called to apparent extreme behavior, whether in time or space series, or in the appearance of unusual patterns, that are just happenstance.

Wunsch's paper applies to the catastrophic global warming hysteria as well as to the ivory-bill hysteria.

In the former, some people think they see an "unprecedented" catastrophic global warming signal in temperature and weather data that are actually quite routine. In the latter, some people think they see evidence of living Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in the form of "unusual patterns" of toots, taps, glimpses etc that are also quite routine.

Mennill to speak in London (Ontario)

Here.

An excerpt:

Our guest speaker is Dr Daniel Mennill, Assistant Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Windsor. Over the past three years Dr Mennill has led a research team on several forays into the American south in search of what has been called the “Holy Grail” of American birdwatchers. Dr Mennill will explain his research methods and report on the team’s progress. Cross your fingers and hope that by the time of the banquet he will have photographic proof of a living bird.

Robert Anderson and the "Ivory-bill"

Here.

" The deceit behind global warming"

An 11/04/07 London Telegraph article is here.

Excerpts:

...It is hard to recall any scientific thesis ever being so comprehensively discredited as the "hockey stick". Yet the global warming juggernaut rolled on regardless, now led by the European Union.
...
More serious, however, has been all the evidence accumulating to show that, despite the continuing rise in CO2 levels, global temperatures in the years since 1998 have no longer been rising and may soon even be falling.

It was a telling moment when, in August, Gore's closest scientific ally, James Hansen of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was forced to revise his influential record of US surface temperatures showing that the past decade has seen the hottest years on record. His graph now concedes that the hottest year of the 20th century was not 1998 but 1934, and that four of the 10 warmest years in the past 100 were in the 1930s.

Furthermore, scientists and academics have recently been queuing up to point out that fluctuations in global temperatures correlate more consistently with patterns of radiation from the sun than with any rise in CO2 levels, and that after a century of high solar activity, the sun's effect is now weakening, presaging a likely drop in temperatures.

If global warming does turn out to have been a scare like all the others, it will certainly represent as great a collective flight from reality as history has ever recorded. The evidence of the next 10 years will be very interesting.