Ever since his original "hockeystick" graph of the global temperature trend was discredited, Michael Mann has been trying to justify himself by producing a second, less challengeable hockeystick graph. His latest effort is dissected in the very thorough and detailed article briefly excerpted below. Excerpts below are the abstract plus mention of what the proxies central to Mann's new hockeystick consist of. By using data known to be corrupted, Mann has certainly done nothing to redeem his reputation.
by Willis Eschenbach
Abstract: A new method is proposed for determining if a group of datasets contain a signal in common. The method, which I call Correlation Distribution Analysis (CDA), is shown to be able to detect common signals down to a signal:noise ratio of 1:10. In addition, the method reveals how much of the common signal is contained by each proxy. I applied the method to the Mann et al. 2008 (hereinafter M2008) proxies. I analysed all (N=95) of the M008 proxies which contain data from 1001 to 1980. These contain a clear hockeystick shaped signal. CDA shows that the hockeystick shape is entirely due to Tiljander proxies plus high-altitude southwestern US "stripbark" pines (bristlecones, foxtails, etc). When these are removed, the hockeystick shape disappears entirely.
Mystery solved. The three in red at the top, and one further down, are all the Tiljander lake sediment series, which are known to be corrupted. Once we remove the four Tiljander proxies, it is obvious that the whole edifice is built on a few closely related high-elevation, moisture limited pine trees located in the southwestern US. These tree rings make up no less than 19 of the 21 remaining top proxies after Tiljander is removed. In other words, the bristlecones are back and with a vengeance.
I guess the deal is that no self-respecting paleoclimate reconstruction would be complete without the bristlecone pines (PILO), which make up no less than 12 of the remaining top 21 (after Tiljander is removed). In addition we have the bristlecone's cousins, the limber pine (PIFL) and the foxtail pine (PIBA). All of these records contain are from similar ecosystems and contain similar signals. The overwhelming majority were collected by Graybill. His work has been called into serious question by LInah Abadneh's thesis, wherein she was unable to replicate his results.
If I ran the zoo, I'd throw out all of those high altitude pine tree ring records. They are known to have problems, their use has been recommended against, and the principal investigator's work is under a cloud. I would omit them.
More here (See the original for links, graphics etc.)
Global cooling hits Britain hard
Traffic chaos as Britain's big freeze brings blanket of snow - and there's more to come
Only the bravest - or foolish - motorists were out and about early yesterday as snow blanketed parts of the country. As much as 4in (10cm) fell in parts of East Anglia, leaving this stretch of the A47 in Norwich to be negotiated with extreme caution. Conditions were made even more hazardous after heavy downpours froze, covering roads in layers of ice. A stretch of the M62 in Greater Manchester was forced to close
The weekend's bitter weather caused mayhem across large swathes of the country, with some roads blocked off and others covered in a sheet of ice by the subsequent downpours. As temperatures dropped to as low as minus 6.1C (21F) police were called to dozens of accidents as black ice made conditions treacherous.
Whilst children up and down the country built snowmen and threw snowballs large parts of the nation shivered in temperatures colder than Moscow (-2C/28.4F), Helsinki (-3C/26.6F) and Berlin (2C/35.6F)....
Gales gusting at 50mph forced the cancellation of ferry services between Holyhead and Dublin whilst ice and snow caused the closure of the eastbound section of the M62 between junctions 21 and 22 in Greater Manchester. Heavy snow fell in Scotland, the North of England and down the east coast from North Yorkshire to Suffolk. In Oxfordshire and Cumbria the temperature dropped to minus 6.1C (21F). Among the next coldest areas were Aboyne, Aberdeenshire, at minus 5.7C (21.7F) and South Farnborough in Hampshire at minus 4.8C (23.36F).
London, which last month saw the first October snow for 74 years, was also carpeted by a layer of snow - only for it to be replaced hours later by freezing rain.
The cold front has prompted bookmakers William Hill to slash the odds of a white Christmas in London from 8/1 to 6/1. William Hill, which has reported record betting on a white Christmas, cut the odds on snow falling on Christmas in London from 8/1 to 6/1 while Ladbrokes is offering 9/2. William Hill spokesman Rupert Adams said: 'We have never had so much money in the book with over a month to go. If it snows, we will be paying out millions to our customers.'
Source
Weather Channel Fires Entire Global Warming Broadcast Team
I guess global warming isn't economically feasible after all!
"NBC Universal made the first of potentially several rounds of staffing cuts at The Weather Channel (TWC) on Wednesday, axing the entire staff of the "Forecast Earth" environmental program during the middle of NBC's "Green Week," as well as several on-camera meteorologists. The layoffs totaled about 10 percent of the workforce, and are among the first major changes made since NBC completed its purchase of the venerable weather network in September.
The layoffs affected about 80 people, but left the long-term leadership of the network unclear, according to a source who requested anonymity due to the continuing uncertainty at the station.
Among the meteorologists who was let go was Dave Schwartz, a Weather Channel veteran and a viewer staple due to his lively on camera presentations. USA Today reported that meteorologists Cheryl Lemke and Eboni Deon were also let go.
The timing of the Forecast Earth cancellation was ironic, since it came in the middle of NBC's "Green Week," during which the network has been touting its environmental coverage across all of its platforms. Forecast Earth normally aired on weekends, but its presumed last episode was shown on a weekday due to the environmentally-oriented week.
Forecast Earth was hosted by former CNN anchor Natalie Allen, with contributions from climate expert Heidi Cullen."
Cullen you'll remember called for Nuremberg style trials for climatologists who dared to doubt the religion of global warming. What goes around comes around babe!
Source (See the original for links)
Interview with skeptical but polite climatologist
Through a video link, President-elect Barack Obama addressed a climate change conference convened today by Arnold Schwarzenegger in Los Angeles, saying he would more aggressively tackle the problem of climate change than the Bush Administration. But behind the politics of global warming, scientists are engaged in a robust debate about the effects of manmade CO2 in our atmosphere. Joining us now is a researcher involved in the debate over climate change. Robert Balling Jr is a professor in the climatology program of the School of Geographical Sciences at Arizona State University. He has served as a climate consultant to the United Nations Environment Programme and served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Robert, welcome to the KVMR evening news. I want to start by asking -Can you maybe describe the debate that's going on among scientists and in peer reviewed journals and otherwise, over the issue of climate change?
RCB: Well I'll do that, just as soon as you tell me what happened in the Civil War. It's kind of a big question - if you were to go to a library or look at any top of the line science journal, you would quickly discover that every element of the greenhouse issue has its folks who seem to be supportive of certain ideas, and others who are not. The most fundamental questions, like, is the planet warming - in reality there's quite a debate about that very subject; as I tell people, you would just discover that the climate change issue is very much more complicated than it is often presented to the public. And that's somewhat the message I have on the circuit, is that no matter what thing you ask about, you find out there's an incredible story behind it and quite a debate going on in the scientific community.
KVMR: Well, let's just step back and tackle that question - "is the planet warming, and how do we know?" To me it's scientists collecting data and then drawing conclusions based on that data, right? well, is the planet warming?
RCB: Yes and no. We have a -- there are a number of ways that the planetary temperature is taken - there are satellites that measure microwave emissions that come from the low atmosphere (those are directly related to the temperature of the low atmosphere, these polar orbiting satellites that allow for a global temperature to be measured); balloons are launched all over the world every day, the balloon record can give us a sense of the planetary temperature; and then there are literally millions of thermometer records from all over the world, and they're not perfect by any means but they can all be averaged and get another sense of the planetary temperature; the good news is they're all very highly correlated.
So it would seem easy, is the earth warming or not? If you said how about the last 30 years, the answer's absolutely, all three of those primary ways that we measure the temperature of the earth show warming. But if you said how about for the last 6 years from 2002 to present, all three show cooling. So you could answer the question a thousand different ways - if you said is the earth warming and you mean the last 100 years, the answer's yes; if you mean the last 1000 years the answer may not be yes, or if you mean how about the last million years, the answer is well, we've actually been rather cold the last million years. So that question is not as easy to answer as it sounds at first glance.
KVMR: So it's really trying to take and analyze and see some sense and consistency to trends in temperatures.?
RCB: Yes, even if you could show beyond a shadow of a doubt that the earth was warming over the last 30 years, and I think scientists have, we know that the climate system varies quite naturally. I mean clearly we've had ice ages come and go, we've had warm periods come and go, and it's hard given the natural variability of climate to say what we have seen over the last 30 years is absolutely related to the buildup of greenhouse gases.
There are people who talk about fingerprints; the warming of the surface does seem to be in the right places - it's in the winter, the high latitudes, night, land areas, where the models tell us we should see it, but the models also tell us we should see a lot more warming above the surface and that warming hasn't been seen. So on the one hand you see this fingerprint, and then another analysis you don't see the fingerprint.
KVMR: I've attended the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union - AGU - for the past 7 years, and I go by the graces of my wife who is a scientist, but I also go as a reporter; I saw Al Gore speak there a couple years ago, and he was very well received as a champion of spreading the word about climate change and global warming. He sort of qualified his remarks to the scientists - perhaps you were there, you are a member of the AGU - saying he's not a scientist, he's a politician, and he was looking to bridge those two worlds; and by the reception he got from the standing-room-only group of scientists, it appeared that most people agreed with him. How do you feel about Al Gore and what he has done in terms of raising awareness about climate change?
RCB: Well there's no doubt he's a politician first, and there's no doubt he spends a lot of time raising awareness of the issue. I saw the film that he put out, and I believe that if at any moment if you said ok, let's stop the film right there, and now lets go critically examine what he just said; it's as I mentioned in the beginining, what we would find out over and over that what he just said is accurate according to some subset of scientists; and what he just said is not consistent with the research findings from a number of other scientists.
Sometimes in the film he'd make very simplistic statements that I think most scientists would feel ill at ease with, and at other times he would say things that most of us would be at ease with. Of course he's going to get a standing ovation, these are human beings, they're going to be polite to speakers, there's no question - if Al Gore keeps the issue alive, and you are a scientist who is in line to receive substantial federal grants, you might stand up and clap as well. If I'm in the audience I would certainly receive his message well, I'd be respectful, but again I don't think he accurately represents the state of science. I mean, even if you were to download the IPCC technical summary
KVMR: (which you contributed to)
RCB: (yeah I have in the past, there's no question about that)- if you were to download the technical summary and read it, you would immediately sense that the IPCC is saying things that are not consistent with some of the points that Gore makes. But I welcome him to the debate, I'm not one to sit back and tell somebody "I don't want to hear your message", the more messengers the better.
But he has been, no question, a very powerful figure in raising awareness of the global warming issue - to the extent that the awareness has been raised - and you can look at some various polls of where global warming really stands in the eyes of the American public, and you can make a case that given all this raising awareness it didn't work, it didn't really raise the awareness that much.
KVMR: It seems that people are polarized over this issue; I've heard people say that climate change is not happening, and we had a congressional candidate on here saying the climate change is the product of alarmists, and.
RCB: I don't know if it's the product of alarmists, but I can get for you astrophysicists at Harvard who could explain to you that variations in the earth's temperature are very closely related to variations in the output of the sun; and some of these people believe that what we have seen in recent decades is solar related; and even this cooling that we've seen recently in global temperature is often explained away as a reduction in solar output.So it's not just a matter of people calling each other names - there are very credible scientists at MIT and Harvard, and Stanford and elsewhere who are writing in a way that would put them in the skeptical camp, which is enormous by the way.
KVMR: You really wouldn't get this in popular culture, this really isn't making it into the mix; it seems that it's a slam dunk for climate change.
RCB: I don't really believe that. I mean, you can turn on the radio in Phoenix Arizona, for probably 8 hours a day, some of your brothers in talk radio are talking about global warming, and making fun of it, and interviewing scientists who are skeptical - I never think that the skeptical viewpoint doesn't get its airing, at all. I've had every opportunity to be on, you name it, and I think the skeptical message has definitely been aired and the American public has heard it. I think to this day, when you ask many Americans what they think of the issue, they still laugh it off they sort of make fun of Gore, they make fun of the issue, and I think they do get that from some of the champions of talk radio.
Source
Stubborn glaciers fail to retreat, awkward polar bears continue to multiply
Second only to the melting of the Arctic ice and those "drowning" polar bears, there is no scare with which the global warmists, led by Al Gore, more like to chill our blood than the fast-vanishing glaciers of the Himalayas, which help to provide water for a sixth of mankind. Recently one newspaper published large pictures to illustrate the alarming retreat in the past 40 years of the Rongbuk glacier below Everest. Indian meteorologists, it was reported, were warning that, thanks to global warming, all the Himalayan glaciers could have disappeared by 2035.
Yet two days earlier a report by the UN Environment Program had claimed that the cause of the melting glaciers was not global warming but the local warming effect of a vast "atmospheric brown cloud" hanging over that region, made up of soot particles from Asia's dramatically increased burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.
Furthermore a British study published two years ago by the American Meteorological Society found that glaciers are only shrinking in the eastern Himalayas. Further west, in the Hindu Kush and the Karakoram, glaciers are "thickening and expanding".
Meanwhile, all last week, ITV News was running a series of wearisomely familiar scare stories on the disappearing Arctic ice and those "doomed" polar bears - without telling its viewers that satellite images now show ice cover above its 30-year average, or that polar bear numbers are at record level. But then "polar bears not drowning after all - as snow falls over large parts of Britain" doesn't really make a story.
Source
Scientists urge Indonesian symposium 'to avoid the hysteria of global-warming alarmists'
In this article Dr. Willie Soon, geo-scientist at the Solar, Stellar and Planetary Sciences division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, and Lord Christopher Monckton, chief policy adviser to the Science and Public Policy Institute in Washington DC., urge the assembled scientists to avoid the hysteria of global-warming alarmists, and instead study solar activity.
Carbon dioxide is not an air pollutant. It is plant food. All life on Earth depends on it. It is natural. It forms the bubbles in bread, champagne, and Coca-Cola. You breathe it out, and plants breathe it in.
The Earth contains a lot of CO2, but the atmosphere contains so little that the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) rightly calls CO2 a "trace gas". A scientific mystery is why the air does not hold more CO2 than it does. Half a billion years ago, there was almost 20 times today's CO2 concentration.Most farmers would prefer to grow crops under much-higher concentrations of CO2 than today's 385 parts per million-less than 1/25 of 1 percent of the atmosphere. To feed the world, low CO2 concentration is not such a great idea. High concentrations are better, and they cause no harm. Experiments have shown that even delicate plants such as orchids thrive at CO2 concentrations of 10,000 ppm.That is why U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia has declared that if CO2 is to be labeled an "air pollutant", then so must Frisbees and flatulence.
What about the danger of overheating the Earth by CO2? Al Gore is spending $300 million telling us "global warming" will be a catastrophe. Yet a survey of 539 scientific papers containing the words "global climate change" and published between January 2004 and February 2007 found not a single one that provided any evidence that "global warming" would be catastrophic. It does not matter how many scientists or politicians say that more CO2 will cause a catastrophe. To true scientists, what matters is whether any real-world data support the idea.
If CO2 is a powerful greenhouse gas, we would have seen a great warming trend in Indonesian temperature history. We haven't. Recent temperatures, according to the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, have been scarcely warmer than they were 70 to 100 years ago. Instead of a strong warming trend, the Indonesian data are dominated by year-to-year changes and natural oscillations every 50 to 100 years.It is remarkable to find documents on the Internet, circulated by WWF-Indonesia, trying to scare the unsuspecting public by saying the temperature in Indonesia has "increased by 0.3§ C" over the twentieth century and that one can expect additional warming of 0.1 to 0.3§ C per decade for the next 20 to 100 years.
In a humid, equatorial nation such as Indonesia, with annual temperatures between 23§ and 32§ C, there is little chance of seeing those predicted warming trends, or any of the predicted changes in rainfall. Professor Mezak Ratag of the Indonesia National Agency for Meteorology & Geophysics says, The output from different models is often different and sometimes contradictory. For example, [a UK climate model] predicts increases in temperature and decreases in precipitation for Indonesia, while [a German model] predicts an increase in both temperature and precipitation.When climate models say that both increased and decreased rainfall are possible, they are not actually making any predictions.
Worse, climate scientists from Stanford University and the University of Washington in the United States recently admitted that the islands of Java and Bali are not even represented as land in many global-circulation models [used by the IPCC].
The 100-year mean temperatures over the period 1901-2000 for March-April-May, June-July-August, September-October-November, and December-January-February are 26.2, 25.6, 26.1, and 25.9§ C, respectively. This confirms the clear dependence of the basic climatology of Indonesia on the arrival and relative intensity of the sun overhead. More sun means warmer weather, and vice versa. It is as simple as that.More sun also means more rain, except that during the December-January-February season there is an additional large contribution from the northwest monsoon and the southward migration of the inter-tropical rainbelt.Look to matahari (the sun in Bahasa Indonesia) rather than CO2 as the key player in Indonesia's climate.
Cutting CO2 emissions by sharply curtailing the use of gasoline and other fossil fuels will make no difference to the weather. It will merely lead the foolish to feel good about "saving the planet". Even if the planet needed saving, all proposed mitigation measures would be futile. It would be cheaper and less irresponsible to adapt to warmer weather as-or rather if-necessary.We have already seen food prices double and triple worldwide because the "green" movement told us biofuels would "save the planet". Science, however, demonstrates that biofuels have a bigger carbon footprint than does gasoline.
Foolish mitigation measures that owe everything to political fashion and nothing to scientific rigor are already harming the world's poor. It is time to stop the hysteria about CO2 before anyone else gets hurt-or even killed
Source
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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